Double life: He gave to charity but West Columbia man was major drug dealer, feds say

David Mozingo ran a West Columbia motorcycle shop, is a Shriner, has a family with two school-age children and supports his Methodist church and Lexington police and fire departments.

But the 48-year-old had another life: He lived in a house full of loaded guns, slipped into Mexico and over the years had brought back more than 94,000 illegal oxycodone pills to peddle to various drug dealers. He laundered his drug profits through his motorcycle shop bank account, always depositing less than $10,000 in cash to avoid suspicion.

Those were the conflicting — but undisputed — versions of Mozingo presented to federal Magistrate Judge Shiva Hodges on Friday as Mozingo’s lawyer, Jimmy Rogers, argued that he ought to go free on bond until his trial on federal charges of conspiring to illegally distribute oxycodone.

In the end, Hodges sided with Assistant U.S. Attorney Mike O’Mara, who argued that Mozingo — who faces a 20-year prison term on the federal drug charges — was a flight risk and posed a danger to the community.

“He is distributing pills that are killers,” O’Mara said, referring to the highly addictive oxycodone pills that have killed hundreds of thousands of Americans in recent years through overdoses. Many of the pills Mozingo sold contained uneven amounts of fentanyl — an even more addictive synthetic drug known to kill its abusers.

“Fentanyl is a ticking time bomb,” O’Mara said, explaining to the judge that with Mozingo’s drugs, “You can get nothing or you can get a whole lot. You can be dead at any moment.”

Hodges said, “The weight of the evidence is very strong” and denied bond to Mozingo at the end of a two-hour hearing at the federal courthouse in Columbia. No date has been set for the trial.

Most of Friday’s bond hearing involved testimony by Midlands drug task force agent Jamey Jones, who for several months worked with the federal Drug Enforcement Administration agents to assemble the case against Mozingo.

Mozingo was the “ringleader” in a conspiracy against which federal authorities are still gathering evidence, Jones said.

Agents used trackers on Mozingo’s car, GPS locators to “ping” his cell phone to determine his location, recordings of telephone calls and texts made by Mozingo and information from one of Mozingo’s customers, a Kentucky drug dealer identified only as the “cooperating defendant.”

Earlier this year, DEA agents in London, Kentucky, had arrested the “cooperating defendant,” a drug dealer who had regularly bought pills from Mozingo for more than six years, Jones testified.

That informant allowed agents to record phone calls and texts between him and Mozingo. With that information, agents got a federal warrant authorizing them to collect GPS location data for Mozingo’s cell phone. In August, they tracked a trip he made to the Columbia airport, then to San Diego and then across the border into Tijuana, a Mexican city just south of the California border.

When Mozingo returned to the United States, he called the DEA’s informant to tell him he had approximately 2,000 pills, including nearly 1,000 counterfeit oxycodone tablets, as well as a batch of Adderall and Xanax pills. Adderall and Xanax are prescription narcotics that are widely abused.

For those drugs, the informant paid $40,962 in cash that the DEA had given him, Jones said, adding in late September, Mozingo shipped the informant another 1,170 pills.

When Mozingo was arrested in early November, federal agents searching his house found 22 firearms — pistols, shotguns and assault rifles — and a silencer, Jones testified. Of those 22 weapons, eight were loaded, he testified. Guns were found in the kitchen and in the master bedroom.

The shotgun had a pistol grip and a silencer on it, Jones testified. “This is not for hunting.”

O’Mara asked Jones why drug dealers usually have guns.

Jones replied, “I have known drug dealers to protect their drug stash and for their own protection.”

Evidence in the case also indicates that Mozingo also sold cocaine, marijuana and heroin, Jones testified.

Mozingo has past convictions in federal court for mail fraud and in state court for strong arm robbery, according to court statements. Hodges said those past convictions were yet another reason to deny him bond.

Mozingo said nothing during Friday’s hearing. Dressed in a jail jump suit, he appeared in a wheel chair, unable to walk, his lawyer said, due to health ailments that included recent kidney surgery and swollen legs.

“I don’t believe he poses a danger to the community or a flight risk,” Rogers said.

Mozingo’s business, Sin Worx Custom Cycles, is no longer in operation. Its Facebook page is not longer available.

“The feds came and shut everything down,” said a man who answered the phone at what used to be Mozingo’s shop, but is now a different business.

This story was originally published December 7, 2019 at 5:00 AM.