Fired Nassau County lawman pleads to stealing cash, coke, half-ton of pot on DEA task force

A veteran Nassau County lawman who once busted drug dealers pleaded guilty Wednesday to corruption that included pilfering thousands of dollars and more than a half-ton of marijuana from police evidence storage.

James Darrell Hickox, who was part of a federal Drug Enforcement Administration task force, faces at least five years behind bars for conspiring to possess with intent to distribute drugs including cocaine, fentanyl and ecstasy as well as pot.

A plea agreement Hickox signed said he bgan stealing from DEA investigations by April 2017, if not earlier, and continued through 2022.

The former Nassau County Sheriff’s Office sergeant with a 17-year career also pleaded guilty to conspiring to defraud the government and to tax evasion in a case that started because a criminal he worked with gave him up to investigators after being arrested.

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Hickox, 38, was indicted last year along with task force colleague Joshua Grady Earrey, a Florida Highway Patrol trooper, after the informant said he and another drug dealer who helped set up drug arrests were allowed to keep some of the drugs and cash the two lawmen seized in arrests.

“[A]s long as the seized dope was good, the [informant] and the other source could keep some drugs ‘off the top’,” an investigator’s affidavit paraphrased the informant, saying the criminal and his partner (the “other source” in the affidavit) stocked their car with white powder to cut into seized cocaine to make up for the amount they took. The two criminals sold the coke on the street and gave part of the profits to Hickox and the other crooked cop, said the affidavit, which didn’t mention Earrey by name.

Earrey pleaded guilty last month and signed a plea agreement that described crimes he and Hickox were involved in, including cutting open evidence bags where police put seized cash so thousands of dollars could be taken before the rest was put into an undamaged substitute bag. Like Earrey, Hickox's plea deal admitted three of the 11 charges in their joint indictment.

Earrey’s agreement said he and Hickox, referred to only as "the co-defendant," targeted marijuana for theft because it’s usually stored in local police evidence rooms where it’s more accessible than drugs that have been shipped off to labs.

Recounting a string of pot seizures the pair worked on in 2021 and 2022, the trooper’s plea said that Hickox had checked out 1,006 pounds of that marijuana from the Nassau property room, pretending it was being taken for destruction.

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In reality, the plea said, the lawmen distributed the pot for resale, keeping the profits for themselves.

A more audacious claim in the same plea agreement said that after Earrey seized a kilogram of cocaine in a drug case and locked it away as evidence, he and Hickox substituted a fake kilo sprinkled with a little cocaine on the outside.

“The co-defendant then gave the real kilogram of cocaine to a known drug dealer to sell for him,” said the agreement, which said Hickox kept about $12,000 from the sale and that Earrey received $6,000 to $8,000.

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The fake kilo was sent to a lab but marked as not needing testing, and was eventually destroyed, said the agreement, which reported other fakes had been manufactured too.

“Under the pretense that the fake kilograms could be used for law enforcement purposes, the co-defendant paid a private 3D printing and fabricating company located in Jacksonville, Florida to make approximately 30 replica bricks since 2018 that looked and weighed like real kilograms of cocaine,” said the agreement, which Earrey signed.

Investigators who served a search warrant at Hickox’s home in Callahan last year found smaller amounts of drugs, including two bags of fentanyl, one weighing 124 grams and the other 44 grams, plus 17 grams of cocaine, and $76,245 in five stacks of cash, according to the investigator’s affidavit filed as part of the case against Hickox.

A search of Hickox's work area at the Sheriff's Office also turned up 260 pills containing methamphetamine, the U.S. Attorney's Office said in a release Wednesday.

Hickox and Earrey were both fired from their law enforcement agencies, First Coast News reported last year.

A sentencing date hasn't been set for Hickox, who entered his plea in Jacksonville's federal court wearing a jail jumpsuit, waving briefly to family members who attended his court date.

This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Lawman admits stealing drugs, cash in Jacksonville-area DEA task force