Did DC Government Help Fund Cocaine Distribution Ring With Tax Dollars?

Given the details around this business closing, you might say I had a feeling Washington, DC’s economic development bureaucrats might somehow be involved. Chalk it up to my originally being from New Jersey.

The story of Uniontown will not have a happy ending. The Anacostia restaurant that many saw as a spark that could ignite a rebirth of Historic Anacostia was evicted Friday from its corner space on Martin Luther King Avenue SE.

Uniontown’s recent closure comes less than a year after owner Natasha Dasher was implicated in a drug trafficking scheme that federal agents said sent 65 kilograms of cocaine and $1.5 million in cash from Texas to Prince George’s County.

Sure enough, if one Googles a bit:

Uniontown will open at 2200 Martin Luther King Jr. Ave. SE, within a block of Vivid Solutions and Big Chair Coffee. Despite some complications with the financing assistance from the city that the owners were awarded in 2008, the restoration will finally move forward, bringing it back to the future: old design with a modern functionality, reports “And Now, Anacostia.”

Maybe Mike DeBonis, the WaPo journalist who wrote the woefully sad piece on the community’s great loss at top will get around to doing some actual journalism and tell us how many tax dollars helped fund a cocaine distribution ring. Ya think?

In what appears to be coincidental timing, court records indicate Dasher, 37, pleaded guilty in Houston Thursday to a pair of federal felonies related to the drug trafficking case — possession with intent to distribute cocaine and a related conspiracy charge. She is scheduled to be sentenced on Nov. 8; the charges each carry a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison.