A former deputy in Fairfax County, Virginia, was sentenced to six years in prison for trafficking women and conspiring to distribute drugs and other contraband to a jail inmate in exchange for bribe payments, prosecutors say.
Robert Theodore Sanford Jr., 37, was a correctional officer at the Fairfax County Adult Detention Center. From Dec. 2022 to May 2023, Sanford smuggled fentanyl, cocaine, a narcotic called Suboxone and other contraband into the jail and gave it to an inmate, the U.S. Attorney's Office said in a release Wednesday. That inmate then trafficked the drugs to other inmates in the jail, prosecutors said.
In addition to the drugs Sanford smuggled into jail, he distributed drugs to women who lived in and prostituted themselves out of an apartment Sanford rented, authorities said.
“Robert Sanford preyed on the vulnerabilities of people in his care,” U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia Jessica D. Aber said. “His corruption didn’t stop with profiting from feeding the addictions of inmates in his charge. Rather than assisting homeless and addicted members of his community, Sanford used drugs to entrap them in a life of prostitution for his own gain.”
Prosecutors said Sanford would give his co-conspirator confidential information, including advanced warning of planned cell searches, which cell blocks deputies were searching, if deputies would be doing strip searches and where they planned to use drug-sniffing dogs. Sanford also gave the inmate info on other inmates he believed provided information to law enforcment, which allowed the co-conspirator to intimidate witnesses, prosecutors said.
Deputies dsicovered a cellphone, two charging cables, a portable phone charger, a USB charging brick, 93 counterfeit oxycodone pills, 174 strips of Suboxone and more than three grams of cocaine in the inmate's long underwear when they did a search in May 2023.
Sanford removed his cash tag name and personal email address from the CashApp account he used to receive bribe payments for smuggling contraband into the jail, authorities said.
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He then began the process of resigning from his job, and falsely told the sheriff's office that his reason for resigning was due to child care challenges, prosecutors said.
