WASHINGTON — One of Washington, D.C.'s most notorious drug kingpins has been transferred to "community confinement," the Federal Bureau of Prisons told WUSA9 on Thursday.
"We can confirm that Rayful Edmond III was transferred (not released) on July 31, 2024, to community confinement overseen by the Federal Bureau of Prisons' Nashville Residential Reentry Management Office," said Scott Taylor, a spokesman for the Federal Bureau of Prisons.
According to Taylor, community confinement means a prisoner is either on home confinement, at a residential reentry center, or a halfway house. For security reasons, the Federal Bureau of Prisons wouldn't tell WUSA9 which it was.
Edmond was originally sentenced out of the Middle District of Pennsylvania to 30 years consecutive to his D.C. sentence of life in prison – which was reduced to 20 years in prison. At the time, officials said Edmond's assistance as an informant to bring justice to murder cases and putting dozens of other drug dealers in jail made him valuable and helped lower his sentence.
Edmond's information and testimony over the years put away a killer responsible for 30 murders and helped unspool the Cali and Medellin cartel operations in the U.S.
Investigators revealed Edmond was a cellmate of Pablo Escobar’s future brother-in-law. Retired prosecutor Richard Watkins said that after Edmond was caught in 1994 directing Colombian cocaine into D.C. using prison phones, he decided to cooperate with investigators despite the threat of death.
He has currently served over 35 years in federal custody.