Celebrity security guard gets 9 years for drug trafficking in Northern Va.

A former celebrity security guard was sentenced Friday to serve nine years in prison for distributing drugs in the Washington, D.C. and Northern Virginia areas, including in Prince William County.

A federal jury at U.S. District Court in Alexandria in October found Joseph Emmanuel Mann, 59, of New Carrollton, Md. guilty of conspiring to distribute oxycodone.

According to court documents, Mann was accused of illegally obtaining oxycodone pills and selling them to dealers, who would then sell the pills in Prince William County and Manassas.

Occasionally Mann would also travel to Manassas to sell the pills, the court documents state.

Mann was a former security guard for several celebrities, including Stevie Wonder, Tina Turner, Lionel Richie and Marvin Gaye, according to a press release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

At the trial, witnesses testified that from 2003 to 2011, Mann spearheaded a conspiracy to distribute oxycodone pills throughout the Washington, D.C., metro area, prosecutors said.

To obtain the prescriptions, “Mann wore disguises, including wigs and hats and used multiple names and dates of birth.”

“By changing his identity, Mann was able to receive high volumes of prescription narcotics on a regular basis from various local pharmacies,” prosecutors said in the release.

Witnesses also testified that Mann would often ride a bicycle or moped, but when he entered a pharmacy to fill a prescription for OxyContin, “he would act as if he was in a lot of pain, wearing neck braces and carrying crutches to feign injury,” prosecutors said in the release.

Prosecutors said Mann was sat in a wheelchair throughout his trial, but no one had seen him in a wheelchair before his arrest on July 12.

Prosecutors said Mann distributed over 20,000 OxyContin 80mg pills pulls near schools, libraries, restaurants and on the National Mall.

According to court documents, between May 2007 and June 2010, Mann sold the pills to many people who lived in Prince William County, after he “obtained OxyContin prescriptions from a doctor who was aware that Mann was selling the pills from the prescriptions for profit.”

In one instance, a confidential informant told investigators he or she went with Mann to a pharmacy in Washington, D.C. to obtain the pills, purchased the pills from Mann and then sold them in Prince William County, according to the court documents.

Another confidential informant told investigators that he or she purchased pills from Man “hundreds of times” between May 2007 and July 2009 and that Mann personally delivered the pills to the informant at his residence in Manassas at least five times in the summer of 2009.

According to sentencing documents filed by prosecutors, Mann also tried to distribute Percocet after his arrest, while he was in jail. In the documents prosecutors also said that Mann tried to get a witness to lie at his trial.

This case was investigated by the FBI’s Washington Field Office and is part of an ongoing investigation called Operation Cotton Candy. Prince William County, Fairfax County, Manassas City and the Virginia State Police Departments assisted with the investigation.

Staff reporter Amanda Stewart can be reached at 703-530-3908.