DEA: $9 million drug ring busted, 'Big Daddy' arrested

NORFOLK

Federal agents say Big Daddy's restaurant was dishing out more than just Southern cuisine.

The Drug Enforcement Administration said it has busted one of the largest drug rings in the area, a $9 million operation allegedly run for the past 10 years by the owner of Big Daddy's restaurant in Virginia Beach.

Fred Phillip Wills Jr., aka "Big Daddy," and two others were arrested Wednesday on a federal indictment charging multiple drug distribution counts.

The indictment alleges that Wills, his wife, Makishea Bobbi Wills, and the third suspect, Kendall Dwight Callaham, aka "L'il Daddy," sold more than 244 pounds of cocaine and smaller quantities of marijuana and laundered the proceeds through the numerous restaurants Fred Wills has owned over the years.

He currently runs Big Daddy's A Touch of the South restaurant at 5600 Virginia Beach Blvd., near Newtown Road, which he opened last year. Before that he operated Big Daddy's at 3300 E. Princess Anne Road, Norfolk, as well as several other restaurants under the Big Daddy's name.

The indictment says the group obtained cocaine and marijuana from Texas, Miami and North Carolina and distributed them throughout the region.

The defendants were jailed pending bond hearings Monday in U.S. District Court. Family members at the restaurant and Wills' lawyer declined to comment.

The DEA, with the help of other agencies and local police, has been investigating the Big Daddy's operation for at least two years, court records indicate.

The indictment says that Wills was warned in 2008 that the DEA was investigating him and that he and a co-conspirator would be "the next ones to go." The group, the indictment says, was loosely affiliated with another large drug organization that was prosecuted over the past year.

The indictment says Wills started dealing small amounts of cocaine and marijuana about 10 years ago. By 2003, he was distributing kilogram quantities of cocaine for $23,500 a kilo, the indictment charges.

In 2005, the indictment says, Wills traded his Hummer H2 for 2 kilos of cocaine.

On several occasions, co-defendant Callaham sold kilos of cocaine from Big Daddy's former Norfolk restaurant, packaging the drugs in take-out containers, the court records say.

In 2007, Wills and another man opened a nightclub in Miami Beach called White Diamonds. The indictment said it was paid for with drug money and that Wills made a number of drug deals from the club, including a 2008 transaction involving 20 kilos of cocaine.

The drug deals continued, the indictment says, through this year as Wills moved his operation from restaurant to restaurant.

Through the years, Wills was known publicly more for his philanthropy than for what has been alleged in the indictment.

He used to open his restaurants to the homeless at Thanksgiving, feeding hundreds of people for free. The Philadelphia native told The Virginian-Pilot in a 2000 interview that he was once homeless himself. He also said he had been a gang member back home and served 10 years in prison for armed robbery.

Pilot writer Patrick Wilson contributed to this report.

Tim McGlone, (757) 446-2343, tim.mcglone@pilotonline.com