Asbury Park | Drug deals, timelines, and comments

News stories last month about a former Asbury Park Press newsroom employee, charged with masterminding a multimillion-dollar drug trafficking ring, focused on a timeline federal prosecutors made public in a news release.

Christopher Erwin, 47, had led the ring selling more than 500,000 tablets of the prescription painkiller oxycodone "since at least as early as January 2009, and continuing for at least two years," prosecutors said.

But in reading their formal, 45-page criminal complaint, I stumbled across a detail I hadn't read before: A confidential source claimed Erwin started selling oxycodone to them much earlier -- around October 2007, the complaint says. That would have been just two months after he left the Press' employment, according to the newspaper's account of his arrest.

The paper did not disclose the circumstances under which Erwin left in August 2007.

The criminal complaint, and a string of comments posted to Gannett Blog by a reader who said they were Erwin, shed light on the post-Gannett years of one former employee whose life, according to prosecutors, spiraled into a drug dealing conspiracy.

Charge: $20K weekly income
Erwin was released from jail on $1 million bail after posting properties as collateral. He was placed under house arrest, with electronic monitoring. Some 21 other co-defendants, including two doctors who allegedly sold prescriptions to Erwin, have also been charged in what prosecutors call the Erwin Organization.

The criminal complaint includes allegations that Erwin, who lives in Barnegat, N.J., made as much as $20,000 weekly selling the highly addictive painkillers, all the while masquerading as a landscaper.

Meanwhile, a close review of Gannett Blog's comments in recent years shows a reader identifying themselves as "Chris Erwin" started posting here at least as long ago as Sept. 8, 2008. The reader said they'd worked at the Press "about 13-plus years."

"I never got a bad review and was rewarded with decent raises along the way," they said. "I started out as a $10-an-hour PT clerk and ended up making about 45K per year. My last two reviews spelled my doom though."

Despite those two, "above-average" reviews, this poster says they were denied a raise one year, then offered a raise of just 1% the following year.

'Legendary little man'
The poster said they eventually complained to then-Publisher Bob Collins ("the legendary little man himself"), and then to Corporate -- "not realizing that this was the exact management style they wanted." The comment concluded: "I was eventually suspended and then fired when I didn't quit."

At least eight more comments were posted that year; in 2009, and then this year. Many were critical of former Press Executive Editor Skip Hidlay.

The most recent comment I found came very early one Wednesday morning last month: May 11. Writing about Hidlay, who had just resigned as publisher of a Kansas daily, they wrote: "Bet it was his choice to resign immediately. Now that's funny. Karma sort of sucks."

That comment was posted shortly before 1 a.m. Just hours later, agents for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency arrested Erwin and 15 of his other alleged co-defendants.

[Image: yesterday's Press, Newseum]