By Shayna Jacobs
DNAinfo Reporter/Producer
MANHATTAN SUPREME COURT — All but one of the Columbia University students accused of running a campus drug ring were offered jail-free plea deals by prosecutors on Tuesday.
The men, charged with felonies after the "Operation Ivy League" sting by the Office of the Special Narcotics Prosecutor, were given plea offers in exchange for admitting to the sale of marijuana, LSD, cocaine and other drugs.
They allegedly dealt from their dorms and frat houses at the Morningside Heights campus.
Prosecutors offered four of the defendants five years probation in exchange for felony drug sale guilty pleas. A fifth, accused cocaine dealer Harrison David, 21, was offered a one-year incarceration sentence in exchange for his plea to a higher level offense.
They had been arrested Dec. 7, 2010.
None immediately accepted the plea offers. They are expected to return to court July 19 to begin bargaining for better deals.
The next step is for attorneys for David, Adam Klein, 21, Christopher Coles, 21, Michael Wymbs, 22, and Jose Stephen Perez, 20, to ask the judge and prosecutors to consider lesser punishments, or allow them to plead to misdemeanors instead of felonies.
Several have asked for their clients to be admitted into diversion programs, which essentially offer drug treatment, citing the students' personal substance abuse as the driving factor behind their need to make money in the alleged sales.
"Essentially he had an addiction to marijuana at first and what started out as smaller sales to fund his own use of marijuana started to grow," Coles' attorney Marc Agnifilo said at the hearing.
He later told reporters his client smoked pot five times a day and was very hindered by his habitual drug use.
Klein's personal drug use "had a tremendous impact" on his life, his attorney Alan Abramson told Manhattan Supreme Court Judge Michael Sonberg.
Coles and Klein have been in drug treatment since their arrest and release on bail, the attorneys reported.
But prosecutors said they do not believe they were selling to feed drug habits and said David and Coles admitted to selling to finance tuition.
Recently, attorneys for the alleged dealers were wondering what effect the arrest of an undercover officer who helped crack the case open would have on the prosecution of the young men.
The 46-year-old undercover, Det. Richard Palase, was charged in a $6,000-per-day Staten Island gambling operation and was suspended by the police department after his June 11 arrest.
In a letter to the lawyers, Assistant District Attorney William Novak said Palase "observed" seven sales made by the defendant, but that he was not present for them.
"Detective Palase did not handle any evidence nor did he participate in the recovery or handling of any evidence seized during the execution of search warrants related to the above referenced indictment," Novak wrote, later telling the judge he was "not a primary undercover" in the case.
