The felon, dressed in black from head to toe, stood next to his tiny window as the last of the day’s sunlight faded behind the bank on the other side of the street.
He watched the car pull around the pot-holed parking lot of the fast food restaurant and slow to a stop. He didn’t want to be here, doing what he was about to do, but it’s not like he had much choice in the matter. He needed the money and the college kids in the car needed their fix.
Once the students were within range, the 23-year-old man pressed a button by his ear and spoke into the receiver.
“Welcome to Taco Bell,” Joey Barna said with a grin suggesting forced politeness. “How’s your day going so far?”
“Pretty great,” the driver at the menu board said. “How about yourself?”
It would be misleading to say Barna was doing ‘pretty great’ too, but he was certainly doing much better than he had been. He was no longer dealing with backstabbing snitches, no longer on the run from the law and no longer homeless.
The college kids ordered two Joey Specials.
Things were looking up.
The Family Business
Born in Piñon Hills, California, Barna is the son of a machinist and a homemaker, yet his upbringing was far from typical. His parents grew around 20 marijuana plants in the backyard of his childhood home, among other plants. Barna’s parents, armed with a license to grow medical marijuana, produced enough marijuana to front Barna ounces at a time when he decided to start selling in Laramie.
Barna arrived in the Equality State as a WyoTech student with dreams of being a machinist and following in his father’s footsteps.
“I had a dad that was always pushing me to make something of myself, but I didn’t know what I wanted to make,” Barna said. “I Googled welding and WyoTech came up. I said I was interested and next thing I know this guy’s calling me and showing up at my pad.”
Barna made friends at WyoTech that later become his customers, but his roommate kicked him out of their shared dorm in Downey Hall after a small fight about French fries and barbeque sauce. When the roommate refused to return Barna’s Xbox, Barna retaliated by taking the roommate’s Xbox hostage.
The end result was a larceny charge and Barna’s expulsion from WyoTech.
Adrift in a city he could not call home, Barna found work at Roxie’s On Grand and moved in with new roommates. That’s when his parents suggested he start selling pot.
“It was about to be winter and my parents had had an amazing crop,” he said. “My mom had so much weed, she didn’t know what to do with it.”
So Barna started selling California weed to people he had met at WyoTech. It was the best job Barna ever had.
“You give them their weed, you get your money, probably smoke a bowl with them and then they’re on their happy way and you’ve got money in your pocket,” he said. “It was a good life while it lasted.”
While a dealer in Wyoming could sell grams of the substance for $20 and “eighths” for $50, Barna based his prices on California standards. Grams were $10. Eighths, which are equal to 3.5 grams or 1/8 of an ounce, were $35.
“If you have lower prices, everybody’s going to come to you,” he said. “I wasn’t out to make as much money as I could. I was just interested in paying my bills and hooking people up.”
For every six ounce package Barna received, he owed his parents $500. If he smoked an ounce himself, he could still sell 40 eighths, for a total of $1,400. $900 profit on each package was enough for rent and food, with a little extra leftover. It was good enough that he quit his job at Roxie’s to deal his parents’ crop fulltime.
And the U.S. Postal Service was bringing it straight to his door.
During his trial, Judge Jeffrey Donnell of the Second District Court of Albany County said he was astounded by the stupidity it took to send and receive drugs through the mail, according to court transcripts,
“You know, Mr. Barna, this is one of those memorable crimes that is probably at least as idiotic as it was criminal,” Donnel said. “I’ve seen stupid things before, but this is right up there…anybody who’s willing to receive illegal drugs in the mail and sell them for money needs to think about their thought process.”
But sending marijuana through the mail was not an original or “memorable” idea in the least. The Rocky Mountain division of the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area program—a drug prohibition enforcement program—published a report last year detailing the effect Colorado’s legalization of marijuana has had on the surrounding states. The report found that in 2013, law enforcement seized 493.05 pounds of marijuana (or 7,888.8 ounces or 63,110.4 eighths) from packages mailed out of Colorado, a figure that has been increasing significantly each year.
And that is just what law enforcement caught, specifically coming out of Colorado. Sealing the homegrown marijuana in airtight packages and shipping it in a five-pound coffee can alongside pinecones and other scented items, growers in California successfully sent Barna the product for months before he got caught.
In the first days of every month, Barna could make $400 in a day or two, depending on how many recently paid WyoTech students stopped by his place.
“I didn’t have too many shady people coming through,” Barna said. “They’re not out to bust me. I was their connect, why would they want to mess with their connect? Especially if I have the best prices in town.”
He was right not to worry about his WyoTech clientele, even as they spread the word to their friends and classmates and Barna’s customer base kept growing. The real threat—and the one that would finally take him down—was much closer to home.
Barna makes about $400 every two weeks at Taco Bell and he works much harder for that money than he did for the cash he made dealing. He sometimes misses the good old days,, but also takes pride in his new job.
Nowadays, instead of hooking students up with a “half-price dub-sack,” he hooks them up with Joey Specials, cheesy potato burritos with creamy jalapeno sauce, rice and bacon. Since Barna started offering his original creation to customers, the upsell has become a local favorite.
“I’m looking for upbeat, energetic, people just to have fun and enjoy their job,” said Zack Shumaker, general manager of the Laramie Taco Bell. “He makes it fun and that’s what it’s all about.”
It All Falls Apart
Barna didn’t sell alone. One of his friends, let’s call him John, helped Barna deal, but the two had a rocky history.
During Christmas break Barna and John visited Barna’s parents, the suppliers, in California. Wired on stimulants, John took the car and drove back to Wyoming in the middle of the night, leaving Barna stranded. As a result Barna missed registration for WyoTech, where he planned to re-enroll.
To add insult to injury, John sold all the marijuana Barna had in a safe at their place, refusing to cut Barna in on the profits once he finally made it back to Wyoming.
It would not be the last time John turned on Barna.
Around 2:30 p.m. on January 17, Deputy Joshua Crites and Sergeant Jeffrey Beeston came to talk with Barna and John’s roommate about an unrelated case. They smelled the odor of burnt marijuana from the living room and saw a glass pipe on the coffee table. According to police reports, they did a protective sweep to “make sure no other persons were in the apartment” during which they saw more evidence of marijuana use and sale.
Barna’s roommate tipped him off about what was going on so Barna rushed home. He found a cop in his living room—a living room decorated with weed-leaf and “Got Pot” posters. Knowing what was going to happen as soon as the other police returned with a search warrant, and unable to hide anything with the eyes of the law staring him down, Barna fled.
He left “to smoke a cigarette” and never came back.
He laid low at a friend’s house for a week and a half, but the police showed up there when he was out and found all of his stuff.
“Nobody got charged for aiding and abetting, but they were keeping an eye on the house,” Barna said. “So I came back in the middle of the night.”
He convinced the father of a friend to grab his stuff and drop it at a car wash in the dead of night. Barna came in after his friend’s father had left, grabbed his bag of belongings and hit the interstate.
“At this time it appears Barna has fled our jurisdiction, presumably back to California,” Beeston’s report reads.
Barna doesn’t miss hiding from the police, but he does miss the freedom he had during that time.
As a condition of his probation, Barna is enrolled in an addiction treatment course. He used to use marijuana every day, but said he does not believe he has a problem.
“I used to have to smoke to do anything,” he said. “It made life better. Get high to do chores. Get high to eat. Get high after you eat.”
He quit cold turkey when he went to jail and only noticed minor changes in his demeanor and experiences.
“When you stop smoking pot, you have more dreams in your sleep,” Barna said. “You know what a shift manager said to me the other day? He said, ‘You know how I know you’re not smoking anymore? Because you’re talking about your dreams.”
On The Run
On the run from the law, Barna lived with his parents in California. He stayed there for a few months, trying to figure out his next move.
He was looking at schools on the West Coast, but that required travelling on major roads, which is risky for a fugitive with Wyoming plates. The only thing to do was to face the issue head on.
“My parents didn’t really know what to do about it, but they were like ‘hey, you still have to do something with your life,’” Barna said. “So I said, ‘Dad, I’m going to turn myself in and then come back and take care of all this.’”
Barna knew his parents shipped a package days before the police stormed his residence. He knew that about six ounces of marijuana would arrive shortly after he left, and he would not be there to receive it and if the police got ahold of it, he’d be looking at a felony charge.
What he didn’t know—and wouldn’t find out until April after he returned to Wyoming and turned himself in—was that John went to the police around 2 p.m. on January 18, the day after the bust, and told them his version of events.
According to police reports, John told Deputies Crites, Guy Morrow and Derek Colling, that the marijuana found in his room did not belong to him. But the deputies didn’t buy that.
“Due to the fact that deputies found 30 grams of suspected marijuana, a digital scale and packaging material in [John’s] room,” Colling’s report read. “I believed that [John] committed the offense of Possession of a Controlled Substance/Marijuana with Intent to Deliver.”
According to police reports, a confidential source at Campus Habitat informed law enforcement that “a package possibly containing suspect marijuana” was at the main office. The police could not smell marijuana when they inspected the package and it took a K9 unit later that afternoon to give them the evidence needed for a search warrant.
To this day, Barna is convinced that the confidential source was John, despite a police report saying otherwise.
“An informant had informed them that I was receiving marijuana from my parents in California,” Barna said. “He snitched me out so they got another search warrant to search and seize my mail.”
Inside the package, double-bagged and wrapped in a pair of gray sweatpants was 5.9 ounces of marijuana.
Consequences
After a couple months in jail and a little time out on bail, Barna was sentenced on Dec. 9, 2014—nearly 11 months after police searched his house. He got three years felony probation with an underlying sentence of two to five years for possession of a controlled substance with intent to deliver.
“I don’t have a lot of use for people that come here from other places and sell illegal drugs,” Donnell said in court. “It appears the defendant was upset about being narc’d out and continues to minimize his behavior that led to the matter before the court.”
By this time, Barna had moved in with cousins in Idaho and found work at a Taco Bell there.
“He’s finally saving a little bit and he’s about to get a place of his own,” John DeLeon, Barna’s public defender, said, adding Barna’s attitude about his past actions had changed. “I like a guy to take it seriously and I think a little bit of fear is a good thing. It means a guy does take it seriously.”
Barna could not live in Idaho any longer. The living situation went from bad to worse when his cousin lost his housing and moved his family in with another family. Barna had to share the dwelling with 11 other people. So he asked Donnel to live with his uncle, if not his parents, in California.
“There’s no way you’re going back to California to live with the people that were mailing you the weed to start with,” Donnell said. “He can go back to Idaho or he can go to jail.”
Upon inspection by his parole officer in Idaho, he was denied living in any of the places he tried or with any of the friends who took him in. So Barna returned to Wyoming without a plan and without a place to stay.
With the last $400 he had, he spent a couple nights at a hotel and lived off of fast food.
“It was hard to come back to Wyoming and be homeless,” Barna said. “That was a very stressful time in my life. I really didn’t know what I was going to do.”
He managed to land a job at Taco Bell in Laramie with references from the same restaurant in Boise, Idaho. He works to make rent, to pay his fines (which total $1645) and to buy food, much of it from Taco Bell.
Barna said his dad’s company wouldn’t hire him now that he’s convicted.
“They don’t hire felons,” he said. “That kind of ruins my life dream to follow my dad’s footsteps, which kind of makes me disappointed in myself.”
It can be difficult for felons and ex-felons to find work, said Laura Griffith, executive director of Recover Wyoming and at-large representative for the board of Faces and Voices of Recovery.
“If you mark on an application that you’re a felon, the process can come to a screeching halt,” Griffith said. “We want to take the box off of applications and let people tell their story. Once you pay for your crime, that should be the end of it.”
As a felon, Barna also lost the right to vote, like more than 25,500 other Wyoming residents. Disenfranchised voters represent 5.99 percent of the adult population, giving Wyoming the seventh highest per capita population of disenfranchised voters in the country.
Nearly half of these voters are ex-felons, meaning even once they complete their sentence, their parole and their probation—and in theory have been completely reformed—they still don’t enjoy the rights of full citizenship.
In Wyoming felons like Barna can apply to the Wyoming Board of Parole to have voting rights restored five years after the end of their sentence. By then, Barna hopes to be out of this state and away from harsh drug laws that cost him dearly.
Even as he recognizes his past illegal actions as foolhardy, Barna is growing weary of the constant stress, of the occasional sub-standard living conditions, of working poverty, of supervised probation. And he misses the parents he left behind to turn himself in.
In a letter to Donnell dated February 4, Barna requested the judge reconsider confining him to Wyoming.
“Please don’t deny me the support of my family,” the letter read. “I miss them dearly. I just want to get my life together and get past this obstacle in my life.”
Returning to the apartment he now shares with a friend, Barna changes out of his uniform and lies down on his mattress. His closing shift at Taco Bell keeps him there until at least 2 a.m. on the weekends.
No matter how much he enjoys chatting with customers or making them food, the long shift is exhausting. Tomorrow he’ll walk across town to his mandatory substance abuse class.
Barna is not entirely convinced marijuana addictions are possible. He said he wants to smoke again, but does not feel a compulsion to. Even if he never sells again, even if he never smokes the amount he used to, it would be nice to smoke a bowl after work, to relax, Barna said.
According to a survey conducted by the University of Wyoming around the time Barna was sentenced, 35 percent of Wyomingites supported personal marijuana use and 70 percent supported medical marijuana. Sixty-two percent said the penalty for marijuana possession should not include jail time. These numbers are up from the last survey, conducted in 2000, but Wyoming is still a long way from even decriminalization.
It will be quite some time before Barna can legally smoke a bowl after work or before bed when he doesn’t feel like dreaming.
“Sometimes I have good dreams, sometimes I have bad dreams,” he said. “Sometimes I’ll have dreams about getting high and when I wake up and I’m like, that’s not good, I’m on probation.”
Barna said he has dreams just about every night now that he hasn’t touched marijuana in months. But with the weight of a felony conviction on his mind, not to mention the slow, creeping fear that he’ll never be a machinist like his father, sometimes it’s nicer not to dream. What Barna really wants is choice.
And that’s what he’s fighting for.
“I’m hoping to save up enough to get a job on the rigs and save up enough to get my felony expunged,” Barna said. “My life goal is not 100 percent destroyed quite yet, but it has been delayed.”
