Chelsie Anderson was the ideal sweet girl next door. She earned money waitressing at the Blue Ocean Seafood Restaurant in South Carolina and as a mom it provided her all the stability she needed. Her mom had experienced addiction and her dad had spent time in prison, which is why she wanted to offer her daughter, whom she had at 19, a balanced life.Soon, the eatery provided her with not just a job but also a partner. Jeremiah Anderson was a busboy working at the restaurant. The son of a professor at a Christian college, he offered her a chance at a family life and even he had a daughter from a past relationship. Soon she was pregnant with another girl and in 2015, the couple tied the knot. Her husband had found a better-paying job outside the restaurant. And the two were saving up to buy a home of their own. “We looked like the perfect beautiful family: my husband, his daughter, my daughter, and our daughter together,” she said to The Cut. “He coached their tee-ball teams, and I was sitting there with snacks or trying to juggle three girls’ afternoon schedules — taking one to church, one to dance, and running late to one’s ball game.”But soon the relationship fell apart with the couple having explosive fights. Anderson found herself blowing off steam at the eatery partying with fellow waitresses and doing drugs. Less than four years into the marriage, her husband moved out. This was the beginning of her future that would lead her to a life worth the books. While she was busy working to pay off the bills and doing drugs the rest, her daughters were taken care of by her ex-husband and the extended family.Eventually, her aunt Kathy Talley, a devoted Christian and her mother’s sister got Anderson and her daughters tested. “The kids come back negative,” Anderson said, “and I come back positive for amphetamines, benzos, and weed.” The girls each went to stay with their father while she agreed to supervised visitations. This was her breaking point she shared.
A dealer
Coke was an expensive habit and towards the end of 2018, she began to sell the drug to cover the costs. She would buy an ounce of cocaine and then sell it to fellow waitresses for small profits. Once she gained the trust of her sources, they offered her a deal. If she gave them a little extra cash every time she made a purchase, they would use it to invest in more products and pay her interest. Within a few months, she was selling not only cocaine but meth and using both.She quit the restaurant and began living a semi-nomadic life, moving among family members’ homes and eventually motels. She’d pick up supplies from different trap houses — just a few ounces of meth at a time, often re-upping several times a day — then drive until her “boss” sent her an address.Anderson’s drift into dealing happened to coincide with a unique moment in American drug trafficking. For decades, law enforcement had been fighting a haphazard war on the chemicals used to make meth. In 1988, Congress passed an act restricting access to key ingredients like ephedrine and pseudoephedrine. The new regulations squeezed domestic producers, and with less homegrown meth, Mexican operations stepped in. By the 1990s, a large cartel lab could produce 150 to 200 pounds of methamphetamine every other day.When Congress passed the Combat Methamphetamine Epidemic Act of 2005, which restricted over-the-counter sales of pseudoephedrine-containing medicines like Sudafed, the shift was nearly complete. The law sealed the sourcing of meth production to Mexico. By 2010, the majority of meth in the U.S. was cartel-made “ice”, cheaper and more consistent than anything cooked in an American garage.In 2013, Nicanor “Nico” Rodriguez, a cartel associate, was arrested and imprisoned alongside Robert Anthony Gracely in a South Carolina state prison. Often called Tony G, Gracely was a well-known dealer in the Upstate, serving time for trafficking meth. Now the men needed workers outside the prison. Women dealers were especially helpful. The men believed women would attract less attention from law enforcement and were less likely to betray them. Anderson did not think of herself as fitting this mould: “I was gonna just get in and get out real quick. I was just trying to make a quick come-up.” But then she met Dane.
A drug cartel queen
Till then, she only knew her bosses by their nicknames, catching glimpses of them on FaceTime when they gave orders. But in late 2019, one of her suppliers told her he wanted to connect her with someone “in case anything happens to me.” Soon after, an inmate in an SCDC prison called her on FaceTime from a contraband phone. Over FaceTime, Dane asked Anderson to step into a more prominent position. She took the promotion and by the beginning of 2020, Dane had Anderson selling roughly ten kilos of meth a week.As her visits with her daughters reduced to a few hours, the money turned her towards a different lifestyle, one where she could spend $3000 on shopping. At the same time, she was growing close to Dane and soon conducted her first interstate drug deal.In early March 2020, Anderson left a visit with her younger daughter to go pick up several kilos of meth and a kilo of heroin. She sold the items over the next few hours in a hotel room and ended up falling asleep on the bed. The next morning, she was surprised by the police at the door. They found a gun on the floor, about $2,000 in cash, and “a large clear Ziploc plastic bag containing a clear substance determined to be methamphetamine.” As they questioned Anderson, the officers seemed to know everything about her already: whom she’d been dealing with, where she had been. Until that moment, Anderson said she had never really considered where the drugs she sold came from, that she was part of an international network supplying the state with seemingly endless amounts of meth and heroin.At this point, she was a part of the largest narcotics conspiracy investigation in state history, in which South Carolina’s attorney general later prosecuted 103 people. She was arrested but Dane helped her flee to Mexico and met another woman, Nicole Burns. As both Dane and Burns’ boyfriends were arrested for being part of what was deemed the ‘Prison Empire’ they realised that they were free to take the lead. They contacted suppliers in Mexico and soon became the heads themselves. At the time, Anderson didn’t see it as a turning point. “I didn’t really have time to process anything,” she says. “I was just figuring shit out.”“The inmates aren’t doing it anymore,” Anderson said she realised. “Now it’s the girls in Mexico.” The empire was running smoothly and profitably until a third woman, Marcy Vickers joined them from North Carolina. Vickers left after getting caught allegedly moving drugs in Rutherford County. Before Anderson could have a say, Vickers showed up at her and Burns’ doorstep.In their new roles, the women were intermediaries between the suppliers in Atlanta and their customers in upstate South Carolina. Their value came from the fact that they were the only ones who had everyone’s contact information and so they were the only ones who could connect the dots. They meticulously planned meetings, drops, and exchanges of money. When Burns got together with Dane and their friendship fell apart, Anderson went to work with CJNG. Back in South Carolina, law enforcement continued to investigate the drug ring, and on January 12, 2023, the attorney general of South Carolina, Alan Wilson, announced a new indictment called “Las Señoritas,” a continuation of the sprawling Prison Empire arrests. The new case got its name from the network of “señoritas” — mothers, wives, friends, colleagues, who had fled to Mexico and were now working with Sinaloa and CJNG.Her reputation connected her with a man she nicknamed Produce, who was supposedly the son of one of the original Sinaloa Cartel members and controlled the drug flow into parts of Texas. He taught Anderson how he trafficked drugs on a far larger scale. Produce soon disappeared when he was transferred to a federal jail. Since then, she has been toying again with turning herself in since Produce disappeared. The only thing stopping her is that the sentences in the Prison Empire and Las Señoritas indictments have been so steep, with people getting 25-plus years in prison. She watches her girls grow older on social media, in TikTok videos and Facebook photos.For now, she has moved from Mexico to someplace else, since she needed a change of scenery.
