United States of America v. Darrick Dernard Bell

RECOMMENDED FOR PUBLICATION
Pursuant to Sixth Circuit I.O.P. 32.1(b)
File Name: 26a0135p.06
UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS
FOR THE SIXTH CIRCUIT
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA,
Plaintiff-Appellee,
v.
DARRICK DERNARD BELL,
Defendant-Appellant.
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No. 24-1657
Appeal from the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan at Detroit.
No. 2:17-cr-20183-1—Mark A. Goldsmith, District Judge.
Argued: April 30, 2026
Decided and Filed: May 7, 2026
Before: SUTTON, Chief Judge; CLAY and MURPHY, Circuit Judges.
_________________
COUNSEL
ARGUED: James W. Amberg, AMBERG & AMBERG, PLLC, Royal Oak, Michigan, for
Appellant. Benjamin C. Coats, UNITED STATES ATTORNEY’S OFFICE, Detroit, Michigan,
for Appellee. ON BRIEF: James W. Amberg, AMBERG & AMBERG, PLLC, Royal Oak,
Michigan, for Appellant. Benjamin C. Coats, UNITED STATES ATTORNEY’S OFFICE,
Detroit, Michigan, for Appellee.
_________________
OPINION
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SUTTON, Chief Judge. Darrick Bell transformed a Detroit motel into the base for a drug
dealing enterprise. A jury convicted Bell of three related counts of drug distribution, and the
district court sentenced him to a below-guidelines sentence of 336 months. We affirm.
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I.
A woman seeking treatment for a heroin overdose at a Detroit emergency room in 2016
told doctors that she was “in trouble” because “bad things [were] happening” to her. R.914
at 149. She lived in a room at the Victory Inn motel. A man named Darrick Bell supplied her
with drugs and fronted her money to purchase them. To pay back her drug debts, Bell arranged
for her to prostitute herself at the Victory Inn. The men she brought to the motel could then buy
drugs from Bell while there. The cycle, she said, grew worse as she became more dependent on
drugs supplied by Bell and his associates to feed her addiction and relied on money from the
prostitution he facilitated to pay for the supply.
A police investigation prompted officers to search the Victory Inn. They uncovered
evidence of a large criminal enterprise. They found several prostitutes who looked “dishevelled”
(sic) along with syringes and scales in one motel room, R.923 at 132; fentanyl, heroin residue,
several cell phones, and four more “dishevelled” women in another room, R.924 at 10; and 92
grams of cocaine, 17 grams of heroin, cash, and cell phones in yet a third room. Nearly every
room at the Victory Inn hosted women trapped in a cycle of money for drugs and prostitution for
money.
Police homed in on Bell as the ringleader. They learned that Bell rented rooms at the
motel for 10 to 20 women at a time and along with several associates he used money, drugs, and
violence to coerce them. He was “able to control everything that[ was] going on” because he
“ma[de] all the money from the prostitution and [he] s[old] the drugs to all the girls.” R.914
at 130. A two-year, national manhunt ensued, which saw Bell featured in an episode of
America’s Most Wanted.
Federal Marshals finally caught Bell in 2019. He went to trial on eight counts, five
relating to sex trafficking and three concerning drug dealing. The trial lasted over six weeks,
producing more than 3,700 pages of trial transcripts in 34 volumes. The government presented
excerpts from the 14,000 hours of surveillance footage it captured of the Victory Inn, hundreds
of text messages sent between cell phones discovered at the motel, and testimony from 24
witnesses. The jury found Bell guilty of three charges: conspiring to distribute drugs,

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No. 24-1657 United States v. Bell Page 3
possessing drugs with the intent to distribute them, and maintaining drug-distribution premises.
The jury found Bell not guilty on one sex trafficking charge and deadlocked on the other four,
which the government elected to dismiss.
The three convictions generated a sentencing guidelines range of 360 months to life. The
court sentenced Bell to 336 months.
II.
Bell challenges his conviction on three grounds: (1) A bevy of text messages introduced
at trial as coconspirator statements amounted to inadmissible hearsay and were not properly
authenticated, (2) the evidence did not support his convictions, and (3) comments by a witness
about her testimony required a new trial. Each argument deserves a turn.
Admissibility of the text messages. At trial, the government introduced hundreds of text
messages from cell phones found at the Victory Inn along with ten summaries of these
conversations. Bell argues that the district court erred in letting the government present some of
these messages because they contained hearsay and the government did not authenticate them.
Because the text messages contained statements introduced to prove “the truth of the
matter asserted” made by people not actively testifying in court, the government needed to show
why they did not amount to inadmissible hearsay. Fed. R. Evid. 801(c), 802. Statements do not
constitute hearsay if a coconspirator makes them “during and in furtherance of the conspiracy.”
Fed. R. Evid. 801(d)(2)(E). Statements by anonymous speakers are admissible under this rule so
long as “circumstantial evidence” shows that the speaker and the defendant likely participated in
a conspiracy. United States v. Martinez, 430 F.3d 317, 326 (6th Cir. 2005). To authenticate the
text messages, the government also needed to produce enough evidence “to support a finding”
that the messages are what the government said they are. Fed. R. Evid. 901(a). We do not
second-guess the district court’s front-row assessment of these evidentiary decisions unless it
abused its discretion. United States v. Carpenter, 157 F.4th 841, 849 (6th Cir. 2025).
Bell does not tell us which of the hundreds of text messages he believes were improperly
admitted or unauthenticated. He instead protests that “many” or “most” of the texts “arguably

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amounted” to hearsay or unauthenticated evidence. Appellant’s Br. 25–26; Reply Br. 3. He
gave the district court little more to work with, objecting generally to the large collection of
messages. Courts, however, “are not like pigs, hunting for truffles buried in the record” of
hundreds of text messages, which took days to present to the jury, occupy hundreds of pages of
trial testimony, and whose foundation the government laid in a 230-page brief. Murthy v.
Missouri, 603 U.S. 43, 67 n.7 (2024) (alteration adopted) (quoting Gross v. Cicero, 619 F.3d
697, 702 (7th Cir. 2010)); United States v. Dunkel, 927 F.2d 955, 956 (7th Cir. 1991) (per
curiam). He has thus not shown that the district court abused its discretion in permitting the
government to present the texts. See United States v. Robinson, 656 F. App’x 145, 149 (6th
Cir. 2016); United States v. Quintanilla, 114 F.4th 453, 473 (5th Cir. 2024); United States v.
McClatchey, 217 F.3d 823, 835–36 (10th Cir. 2000).
Even if Bell had developed his argument further and pointed to particular messages he
found problematic, the record would belie his arguments. Ample evidence showed that members
of a conspiracy that included Bell sent and received the messages. Numerous victims and former
conspirators testified to the existence of a criminal enterprise to profit from a cycle of drugs and
coerced sex at the Victory Inn, and several witnesses confirmed Bell’s leading role in the
conspiracy. That operation occupied nearly all of the rooms at the motel, which Bell rented. The
conspirators sent their messages between phones that officers recovered from those rooms,
which also housed drugs, drug paraphernalia, and cash. After coercing the women into
prostitution through their drug addictions, Bell’s drug dealers used the women to coordinate
prostitution and drug sales. The messages themselves often discuss efforts to schedule these
illicit exchanges. The messages readily fall into the hearsay exemption for coconspirator
statements.
The government also laid a strong foundation for authenticating the messages. It
presented summaries of the contents of each phone, the room where officers recovered each
device, the name of the person who used each device, and the name of the person who received
the messages. Many of the text conversations include messages identifying the authors.
Witnesses also tied the phones to conspirators, testifying, to take an example, that one cell phone
was found in a room used by one of the prostitutes working for Bell, contained photos of notes

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No. 24-1657 United States v. Bell Page 5
with her name and number in her handwriting, and was logged in to her Facebook account. That
is enough evidence for “a reasonable juror” to find the messages authentic. United States v.
Craig, 953 F.3d 898, 902 (6th Cir. 2020) (quotation omitted).
Bell nevertheless says that the district court should not have admitted the messages
because various residents of the Victory Inn shared the cell phones, making it hard to tell who
sent each text. To admit the messages as coconspirator statements, the government did not need
to attribute each message to a specific conspirator. Martinez, 430 F.3d at 326. The evidence,
and the texts themselves, showed that the messages related to a large drug conspiracy. The
presence of the phones at the Victory Inn and their use by various drug dealers and prostitutes
tied to Bell showed that members of this conspiracy sent the texts. The government, in other
words, “show[ed] that the unknown” author of some of those messages “was more likely than
not a conspirator.” Id. (quotation omitted).
The same holds for authentication. Witness testimony, pictures, and the messages
themselves showed that they came from phones recovered at the Victory Inn or other locations
occupied by members of Bell’s enterprise and used by his associates. Many of the messages,
moreover, named the sender. The government provided numerous avenues for the court and jury
to find that the text messages are “what the [prosecution] claims [they are].” Fed. R.
Evid. 901(a); United States v. Lamm, 5 F.4th 942, 946–48 (8th Cir. 2021).
Bell insists that, because some of the texts came from Bell’s victims, they fall outside the
coconspirator exemption. But nothing precludes statements by victims from qualifying under
this exemption. United States v. Clay, 16 F.3d 892, 895 n.2 (8th Cir. 1994). “[T]he key is
coordinated action,” not the voluntariness or culpability of the speaker taking the actions. United
States v. Musaibli, 42 F.4th 603, 615 (6th Cir. 2022). Because the government presented
evidence that Bell’s subordinate drug dealers and prostituted women sent the messages to
advance the enterprise, they meet this standard. Testimony showed, for instance, that one of the
victims whose messages came into the trial as coconspirator statements served as a trusted
prostitute who helped run Bell’s operations.

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No. 24-1657 United States v. Bell Page 6
Sufficiency and weight of the evidence. Even if the court properly admitted the text
messages, Bell claims that the evidence did not support his convictions. To succeed, Bell must
show that the evidence, even when viewed in the light most favorable to the government, would
not permit “any rational trier of fact” to find the elements of the offenses satisfied. United
States v. Houston, 792 F.3d 663, 669 (6th Cir. 2015) (quotation omitted). In the alternative, Bell
claims that, even if some evidence supported each element of the offenses, the convictions went
against the manifest weight of that evidence. To succeed on that claim, Bell had to create “a
definite and firm conviction” that the district court “committed a clear error of judgment” in
rejecting this argument. United States v. Callahan, 801 F.3d 606, 617 (6th Cir. 2015) (quotation
omitted).
The jury convicted Bell of three charges. One: he “distribute[d],” “dispense[d],” or
“possess[ed] with intent to . . . distribute” illegal drugs. 21 U.S.C. § 841(a)(1). Two: he
“conspire[d] to” distribute at least 280 grams of a “mixture or substance” containing “cocaine
base” or 100 grams of a mixture containing heroin. Id. §§ 841(a)(1), 841(b)(1)(A)(iii),
841(b)(1)(B)(i), 846. Three: he “knowingly” “lease[d],” “rent[ed],” “use[d],” or “maintain[ed]”
a “place . . . for the purpose of manufacturing, distributing, or using any” illicit drug. Id.
§ 856(a)(1). As to all three convictions, Bell denies that he sold drugs and that he sold the
quantity of drugs the jury attributed to him.
The evidence amply supported all three convictions. Several of the victims testified to
buying drugs directly from Bell. And he supplied drugs to other dealers who plied their trade at
the Victory Inn. The jury had more than enough evidence to convict Bell, and the district court
justifiably held that the evidence did not manifestly cut against the convictions.
The evidence likewise backed up the drug quantity finding. Recall that the charges
required the jury to find Bell responsible for 280 grams of cocaine and 100 grams of heroin.
Id. § 841(b)(1)(A)(iii), (b)(1)(B)(i). The jury could rationally assign the vast quantities of drugs
discussed in witness testimony to Bell because he “was in charge of all” the “drug selling” at the
motel. R.922 at 54. As “the main guy” and “the supplier for the Victory Inn,” R.916 at 35, Bell
undertook responsibility for the drugs distributed at the hotel.

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No. 24-1657 United States v. Bell Page 7
Bell, more specifically, directly supplied one of his associated drug dealers with between
three and six grams of cocaine every three or four days for four or five months. That means that
Bell sold him, at a minimum, 90 grams of cocaine and possibly up to 300 grams. The three other
dealers that Bell supplied would have needed to sell only 190 grams collectively to reach the
280-gram threshold. And Bell distributed $4,000 of cocaine to one of them “at least three times
a day.” R.916 at 37–39.
The same holds true for heroin. One of the dealers testified that heroin sold for $200 a
gram and the women spent at least $100 each day on drugs. Bell’s drug-and-sex web included at
least 10 women at a time, which means that they needed to buy heroin for 20 days to reach 100
grams. Bell’s control over the Victory Inn lasted much longer than that.
Bell’s speculation that other dealers in the area might account for the volume of drugs
involved gets him nowhere in view of the mountain of evidence directly connecting him to large-
scale drug sales. Nor does his attack on the credibility of two witnesses who cooperated with the
government—the manager of the Victory Inn and a drug dealer—meaningfully advance his
position. The best assessors of the credibility of witnesses are the jurors who see and hear them
testify, not the distant reviewers of pages of testimony from a cold record. Many other
witnesses, at all events, corroborated the accounts of both witnesses.
J.G.’s statements. Bell separately seeks a new trial based on newly discovered evidence.
He frames this argument as a due process challenge based on prosecutors “knowingly solicit[ing]
false testimony or knowingly allow[ing] it to go uncorrected” in a way that affected the jury’s
decision. Glossip v. Oklahoma, 604 U.S. 226, 246 (2025) (quotation omitted).
Bell relies on emails from a defense attorney saying that a government witness named
J.G. told her cellmate (his client) that she “lied” (1) “about Bell raping her” and (2) “about not
knowing about the sex trafficking,” which meant “Bell ‘got off’ as a result” from that charge.
R.1032 at 2.
The problem for Bell is that J.G. never testified about either point. On the contrary, she
testified that she had romantic feelings for Bell and described how Bell came to the motel only to
“drop off drugs” or to manage his “prostitution” “business.” R.917 at 85. J.G.’s alleged

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No. 24-1657 United States v. Bell Page 8
statement to her cellmate, therefore, did not address her actual testimony at trial. The cited
emails thus give no reason to believe that J.G. lied at trial, much less that her lies affected the
jury’s deliberations. Even if we assumed that J.G. lied in a material way, Bell fails to point to
any evidence that the government “knowingly” solicited or permitted J.G.’s (allegedly) false
testimony. Mack v. Bradshaw, 88 F.4th 1147, 1160 (6th Cir. 2023); Glossip, 604 U.S. at 246.
III.
Bell’s challenges to the district court’s sentencing guidelines calculation also fall short.
In reviewing whether the district court calculated the sentencing guidelines correctly, we
reconsider its factual findings only if they are clearly erroneous and approach its legal
conclusions with fresh eyes. United States v. Rayyan, 885 F.3d 436, 440 (6th Cir. 2018).
Dangerous weapon enhancement. The district court increased Bell’s offense level by
two because “a dangerous weapon (including a firearm) was possessed” during the conspiracy.
U.S.S.G. § 2D1.1(b)(1). His accomplices’ possession of a firearm counts as long as they
possessed the gun “within the scope” of the conspiracy, “in furtherance” of it, and in a way
“reasonably foreseeable in connection” with it. Id. § 1B1.3(a)(1)(B); see United States v. Brown,
131 F.4th 337, 344 (6th Cir. 2025).
The government cleared this hurdle. Evidence connected Bell’s coconspirators to
firearms and even showed that a “shootout” happened at the Victory Inn during Bell’s leadership
of the conspiracy. R.1141 at 40. Members of the conspiracy used the guns to support it. Two of
Bell’s dealers kept guns in their Victory Inn rooms along with their drug supplies. Bell tasked
one of these dealers with providing the “muscle” for protecting the operation and enforcing its
goals. R.917 at 94.
Bell protests innocence of any knowledge of the firearms’ role in his drug operation. But
he offers no evidence to support the argument. It strains credulity to believe that Bell would not
“have reasonably foreseen” that the “major drug trafficker[s]” working under him “possessed
weapons in the residence where [they] kept a significant drug supply and thousands of dollars in
currency.” United States v. Benson, 591 F.3d 491, 505 (6th Cir. 2010). Even if he were

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No. 24-1657 United States v. Bell Page 9
somehow ignorant of the weapons at the hotel, Bell certainly knew about them after J.G. called
him to report the shootout.
Leadership enhancement. Bell challenges the district court’s four-point enhancement for
his role as “an organizer or leader of a criminal activity that involved five or more participants or
was otherwise extensive.” U.S.S.G. § 3B1.1(a). Considerable evidence undergirds the finding.
One victim said that Bell was “the boss” of the Victory Inn drug enterprise. R.920 at 99.
Another victim said that Bell “was basically running the Victory Inn” because “[e]verything
revolved around him” and that he was “able to control everything that’s going on.” R.914 at
110, 130. At least 10 women at a time fell under Bell’s influence. Bell oversaw a small army of
dealers, including one who served as his “right-hand man” and helped collect the proceeds of the
drug sales. R.918 at 105–06. Bell managed these subordinates by frequently calling meetings to
discuss operations.
The record does not supply any traction for Bell’s contrary arguments. He insists that he
sold drugs only to individuals rather than as a part of a larger scheme. But the evidence at trial
provides plenty of evidence of retail and wholesale sales. It includes numerous examples where
he supplied drugs through his drug dealing associates. And it includes one example in which a
dealer handled thousands of dollars of drugs at a time.
Bell’s claim to being a single small-time drug dealer among many others at the Victory
Inn cloaks his leadership of a brazen operation with humility. Not only did he supply the others
with their drug inventory and frequently collect profits from them, he also served as the central
coordinating figure for the operation. Rather than one among equals, Bell was “the main guy”
and “the supplier for the Victory Inn.” R.916 at 35.
Drug quantity finding. Bell attacks the district court’s decision to increase his offense
level by two points because he was responsible for at least 3,000 kilograms of “converted drug
weight.” U.S.S.G. § 2D1.1(c)(4). In this calculation, one gram of crack cocaine base counts as
3.5 kilograms of “converted drug weight,” and one gram of heroin adds a kilogram to Bell’s drug
weight total. Id. § 2D1.1 cmt. n.8(D).

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No. 24-1657 United States v. Bell Page 10
The record shows that Bell sold far more than the required quantity. A single one of the
dealers he supplied alone exceeded it in a four-month period. The dealer sold between 2 and 4.5
ounces of cocaine base at least every four days. That comes out to at least 1,729 grams of
cocaine sold over that period. That quantity counts as over 6,000 kilograms of converted drug
weight, double the quantity required. Id. § 2D1.1(c)(4) & cmt. n.8(D). Given the overwhelming
evidence that Bell was the main supplier for all of the dealers at the Victory Inn for a much
longer period than four months, we find no error, let alone the requisite clear error, in the district
court’s calculations.
Threat of violence enhancement. Bell denies that he “used violence, made a credible
threat to use violence, or directed the use of violence,” id. § 2D1.1(b)(2), undermining the district
court’s two-point enhancement on that ground. The evidence clearly supported the finding. Bell
used or threatened violence to protect his drug operation or collect debts. He told one of the
female victims who was delinquent in paying back drug money he fronted her: “Don’t make me
beat your ass, get my money.” R.914 at 131–32. He broke another of the victims’ toes with a
baseball bat after she “stole his drugs.” R.917 at 141–42. Violence pervaded the enterprise until
the government ended it.
Resisting this conclusion, Bell says that the evidence connected violence only to the sex
trafficking charges, for which the jury acquitted him or deadlocked, not to the drug convictions,
for which the jury convicted him. But this contention overlooks the tight web of
interconnections between Bell’s drug dealing and the prostitution at the Victory Inn. No less
importantly, it overlooks the significant evidence that Bell and his subordinates used “physical
assaults” to enforce drug debts. R.917 at 41–42. In trying to parry these arguments, Bell returns
to the theme of questioning the witnesses’ credibility. But we typically do not second-guess the
district court’s credibility determinations at sentencing. United States v. Rodriguez, 38 F. App’x
244, 252 (6th Cir. 2002). And, again, he provides no sound reason to doubt the district court’s
face-to-face assessment of their testimony or of the testimony of other witnesses who
corroborated it.
Criminal history points. Bell challenges the district court’s assignment of 12 criminal
history points for his numerous prior Michigan convictions. Bell insists that only his 1995

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No. 24-1657 United States v. Bell Page 11
conviction for second-degree murder should count because he finished his other sentences before
the beginning of the Sentencing Guidelines’ 15-year lookback window. We need not resolve the
point. Bell has agreed all along that his criminal history fell into at least category III.
Appellant’s Br. 43 (“If they had not been scored, Bell’s criminal history level would have been
reduced to 4 points.”); Reply Br. 8 (“[I]t was error to assign him 12 additional points.”); R.1053
at 11 (“[H]is criminal history score is a 4, which places him as a category III criminal history.”);
Oral Argument at 9:02–9:17 (admitting Bell had at least four criminal history points). Because
the district court correctly calculated Bell’s offense level, his sentencing range of 360 months to
life in prison would not change regardless of whether his criminal history fits within category III
or VI. See U.S.S.G. ch. 5, pt. A (2023) (sentencing table). If a guidelines disagreement has no
impact on the resulting range, we need not resolve it. See United States v. Faulkner, 926 F.3d
266, 275 (6th Cir. 2019); see also United States v. Daniels, 163 F.4th 992, 1015–16 (6th Cir.
2026).
Even if Bell made it to the base of this issue, it’s worth pointing out that he would face a
steep ascent to reach the summit. He incurred four Michigan sentences for assault, illicit
concealed weapons, and drugs between 1990 and 1993. He is right that the Sentencing
Guidelines consider only convictions that happened during the last 15 years or that caused the
defendant to be in prison during the last 15 years, U.S.S.G. § 4A1.2(e)(1), and that individually
each of these sentences was originally scheduled to end before that 15-year lookback period
began in 2000. But we “normally” consider a conviction for criminal history purposes if some
“incarceration during the lookback period . . . would not have occurred in the absence of—that
is, but for—the sentence.” United States v. Hinojosa, 138 F.4th 1004, 1008 (6th Cir. 2025)
(quotation omitted). And Michigan law made him ineligible for credit for time served during
presentence custody on his murder conviction because he remained on parole for these offenses.
See Mich. Comp. Laws § 769.11b; People v. Idziak, 773 N.W.2d 616, 624 (Mich. 2009). These
convictions, then, likely served as a “but for” cause of prison time that he served during the
relevant 15-year period. Hinojosa, 138 F.4th at 1009.
We affirm.

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