By HOLLY GATLIN
State Staff Writer

The operator of Blaney Drag Strip near Elgin has been charged with trafficking in 9 ounces of cocaine with a street value of $55,000, authorities said Wednesday.

Race car owner and driver Johnny T. Dowey, 43, of 3606 Carrison Road, Columbia, posted on Wednesday $50,000 cash – 10 percent of the $500,000 bond set by Columbia Magistrate Walter Jones – and was released.

Dowey faces a minimum of 25 years in prison if convicted of trafficking in more than 100 grams of cocaine.

Agents of Richland County Sheriff’s Department and the U. S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms arrested DOwey and another man, Otis Smith, 41, on Monday.

The arrest occurred off U.S. 321 north of Columbia about a block from the wooded location where Dowey is accused of selling 7 ounces of cocaine to an undercover agent, Sheriff Frank Powell said.

Dowey also is accused of selling 1 ounce of cocaine to agents on two other occasions, Powell said.

Officers seized $13,600 used to purchase the 7 ounces, a 1981 Cadillac Eldorado and a 1978 Chevrolet Van.

Powell said Dowey was charged with one count of trafficking in more than 100 grams of cocaine, two counts of trafficking in few than 100 grams of cocaine, three counts of conspiracy to traffick in cocaine and one count of transporting illegal drugs in a motor vehicle.

Smith, of 116 Brick Iron Road, Columbia, owner of a scrap metal business, is charged with three counts of trafficking in cocaine and three counts of conspiracy Smith’s bond was set at $50,000, and he was released Wednesday after posting $5,000 cash, authorities said.

Dowey’s attorneys, David A. Fedor and Dave Massey, declined to comment.

Dowey, who also owns a building wrecking business, recently was awarded the contract to clean up the site of the old Wade Hampton Hotel, which was imploded in August, Powell said.

Dowey leases Blaney Drag Strip from Ed and Sandra Smith, who opened the track in 1962. Dowey signed a 10 year lease that expires this year, Mrs. Smith said.

She said she and her husband plan to develop the property and will not renew the contract. The Dixie Finals, the season’s main racing event scheduled for Saturday, will be “the 18th and the last” such race, Mrs. Smith said.

“It’s gotten to the point that the interest on the developed real estate would be far greater than the revenue generated by the racing facility,” she said.

Blaney Drag Strip was linked with narcotics activities in the early 1980s, when state and federal investigators identified it as one site where convicted cocaine smuggler Newby F. Love planned to land two small planes with hundreds of pounds of marijuana.

Both missions failed – one when the drug plane crashed off the coast of Florida and the other when Love’s ground-to-air radio failed, making it impossible for him to signal the pilot to land.

In 1983, Love was sentenced under the federal drug “kingpin”law to 50 years without parole in the smuggling of nearly 1,000 pounds of cocaine into Sumter County.