The rise and long reckoning of Ralph “Plukey” Duke

PLUKEY DUKE

Cocaine, Cash and the Minnesota Connection

Ralph “Plukey” Duke became one of Minnesota’s most notorious cocaine traffickers. His story runs through a guarded country house, Las Vegas phone calls, a hotel sting and decades in federal court. The nickname stuck. So did the case, long after the money stopped moving.

The northern end of the business

In the court records, his name is Ralph Chavous Duke, with “Plukey” and “Plookie” listed among his aliases. During the 1984–1989 period examined by federal authorities, he controlled a cocaine network serving Minneapolis and St. Paul. The Eighth Circuit’s account traces supplies to a Colombian-affiliated source in Houston and suppliers in Los Angeles. Younger associates drove the cocaine to Minnesota, where dealers divided wholesale quantities for street sales.

The scale attracted attention well beyond any single neighborhood. In its 1989 annual report, the St. Paul Police Department credited cooperation with the DEA for breaking up Duke’s operation. The report counted at least 26 people indicted and $200,000 in confiscated cash. A substantial share of that money, it noted, returned to the department. For police, this was a major victory in the local drug war.

Minneapolis skyline at dusk with highway light trails in the foreground — Minneapolis at dusk. The Library of Congress dates this photograph between 1980 and 2006.Photo: Carol M. Highsmith Archive / Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division. No known restrictions on publication.

Behind the gates in Delano

Duke’s country property in Delano, west of Minneapolis, supplied the story with an extraordinary setting. The 1991 appellate opinion describes a house on two acres, an electronically controlled gate, surveillance cameras monitored from the master bedroom and three guard dogs. Trial evidence placed cocaine deliveries and cash counting there. The comforts of a country retreat came with the defenses of a place expecting trouble.

The same record describes houses in Minneapolis, St. Paul and Los Angeles, including housing for associates. Property served the business as well as its owner. The organization needed places to stay, places to meet and somewhere to bring the next load.

Downtown Delano, Minnesota, with brick storefronts, parked cars and an American flag — Downtown Delano, photographed in May 2010. Duke’s country property was in the Delano area.Photo: Jon Platek / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.

Family, favors and expensive rent

The network drew heavily on personal relationships. Duke’s son, Ralph Lamont “Monte” Nunn, and other relatives appear throughout the prosecution record. The overlap between family and business would make the eventual arrests especially destructive: criminal exposure traveled through households as readily as money did.

There were tangible rewards for participation. In Shawn Regan’s appeal, the court described his work transporting cocaine and handling proceeds, along with Duke paying his rent in an expensive high-rise apartment. Regan’s convictions and sentence were upheld. The arrangement offers a revealing glimpse of Duke’s influence: the boss could help finance a comfortable life, while drawing its beneficiary deeper into the operation.

A call from Las Vegas

On March 4, 1989, a wiretap captured Duke calling his former wife, Doris Jean Admon, from Las Vegas. According to the opinion in her appeal, he told her to collect $6,000 from an associate. Further conversations concerned bringing money to him in Nevada. Even away from Minnesota, Duke remained connected to the flow of cash.

A month later, on April 6, Admon flew from Minneapolis to Los Angeles. Agents found $1,523 in her purse and luggage, followed by $33,880 in a money belt. Her explanations included savings, bingo winnings, a loan and gifts. The details have the texture of a crime film; they come from a federal court’s account of the evidence. Her convictions for conspiracy and interstate transportation of drug proceeds were affirmed.

The seller was working for the DEA

The investigation’s decisive turn came through Andrew Chambers, an informant posing as a supplier. He cultivated Monte Nunn and arranged a 20-kilogram cocaine transaction for May 17, 1989. For the buyers, it appeared to be another wholesale purchase. For investigators, it was a carefully recorded operation.

At a Hilton hotel, Nunn inspected the cocaine. Later, the buyers arrived with $117,754 in a shoebox wrapped in a green bag. Arrests followed, and Duke was taken into custody in connection with the operation. Search warrants at four houses followed on May 18. A business built on private arrangements now had conversations, witnesses and cash for a jury to examine.

The informant’s own secret

Chambers helped bring Duke down, but his credibility became a scandal of its own. In 1995, the Eighth Circuit found that Chambers had committed perjury when he testified that he had never been arrested or convicted. The prosecution had also incorrectly told defense counsel that he had no arrest record.

The court found no evidence that prosecutors actually knew he was lying at trial, but concluded that they should have known. That distinction matters. It was a serious failure in the government’s handling of its witness, established in a judicial opinion rather than merely alleged by Duke’s supporters.

Even so, the court denied Duke a new trial. Recordings and independent evidence corroborated the transaction; the judges concluded that disclosure of Chambers’s record would not have changed the result under the applicable legal standard. The man who helped expose the drug operation had lied about himself. Duke’s convictions survived that revelation.

Life, forty years and another hearing

A jury convicted Duke in 1989, and his original 1990 sentence was life plus forty years. The legal history then became unusually tangled. One overlapping drug conviction was vacated on double-jeopardy grounds. In 2016, a sentencing-guideline change reduced the drug portion to 365 months, with the additional firearm terms still attached. A later district-court order recounts those changes.

In 2017, Duke won the removal of all three firearm convictions following a Supreme Court decision concerning the statute’s meaning. That victory led to resentencing on his remaining drug convictions. In 2018, Judge David S. Doty imposed life again. The Eighth Circuit affirmed in July 2019. The court acknowledged Duke’s rehabilitation efforts but upheld the weight given to the scale of the operation and his involvement of young people, including relatives.

U.S. District Judge David S. Doty wearing glasses, a dark suit and a striped tie — U.S. District Judge David S. Doty, who sentenced Duke. Undated portrait.Photo: U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota / Wikimedia Commons. Public domain in the United States.

What happened after the kingpin fell?

The arrests left a complicated local history. In a 2021 interview with the Minnesota Reformer, historian Will Cooley argued that removing major suppliers such as Duke helped fragment the drug market, creating a more chaotic contest among smaller dealers. He presented that as one factor in a wider explanation of Minneapolis’s later violence. The police achievement of dismantling a network and the question of what replaced it belong to the same uneasy history.

One case, very different futures

Among Duke’s co-defendants was Serena Nunn, then Monte Nunn’s girlfriend. She received a sentence of nearly sixteen years. As MPR News later reported, Doty himself