'Heroin Hotline' leader sentenced to 20 years

A man convicted of running a West Side heroin trafficking operation with his brother via a telephone hotline has been sentenced to 20 years in federal prison. Pierre Henderson, 37, pleaded guilty last December to distributing more than 30 kilograms of heroin in the operation from 2008 through 2012, according to a statement from federal prosecutors.Henderson’s 35-year-old brother, Eric Henderson, pleaded guilty to the same charge — conspiracy to distribute heroin — in January 2014 and was sentenced to about 16 years earlier in March, prosecutors said.According to court documents, the Henderson brothers took heroin orders on a telephone hotline from thousands of customers across the Chicago area who would then travel to the West Side to pick up the drugs from their street-level distributors, prosecutors said. The Henderson brothers were among 8 federal defendants who were arrested in Chicago in May 2013 after an FBI investigation code-named “Operation Heroin Hotline.”