CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa — A 64-year-old Cedar Rapids man has been sent back to federal prison for selling drugs near a school — the same kind of offense that put him in federal court 18 years ago, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Northern District of Iowa announced.
William Robertson, 64, of Cedar Rapids was sentenced on Wednesday, November 4, 2026, to 41 months and 15 days in federal prison, and must also serve a 10-year term of supervised release after the prison term. He had pleaded guilty on May 21, 2026, to one count of distribution of a controlled substance near a protected location.
Source: U.S. Department of Justice, U.S. Attorney's Office, Northern District of Iowa
Four sales he admitted in his plea agreement
In his plea agreement, Robertson admitted that he distributed controlled substances on four separate occasions between October and November 2024. On the first occasion, he admitted distributing a mixture containing heroin, fluorofentanyl and fentanyl, as well as a mixture containing cocaine base. On the second occasion, he admitted distributing a mixture containing fentanyl and a mixture containing cocaine base. On the third, he admitted distributing a mixture containing cocaine base, and on the fourth, a mixture containing cocaine, according to the Justice Department.
Robertson admitted that the first three of those distributions took place within 1,000 feet of a school in Cedar Rapids. That distance is what made the charge a protected-location offense: federal law treats drug selling within 1,000 feet of a school and certain other protected places as a more serious crime than the same sale elsewhere.
The 2008 conviction for the same kind of crime
This is not Robertson's first federal case of this kind. He was previously convicted of conspiracy to distribute five grams or more of cocaine base within 1,000 feet of a protected location in 2008, in the same court — the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Iowa, the Justice Department said. The new distributions he admitted took place in the fall of 2024, sixteen years after that earlier conviction.
The judge, the prosecutor and the police
Robertson was sentenced in Cedar Rapids by U.S. District Court Chief Judge C.J. Williams. The case was prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney Adam J. Vander Stoep and was investigated by the Cedar Rapids Police Department. The case file number is 25-CR-29 in the Northern District of Iowa, and court file information is held by that district's federal court clerk.
What fluorofentanyl is, and why these mixtures worry officials
Two of the mixtures Robertson admitted selling contained fentanyl, and the first also contained fluorofentanyl, a fentanyl-related synthetic opioid. Federal health and law-enforcement agencies have repeatedly warned that fentanyl and its analogues are the main drivers of overdose deaths in the United States, because tiny amounts can be lethal and because buyers often do not know exactly what is in a mixture sold on the street. The plea admissions here describe mixtures — heroin, fentanyl compounds and cocaine base sold in combination — which is the pattern officials say makes street drugs especially unpredictable.
The Justice Department's announcement stresses a point that applies to every federal sentence: there is no parole in the federal system. Robertson will serve his prison term under federal rules and then begin the separate 10-year term of supervised release, during which he remains under court supervision after leaving prison.
Why the school-zone rule matters to Cedar Rapids families
For families in Cedar Rapids, the detail that three of the four admitted sales happened within 1,000 feet of a school is the heart of the case. The protected-location law exists because Congress decided that drug markets operating within sight of schools, playgrounds and similar places deserve heavier punishment, both to push dealing away from children and to raise the cost of selling there. Robertson's guilty plea was to a single protected-location count, but his admissions describe a short, repeated run of sales — four occasions in about two months — in the same city where he had already been convicted of the same conduct.
What happens next
Robertson is being held in the custody of the U.S. Marshals Service until he can be transported to a federal prison, the Justice Department said; the announcement did not name the prison. When the prison term ends, his 10 years of supervised release begin. The sentence, handed down on November 4, closes the case that began with the October and November 2024 distributions and the May 2026 guilty plea.