Edmond, a symbol of the city's 1980s crack epidemic, stepped down to community corrections this summer and was set to be released from custody next year.

Rayful Edmond III, a onetime drug kingpin who spent more of his life in prison than out of it for his role fueling the District's murderous crack cocaine epidemic, died suddenly Tuesday within a year of his release date, according to a U.S. Bureau of Prisons official.

Edmond, who turned 60 in November, died at a halfway house in Florida, said bureau spokesperson Kristie Breshears. No cause of death has been released. Edmond had been moved this summer from a federal penitentiary to "community confinement" and was set to be released late next year, the agency said at the time.

Arrested in 1989 and initially sentenced to life in prison with no eligibility for parole, he became a government informant during his decades of incarceration, providing an "unparalleled magnitude ... of cooperation," a judge wrote in 2021 in significantly reducing his sentence.

The city's bygone "king of cocaine," as he was dubbed, Edmond exuded a charisma that helped him command an army of dealers and mountain of profits. Convicted of federal drug-trafficking charges in D.C. and sentenced in 1990, he oversaw a sprawling operation that smuggled as much as 1,700 pounds of cocaine into the city each month in the latter part of the 1980s, authorities said. They estimated that Edmond raked in about $2 million per week in those years.

In August, the Bureau of Prisons announced that Edmond would leave prison for a step-down program, but declined to say where he would be located.

The huge profits available in the crack trade spawned open-air dealing in many areas of the District back then, with competing street crews guarding their turf -- and encroaching on others' territories -- through nightly gunfire. As D.C.'s annual homicide toll climbed sharply in the late 1980s and early 1990s, peaking at nearly 500, the city acquired the nickname "America's murder capital."

The epidemic of crack dealing and bloodshed ravaged communities all over the country. Edmond himself, though, was never found guilty of any violent crimes. During his years of imprisonment, authorities said, Edmond cooperated extensively in investigations of drug and homicide cases in the District and elsewhere. In return for his help, federal prosecutors in D.C. asked a judge in 2019 to modify Edmond's sentence of life without parole, allowing him to someday go free.

"I am very remorseful," Edmond said at a 2019 court hearing on the government's motion. It was the first time he had apologized to D.C. residents for the wave of addiction and violence he helped bring to their city. "I am sorry for everybody I hurt, for everybody I disappointed," he said. "If I ever get the opportunity, I will do my best and whatever it takes to make up for all of my crimes."

This is a developing story and will be updated.