The indictment accuses the suspects of trying to sneak fentanyl, methamphetamine and heroin into the facility by hiding the drugs inside of people who purposefully got themselves arrested. Fentanyl-laced pills could be sold in jail at 10 times the regular street price, according to the Department of Justice. 

“The smuggling of drugs into our jails, particularly with the emergence of fentanyl, has dramatically increased inmate deaths and medical emergencies within our corrections division,” Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco said. 

The suspects face a minimum of five years in prison if convicted as charged. 

Federal investigators do not know when the alleged drug smuggling scheme started but know it continued into late 2022 after they intercepted phone calls where people talked about sneaking drugs into a Riverside County custody facility. They named Andrew Jesus Ayala, 46, the scheme’s alleged mastermind, according to the indictment. 

Ayala and a Riverside street gang would recruit people willing to smuggle the drugs inside their bodies. The crew would arrange temporary housing for the drug mules before and after they purposely got arrested to deliver the drugs, according to the indictment. 

In one instance, a suspect tried to smuggle 1.75 ounces of meth inside of his body. However, an X-ray machine revealed the contraband. 

The post 10 charged in drug smuggling scheme at Riverside County jail appeared first on The Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle.

Jorge Alberto Oceguera Rocha, a 26-year-old Banning resident, admitted last week to carrying the controlled substances and to possession of controlled substances for sale during a hearing in Riverside. 

He made the plea directly to Superior Court Judge David Gunn, without input or objection from the Riverside County District Attorney’s Office. 

During the hearing, Gunn dismissed sentence-enhancing allegations of perpetrating a drug-related offense while armed. He also imposed a four-year term of incarceration, which can be served in county jail because Rocha’s crimes are categorized as “non-violent.”

Rocha was released on Thursday from the Byrd Detention Center in Murrieta after the court factored in state credits, intended to reduce overcrowding, and adding the time that he had already spent behind bars while awaiting disposition. He will now be on mandatory supervision for the next 16 months. 

He was arrested in the early morning on Sept. 17, 2023, when he was pulled over near the I-10 Freeway and County Line Road in Calimesa, prosecutors said. He was being surveilled as part of an investigation into more than a dozen people, conducted a part of Operation Hotline Bling, which is a law enforcement operation to crackdown on the Sinaloa drug trafficking network based in Mexico.

“After a K9 alerted to the presence of narcotics within the vehicle, a search was conducted,” said RSO Captain Rob Roggeveen at the time of the arrest. “Located in the vehicle was (104) pounds of packaged fentanyl pills — M30s. Also located in the vehicle was a loaded handgun.”

Rocha, who had been working at the department’s Banning station since he was hired in 2019, was arrested without incident and resigned from his position with the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department immediately following his arrest. 

It’s not clear exactly how long Rocha was being monitored by investigators.

On Thursday, the day after news of Rocha’s sentencing was announced, Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco took to social media to further discuss the matter. 

He says that the Riverside County District Attorney objected to Rocha’s plea, contradictory to some media reports. 

“I am telling you that is a flat out lie,” Bianco said. “The Riverside County Sheriff’s Office, who investigated this crime and our Riverside County DA’s Office, who prosecuted this crime, adamantly objected to this sentence.”

His sentiment was matched in a statement from a district attorney spokesperson. 

“We did object, on the record in open court, to the defendant making a plea to the court … based on the defendant taking advantage of a position of public trust,” the statement read in part. 

The post Former Riverside County deputy pleads guilty to transporting over 100 pounds of fentanyl appeared first on The Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Biden administration on Tuesday imposed sanctions on 13 members of Mexico’s powerful Sinaloa cartel and four Sonora, Mexico-based firms accused of trafficking fentanyl and other drugs into the United States.

The latest action follows a series of measures taken this year against members of the Sinaloa cartel, cash couriers and cartel fraud schemes.

Included in the sanctions are a manager of cartel operations in Nogales who oversaw the trafficking of multi-ton quantities of drugs, authorities said, as well as members of his family and his associates. Also sanctioned are a restaurant, stone and mining companies and an import-export firm.

The sanctions cut them off from the U.S. banking system, cut off their ability to work with Americans and block their U.S. assets.

The Treasury Department’s undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, Brian Nelson, said that the U.S. “will aggressively pursue all who are complicit operators and facilitators of these illicit fentanyl networks.”

The Treasury “will continue to use its authorities to expose and isolate those who profit from deadly fentanyl sales in the United States,” Nelson said.

Fentanyl, a powerful opioid, is the deadliest drug in the U.S. today.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that drug overdose deaths increased more than sevenfold from 2015 to 2021. More than 100,000 deaths a year have been linked to drug overdoses since 2020, and about two-thirds of those are related to fentanyl.

Mexico and China are the primary sources for fentanyl and fentanyl-related substances trafficked directly into the U.S., according to the Drug Enforcement Administration, which is tasked with combating illicit drug trafficking. Nearly all the precursor chemicals that are needed to make fentanyl come from China. And the companies that make the precursors routinely use fake return addresses and mislabel the products to avoid being caught by law enforcement.

In October, President Joe Biden’s administration announced a sweeping series of indictments and sanctions against Chinese companies and executives blamed for importing the chemicals used to make the deadly drug.

Republicans have complained, however, that the Democratic administration isn’t doing enough to stop fentanyl and the issue is likely to figure prominently in next year’s presidential campaign.

Find your latest news here at the Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle

The post The US sanctions Mexican Sinaloa cartel members and firms over fentanyl trafficking appeared first on The Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle.