Drug cartel in NJ: Sinaloa traffickers now live among us

Omar Zeus Rodriguez went largely unnoticed on Willingboro's Berkshire Lane, a tree-lined street of mostly well-maintained Levittown homes from the 1950s and '60s.

“It’s a quiet neighborhood, but when something goes wrong, the police are here in a heartbeat,” said Chris Waleh, 30, who lives next to the weathered Cape Cod that Rodriguez rented. They seldom need to be called, he said.

So when Darrell Holmes, a 63-year-old retired truck driver who has lived in the neighborhood for 14 years, saw a group of men standing by the side of his home in late June, he knew something was amiss.

“They were in plainclothes, but I knew they were cops,” he said.

In the back of Rodriguez's Range Rover on that peaceful street, New Jersey State Police detectives uncovered 5 kilograms of fentanyl, enough of the deadly synthetic opioid to kill everyone in South Jersey.

They also discovered 40 kilograms of heroin, which would have flowed into the arms of addicts in Monmouth and Ocean counties as well as much of the rest of New Jersey, state police said.

With Rodriguez's arrest, state police said they also found a direct link to one of the most dangerous criminal organizations in the world: the Sinaloa cartel. It's a drug empire whose product kills more than 1,000 New Jerseyans annually, including more than100 people at the Shore.

Rodriguez represents a sea change in how heroin is trafficked. Until two or three years ago, the cartel used intermediaries to transport the heroin and drop it off to dealers in New Jersey who had enough capital and know-how to handle large shipments, according to the state police. 

Now Sinaloa cartel members reside in New Jersey, next to people who cut their lawns, walk their kids to school and lounge in their backyards.

“They’re in sleepy towns,” said New Jersey State Police Detective Sgt. 1st Class Larry Williams, who was involved in the arrest of people connected to Rodriguez. “They’d rather be in a Willingboro or another place where they can’t be robbed or can’t be found. They want to blend into their surroundings.”

Or like Rodriguez, virtually disappear. Williams said the suspected drug dealer lived in the township for about a year and a half.

"They’re not the guys you see in the movies dressed in black, all tattooed, and wielding AK-47s," said David Shirk, an associate professor at the University of San Diego and an expert on Mexican organized crime. "They’re businessmen." 

When Rodriguez was arrested, he carried identification that listed his home in the northwest Mexico state of Sinaloa, nestled against the Gulf of California and the Pacific Ocean. Rodriguez, Williams said, was a member of the cartel.

The Sinaloa cartel controls about 90 percent of the wholesale heroin flowing into New Jersey, said Carl Kotowski, who headed the Drug Enforcement Administration's Newark office until his retirement in October. 

A chief byproduct of that enterprise is an epidemic of broken lives, fractured families, and death. Heroin was found in the bodies of more than 4,000 New Jerseyans who died from the drug alone or in combination with other drugs since the beginning of 2012.

More than 700 of those victims came from Monmouth and Ocean counties. And the majority of that heroin came from the Sinaloa cartel, according to law enforcement officials.

“If it’s Mexican heroin, most likely there’s a Sinaloa guy right behind it,” said the State Police's Williams.

Fentanyl-related deaths in New Jersey have also risen sharply, since 2014.

A deadly price is paid, of course, on the Mexican side of the border as well.

In Mexico, mass executions, chainsaw beheadings and hangings of cartel members have added to the group's reputation for grisly violence — a spectacle that has not abated since the rearrest of cartel leader Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán Loera in January 2016.

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But the human toll in New Jersey since cheap Mexican heroin entered the market is hard to fathom, even for veterans in the field of addiction. Nationwide, some 64,000 Americans died from drug overdoses in 2016, the vast majority linked to prescription opioids, heroin, fentanyl or a fentanyl analogue, or combinations of those drugs.

John Brogan was feeding a heroin addiction until shortly after he was revived by naloxone in a Burger King bathroom in Philadelphia in 2010. He now steers addicts into treatment through Lifeline Recovery Support Services, based at the Abundant Grace Church in Toms River.

Brogan crystallized the devastation with an image familiar to him: the slightly blue bodies of young men and women on life support in a hospital emergency room with their families hovering over them.

“There’s despair, panic, hopelessness because they know when the morning comes they’re going to have to shut off that key,” he said. “It’s destroying an entire generation. It’s the complete destruction of a family system. We need as big an army as possible to get us out of this.”

The road from Sinaloa to New Jersey has had many twists and turns over the decades.

Mexico produced mostly marijuana and a crude version of heroin known as black tar heroin until the 1980s when drug lords aided the thriving Colombian cocaine trade by flying the drug into Mexico.

A break-up of a syndicate known as the Guadalajara cartel led to an offshoot based in the state of Sinaloa led by “El Chapo.”

The Sinaloa cartel smuggled cocaine across the border in every conceivable way: from tunnels under the border fence, to submarines, to their own airliners, to dune buggies crossing the border over sandbag bridges and in factory-sealed cans of food.

As the Sinaloa cartel perfected its prowess as a distributor, bringing in $3 billion a year by one estimate, it expanded its heroin operation.

Narcotics traffickers in Mexico had a well-established black tar heroin business in place by the mid-2000s, sending it to mostly Western states.

But powder heroin was preferred by users in Eastern markets, according to the DEA.

The Mexican cartels entered the heroin trade after a series of events in Colombia that produced a supply shock. That included a crackdown on the production of opium poppies by the Colombian government.

At the same time, a clampdown in Mexico weakened the Mexican cartels, which also saw a drop in revenue from their cash crop, marijuana. The start of legalized marijuana in the United States, whether for medicinal or recreational use, also cut into cartel profits.

“Now anybody could get access to high-quality marijuana without having to pay a premium for getting it across the border,” Shirk said.

The weakened cartels sought a new product area to produce more revenue, Shirk said. They focused on opium poppies, already growing in the “Golden Triangle,” the region that encompasses parts of the states of Sinaloa, Durango and Chihuahua.

Opium poppies grew there since Chinese immigrants who worked on the transcontinental railroad in the United States emigrated to work on the railroad in Mexico. It was Chinese Mexicans who first turned the poppies into gum and trafficked it to the United States, according to journalist Ioan Grillo in his book "El Narco: Inside Mexico’s Criminal Insurgency."

Flush with capital from the cocaine trade, with a supply shortage to exploit, the Sinaloa and other cartels set up labs and started producing their own highly refined brand of heroin, known as Mexican white powder heroin.

It had the highest purity in the world.

A DEA expert on the Sinaloa cartel, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for security reasons, told the Asbury Park Press that he first saw Mexican white powder heroin in Arizona in 2012. “That was a big deal,” he said.

That was also a pivotal time in the opioid epidemic, he pointed out. A crackdown on “pill mills” – doctors’ offices where painkillers were easy to come by – in Florida and elsewhere made it tougher to get opioids. The price rose on the street.

Mexico quickly supplanted Colombia as the United States' main heroin supplier.

According to DEA statistics, Mexican heroin in 2003 accounted for 5 percent of wholesale heroin seizures in the United States while Colombian heroin made up about 90 percent. In 2015, Colombian heroin fell to less than 5 percent of seized heroin. Mexican heroin: 93 percent.

Opium poppy cultivation in Mexico more than tripled between 2013 and 2016, according to the DEA.

As cheap and potent Mexican heroin flooded the market, the price of heroin in New Jersey dropped.

Brogan said the price of heroin on the street in Ocean County and Philadelphia began to plummet around 2011-2012, from $20 a bag to $10. It's now as low as $5.

The number of addicts rose and the type of people who became addicted changed after 2012, said Greg Coram, a former West Virgina state trooper and a clinical psychologist who treats addicts.

"Now it was attorneys, teachers, police officer, medical professionals," said Coram, who is an associate criminal justice professor at Monmouth University. "And 90 percent of them started with a prescription" for opioids.

Heroin poured over the Southwest border, by every conceivable means. 

The cartels use drones and ultralight aircraft to make drops and conduct surveillance, according to the DEA.

New ideas pop up all the time to keep the border enforcers guessing.

On March 16, a Louisiana State Trooper stopped a Texas driver who was traveling from Brownsville, Texas, to New York City. Authorities turned up 8.5 pounds of heroin hidden in the vehicle battery. The battery still worked.

The DEA readily acknowledges that no one can stop the flow of heroin across the border.

"It's about demand," said Wade C. Sparks, DEA spokesman.

The massive flow of commerce makes uncovering heroin nearly impossible.

If the DEA stops a cargo of tomatoes randomly to check for heroin, the agency gets sued if it goes bad, said another DEA spokesman, Melvin Patterson,

Shirk agreed.

'We’re a country where more than half the population of adults has tried drugs, more than half the population thinks we should legalize marijuana," Shirk said. "The use of drugs is so popularized and accepted particularly by middle-class society, college educated society I don’t think we seriously want to stop drugs from flowing across the border. I don’t think people are committed to the cause." 

Once in New Jersey, Dominican traffickers frequently pick up the heroin from the Sinaloa cartel. There is little interaction between the cartel and gangs like the Bloods or Crips, according to the DEA.

The Dominican or other traffickers take the bricks of heroin – and fentanyl – to a “mill,” a house or apartment, where they break down the blocks using coffee grinders, blenders, or food processors. They add adulterants like diphenhydramine – an antihistamine - or quinine and diluting agents like lactose or mannitol.

The end product is prepackaged for mid-level or street sales in glassine packets or wax folds called decks. Those decks litter New Jersey.

A cornfield and a water tower that serves as a landmark greet people arriving into this part of the Burlington County township of 31,475 along with a sign that reads: "Willingboro – a naturally better place to be."

Willingboro was founded by English Quakers in 1688. Almost three hundred years later, in the late 1950s, a court case opened the town to integration.

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Blacks now make up nearly three-quarters of the township.

At least demographically, Rodriguez stood out. He was one of about 370 Mexicans living in Willingboro, according to the most recent Census data.

Authorities believe Rodriguez moved to Willingboro as a matter of happenstance, not for some strategic reason beyond that the home was available without a background and credit check.

Cartel members live under the radar in neighborhoods like Willingboro to expand their networks and exert more control over the cartel’s business for one reason: money.

"They’re controlling that transportation route and their guys handle it here so they can basically get the price that a kilo will go for in this area as opposed to at the border," Williams said.

Neither the DEA nor the state police had estimates on how many cartel members are here or how much heroin they bring into New Jersey.

On a sunny mid-November day in the middle of the work week, few people were in the neighborhood around 78 Berkshire Lane, the now-vacant home where Rodriguez lived.

Holmes, who raised three of his six children around the corner from Rodriguez’s home, saw the story in the local papers two days after the bust.

“It was a shock to everybody. Everybody was like, ‘Wow!’ ” Holmes said. “We’re all pretty cool around here. Everybody knows each other. I never noticed anything going on there. It was just a regular house in a regular neighborhood. There was never a problem, ever, ever.”

On June 28, about 78 miles north of Willingboro, detectives from the New Jersey State Police Drug Trafficking North Unit gathered in a Target parking lot on Tonnelle Avenue in North Bergen.

They had received a tip that drugs were due to arrive there.

According to law enforcement officials, Jesus Carrillo-Pineda, 31, of Philadelphia, steered the Mercedes-Benz he was driving into the lot. Two other men, Jesus Yanez-Martinez, 22, and Daniel Vasquez, 28, both of Somerton, Arizona, arrived in a tractor-trailer.

The State Police detectives watched as the men threw two black duffel bags into the trunk of the Mercedes, authorities said.

When detectives closed in, they found 40 individually wrapped kilograms of what they thought was heroin in the duffel bags. Lab tests eventually showed it to be fentanyl – the largest seizure of the synthetic opioid in the state’s history.

“It was heading for the New Jersey, Philadelphia market,” Williams said.

Theoretically, the 45 kilograms of fentanyl was enough to kill everyone in New Jersey and New York City, Just 2 to 3 milligrams of the drug can be fatal.

That bust led them to Rodriguez.

The detectives from the New Jersey State Police Trafficking South Unit found Rodriguez, 38, loading a suitcase into his Range Rover outside the place, according to the officials. The state police found the fentanyl and what they believed to be 80 kilograms of heroin in the suitcases and in an open Fed Ex box in the trunk of the SUV. It turned out to be 40 kilograms of heroin and another 40 kilograms of cutting agents.

Carrillo-Pineda was also a cartel member, according to the authorities, but only Rodriguez turned over identification showing that he came from Sinaloa. Neither man admitted to being part of the cartel.

All four were indicted in September. They have pleaded not guilty. Attorneys for the men did not immediately return calls.

Williams said the arrival of cartel members into the state coincided with a sharp uptick in the size of seizures.

“You used to see 5 kilos of heroin, 7 kilos of heroin, or 2 kilos of heroin. Forty kilos would have blown our socks off five years ago," he said. "Demand dictated it. Now it’s coming straight from the mountains of Sinaloa, Chihuahua and Durango down there. They’re pushing it as fast as they can grow it.”

Williams added: “Now, it’s off to the races basically.”

Ken Serrano: 732-643-4029; kserrano@gannettnj.com