Hoping to sell more than five pounds of cocaine in June 2017, Long Beach resident Ana Gonzalez-Magana sent a text message—“Good morning”—to an Orange County person she wrongly believed was willing to pay $45,000.
Gonzalez-Magana then arranged a noon rendezvous at a busy Santa Ana Claim Jumper parking lot unaware she was entering a trap.
The buyer, a non-citizen who’d been booted from the United States on four occasions for illegal border crossings, was then in this country with official permission thanks to a secret deal: work as a confidential government informant on Southern California streets and get paid for infiltrating narcotics operations.
Along with Perla Esmeralda Urias, Gonzalez-Magana arrived to make the transaction in a Nissan Murano and met the wire-wearing CI, who sliced into two bags holding the cocaine for inspection and saw a white powdery substance before voicing a verbal code that Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents could sweep in for arrests.
Urias gave permission for a raid on her Long Beach apartment, where agents found club promoter Adrian Enrique Delreal, 121 grams of methamphetamine, 75 grams of heroin and 95 grams of marijuana.
Delreal, who was born in 1986, also stored nearly four pounds of cocaine and $96,722 in cash in his Mercedes Benz, according to the DEA agents.
Urias and Gonzalez-Magana are now serving 36-month prison sentences.
Next month inside Orange County’s Ronald Reagan Federal Courthouse, federal prosecutors hope to send Delreal, who has pleaded guilty, away for as much as 10 years.
CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.
Effing cops. These convictions whould be overturned.