FBI Traces New York Cocaine Sales to Southern California

A few blocks away from Chapman University, on Aug. 20, 2018, undercover police watched the driver of a late-model Hyundai Elantra rental three times pull into an auto-repair garage and leave without obtaining any repairs.

The reason for such activity wasn’t a mystery to the FBI.

Tracking Mexico-based organized crime’s heroin and cocaine distribution in New York led agents to Orange County and a nondescript industrial street in the city of Orange. 

Aerial support tailed the driver of the Hyundai as he employed countersurveillance measures that included getting on the northbound 57 freeway near Angel Stadium, taking an off-ramp and immediately reversing to enter the southbound side of the road.

Road-flipping might normally indicate someone with a lousy sense of direction, but in this situation, the agents accurately considered it “indicative of activity conducted by drug-trafficking and money-laundering organization members in order to determine whether anyone is conducting surveillance of them.”

An Orange County Sheriff’s Department (OCSD) deputy eventually stopped the Hyundai on the northbound 57 and claimed he observed the driver’s hands shaking and sweating as he handed over his Virginia license. 

When the deputy asked Keith Sawyer to exit the vehicle, he sped off toward Diamond Bar, where he stopped in a parking lot, opened the trunk, grabbed a white box and tossed it in the bushes near a highway retaining wall. 

That box contained 3 kilograms of cocaine, according to the FBI. 

Meanwhile, officers obtained a search warrant to enter Enrique Carmen Moreno’s auto-repair shop and found 343 $100 bills, 131 $50 bills, 1,003 $20 bills, 91 $10 bills and 145 $5 bills for a total nearing $63,000.

Both Sawyer and Moreno have criminal records in other states, the Department of Justice (DOJ) reports.  

Having labeled the money illegal narcotics-trafficking revenue, DOJ prosecutors are now in the process of taking ownership of the cash.

If nobody steps forward by June 13, it’s likely U.S. District Court Judge Andrew J. Guilford will grant the government’s request inside the Ronald Reagan Federal Courthouse in Santa Ana. 

2 Replies to “FBI Traces New York Cocaine Sales to Southern California”

  1. Hang em high! International gangsters should beware, but they don’t; cause they know our bark is worse than our bite.

  2. But is it ok for the FBI to have there Undercovers use sale transport ect just to take soomeone down what about that peraons well being tuere life to come. There families pain and loss of that persons life especially when they dont get them help afterward and watch as tuere life get distroied for what there that aboys they get for there what doing nothong but distroing lifes

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