California inmate recruited 'wives' to spread fentanyl across Alaska, feds say

Los Angeles Times ^ | Dec. 20, 2024 3 AM PT | Matthew Ormseth

[E. Pluribus Unum]

As Sunday Powers drove along a remote highway in Alaska, her boss tracked her every move from 3,000 miles away.

A former Girl Scout raised in a town called North Pole, population 2,427, Powers had gotten involved in the drug business. She sold blue fentanyl pills and smuggled money for a dealer in California, according to court documents and interviews.

Powers had never met her boss, Heraclio Sanchez Rodriguez — he had been serving a life sentence in the California prison system since 1998. Authorities charge that Sanchez ran one of the largest drug trafficking organizations in Alaskan history without ever setting foot in the state.

Using contraband cellphones, Sanchez spun a web that stretched from Mexico to Los Angeles to far-flung Alaskan villages, authorities say. Flights carried women traveling with drugs and cash. Packages stuffed with fentanyl pills flowed through the U.S. postal system. Cash App payments linked senders in Alaska to recipients in Mexicali and Culiacán.

“This guy’s very intelligent,” Powers’ brother, Charles Hills, said of Sanchez. “He created a network and bought his way into enough circles of trust, whatever you want to call it, and just destroyed the area.”

By 2023, Powers was running from Sanchez. After working for him for about six months, she’d lost some of his money, according to her family. Prosecutors say he turned Powers’ phone into a tracking device and sent a man into the Alaskan wilderness to find her.

Sanchez, whose attorney didn’t respond to requests for comment, has pleaded not guilty to charges of trafficking drugs, laundering money, obstructing justice, carjacking, kidnapping and murder. Grand juries have indicted 58 people in the last year on charges of selling drugs, laundering their proceeds and committing violence on Sanchez’s behalf. He...

[allendale]

The native Indians in Alaska’s Northern regions have a horendous problem drugs and alcohol. The young people are flush with cash from oil royalties. The Arctic ocean coastline is littered with the wrecks of expensive cars and trucks. Many young people die or are crippled in these DUI wrecks. They don’t show this carnage on the Alaska cable TV shows. Sanchez could never expand his deadly business there if there wasn’t a demand for his products.

[ASOC]

The drug and alcohol problems is now nearly out of control -

see https://apnews.com/article/anchorage-alaska-homeless-winter-housing-94aca7bb29647ef367e19bba2ef1a96d

[packrat35]

Selling fentanyl should be a death penalty offense. It is killing more people in the USA than almost any other cause. Pushing poison should be treated as a capital crime.