A heroin network that supplied millions of dollars’ worth of the drug to dealers throughout the Northeast has been dismantled, law enforcement officials said Tuesday.
New Jersey Attorney General Jeffrey Chiesa said authorities arrested 15 people and seized three kilograms of bulk heroin worth more than $300,000 wholesale. Authorities also netted nearly 500 bricks of the drug that were ready for resale and could fetch upward of $1 million. The network operated out of a series of heroin mills and stash houses in Paterson, Chiesa said.
The network trafficked multiple kilos of heroin per week to suppliers and high-level drug dealers in New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania and Washington, D.C., Chiesa said.
“They were not, for the most part, selling directly to street-level dealers,” Chiesa said. “The evidence seized indicates that this is a high-volume operation.”
Authorities seized 10 houses and one car during the six-month operation. The bricks of heroin were seized from a Dodge Caravan stopped on Interstate 80. The bricks were packaged into thousands of individual glassine bags, ready for immediate sale. In addition, authorities took nearly $500,000 in cash and a kilo of cocaine.
The alleged leader of the network, 36-year-old Segundo Garcia of Prospect Park, N.J., is charged with leading a narcotics trafficking network.
Officials dismantled what amounts to a regional drug business, complete with management ranks. They arrested three middle managers allegedly responsible for resupplying product and money to wholesalers in the region, five alleged managerial-level suppliers and seven lower-level men who allegedly packaged and distributed the drug. Two were taxi drivers who transported the drugs and cash, Chiesa said.
Two men remained at large.
“It wasn’t a startup operation,” said Stephen J. Taylor, director of the attorney general’s Division of Criminal Justice. “It was a sophisticated drug operation.”
Officials said the network’s distribution channel flowed from two heroin mills in Paterson where employees would process the heroin, cutting it with other substances, increasing its volume threefold. Employees would then package the heroin into small plastic bags so it could be delivered to dealers and sold.
“Behind the doors of these buildings we allege the defendants employed workers who processed the heroin wearing aprons and surgical masks,” Chiesa said.
The drugs were processed in multi-family houses designed to hide the operation in plain sight, Chiesa said. But it became hard to obscure employees who wore aprons and pulled up masks to take cigarette breaks outside, Chiesa said.
Paterson, a city of 146,000 about 20 miles northwest of Manhattan, has long been plagued by drug-related crime. Officials said they believe the bust will help decrease some of the violence and dismantle some of the city’s drug dealers.
Authorities said the heroin was from Colombia, but would not elaborate further.
New Jersey has one of the nation’s highest rates of heroin use, with about 17,000 heroin-related drug treatment admissions in 2010, according to the White House office of National Drug Control Policy.
Gov. Chris Christie started a task force to investigate the spike in heroin use statewide, especially among teenagers and young adults.
New Jersey and New York are also one of the nation’s biggest heroin intake points, officials said, due in part to their high, dense population, access to airports, highways and ports and a longtime demand that is only growing.
“The demand is here,” said Brian R. Crowell, the Drug Enforcement Administration special agent in charge of the New York Division. “And we have the network between the airport and seaports here and the highways connecting New England and Washington and west out to Pittsburgh.”
The high demand for prescription opiates is also fueling an increase in heroin use. Heroin is cheaper than prescription drugs such as Oxycontin, and many who abuse pills turn to heroin for a cheaper high that can be easier to obtain on the street.
“What happens in a lot of cases is people transition from the prescription drugs to heroin because it’s a cheap substitute,” Chiesa said.