A cross-country drug bust that started in Richfield netted 480 kilograms of cocaine with a street value of about $100 million and resulted in arrests in Utah and New York City.
Richfield police arrested two men, and then federal agents flew the semitrailer truck they were driving aboard a military cargo aircraft to the New York area so the truck, stripped of its contraband, could keep a delivery rendezvous schedule there.The driver of the truck, Manuel Bonilla, 37, and his passenger, Jose Moreno, 31, who both listed their residences as being in Los Angeles, cooperated with law enforcement officers by traveling to New York and making a "controlled delivery" where agents made six additional arrests Wednesday.
Drew Moren, agent in charge for the Drug Enforcement Agency in Utah, said Richfield police officer Dusty Torgerson stopped the semitrailer truck Monday morning as it pulled off I-70.
The officer was an experienced truck driver and recently completed a course in drug interdiction. He stopped the truck after noticing it had no license plates and pursued an investigation of the vehicle after noticing the truck's paperwork was irregular and seeing what appeared to be marijuana in the cab.
The occupants of the truck gave Torgerson permission to search the trailer, where he found the cocaine secreted inside a load of household goods.
Agents loaded the tractor aboard a military C-5 cargo jet but the trailer was 2 inches too tall to fit inside the aircraft, said DEA agent John Dowd.
So the tractor was flown to Andrews Air Force Base in Washington, D.C., while agents in New York scrambled to find a similar trailer and painted it to match the one left in Utah.
The courier truck originally had a chase car following it, but the two vehicles became separated. After agents made their arrest in New York, the two occupants of what officials believe was the chase car were arrested at a Jersey City, N.J., motel.
Nabbed in the New York arrests and charged with conspiracy to distribute cocaine were Carlos Garcia, 32, of Colombia; Jaime Sandoval, 36, of El Salvador; Mario Gutierrez, 25, of Venezuela; Sofia Tangarife-Pena, 40, of Colombia; Franklin Munoz, 36, of Costa Rica; and Marcos Rodriguez, 41, of Colombia.
Dowd said the cocaine was worth about $16 million. But Moren said a street price, once the cocaine had been cut, of $100 per gram puts the value at $96 million or more.