Canadian Woman Indicted For NYC Fentanyl Trafficking Scheme

REGO PARK, QUEENS — On July 29, 2017, a Canadian woman called two drug peddlers in Rego Park to arrange a shipment of 13 kilograms of a substance they called "grasa" from Houston to New York City. They put her on speakerphone as she asked when the kilos were getting picked up.

What Aurora Betancourt didn't know was that law enforcement officers had recorded the call, which would help pave the way for her indictment on drug trafficking charges over a year later.

Betancourt was arraigned Thursday in Brooklyn federal court on charges of distributing fentanyl, about a year after she was arrested in Colombia and more than two years after the phone call that helped law enforcement crack open the case, federal prosecutors said.

Two days after that 2017 phone call, agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration seized the "grasa" shipment before it could reach New York, where it would have fetched $800,000, according to FBI estimates. A drug test showed the "grasa" was fentanyl, a deadly opioid.

At the time, it was the Drug Enforcement Administration second-largest fentanyl seizure in its history, federal prosecutors said.

Betancourt met with her Queens-based accomplices in October 2017 to pick up documents proving the feds had seized the shipment, so others wouldn't ask her to cover the cost of the lost narcotics, according to a detention letter filed in federal court.

The next month, based on that evidence, a grand jury indicted Betancourt on two criminal charges related to fentanyl dealing — but it wasn't until December 2018 that authorities managed to arrest her, according to prosecutors. She was cuffed in Colombia on a provisional arrest warrant, then extradited to the United States this month.

If convicted, Betancourt faces a mandatory minimum sentence of 10 years in prison.