NYC Cocaine Kingpin Gets 20 Years In Prison

NEW YORK, NY — A drug kingpin who sold more than a ton of cocaine throughout New York City was sentenced Thursday to 20 years in federal prison, federal prosecutors in Brooklyn said. Luis Bello of the Bronx, 34, led an operation for two years that imported drugs from Puerto Rico and sold them across the New York area, raking in at least $620,000, prosecutors said.

Bello had pleaded guilty in Brooklyn federal court to charges of conspiring to distribute more than five kilograms of cocaine, conspiring to launder money and firearms trafficking.

He was among 10 members of the drug ring — including a former U.S. mail carrier from New Jersey who helped transport the drugs — to plead guilty under a 2013 indictment.

"Today’s 20 year sentencing of Bello effectively rids our community of the convicted leader of a dangerous drug trafficking and money laundering organization with ties to the Caribbean, that flooded the streets of New York with large quantities of cocaine," Angel M. Melendez, the special agent in charge in New York for U.S. Homeland Security Investigations, said in a statement Thursday.

Using the U.S. mail and drug couriers, Bello and his co-conspirators shipped more than 1,000 kilograms of cocaine — more than 2,200 pounds — from Puerto Rico to the Bronx from 2011 until his arrest in September 2013, federal prosecutors said.

Members of the drug ring often sent the cocaine to post office boxes in New York and New Jersey and the Highbridge post office in the Bronx, prosecutors said. A mail carrier there, Jermaine Sandifer of Perth Amboy, New Jersey, picked up packages of drugs addressed to places along his route and brought them to Bello, prosecutors said.

According to prosecutors, Bello and his underlings took the money from their drug sales to banks and exchanged small bills for larger ones. They then smuggled the money to Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, hiding cash in pants pockets and soap bottles.

The operation was lucrative — investigators found $58,000 in cash exchanges in a single month in 2011 through an account in Bello's name, prosecutors said.

Bello's sentence of 20 years in prison and five years of supervised release is the stiffest among his co-conspirators so far, according to prosecutors.

Bello's lawyer, Alexei Schacht, said the sentence is "disproportionately long," given "the many facts and circumstances in the case."

"We believed a sentence of ten years would have been far more appropriate," Schacht said in a text message.

Sandifer, the mail carrier, got five years in prison for distributing at least 150 kilograms of cocaine, prosecutors said. Joel Aguilar of Manhattan will serve six years in prison for distributing the same amount.

Bello's cousin, Carlos Bello Tirado of Leesburg, Florida, was sentenced to four years in prison. And Ernest Pena of the Bronx was sentenced to the prison time he already served for distributing 85 kilograms of cocaine.

Four other people from the Bronx and one from Newark, New Jersey are still awaiting sentencing, prosecutors said.

(Lead image by Steve Buissinne via Pixabay)