NYC’s Fentanyl Crisis: NY DEA Chief On How Feds Are Fighting Back

NEW YORK CITY – Drug overdose or drug poisoning, the majority of which is related to fentanyl, kills more New Yorkers every year than homicide, suicide, and motor vehicle crashes combined.

“This is a crisis, an epidemic like nothing we’ve ever seen before in drug law enforcement,” Special Agent Frank A. Tarentino III, who leads the Drug Enforcement Administration’s (DEA) New York Division, told Patch. “It’s the greatest threat that we’ve ever experienced.”

Patch caught up with Tarentino earlier this week, in honor of National Fentanyl Prevention and Awareness Day on Wednesday, Aug. 21.

What Is Fentanyl?

A potent synthetic opioid, fentanyl was first developed in 1959 as an intravenous anesthetic. According to the DEA, it’s about 100 times more powerful than morphine and 50 times more potent than heroin.

Relatively unknown outside of medical settings until about 10 years ago, a complex, global supply chain funnels the drug to New York City.

Chemicals from China and India are processed into powder and pills in Mexico. They flow across the southwestern border and move through the United States via transportation networks to a number of regional distribution hubs, of which New York City is one.

‘Pill Mills And Stash Houses’

“New York City is right in the belly of the beast, in terms of the destination that the city is for drug distribution. This is where the majority of the drug cartels are sending their large quantities of drugs, because it is a geographically ideal location for the entire region,” Tarentino explained.

Although some amount of product is transported via shipping containers and mail parcels, most of the drugs arrive via tractor trailer or motor vehicles, according to Tarentino.

“The Bronx is really ground zero because of its location, because of the transit arteries that flow through it up into the Northeast and down into the Southeast. There's a number of different pill mills and stash houses in the Bronx that really facilitate these clandestine operations,” he explained.

Wholesalers move massive amounts of drugs to mid-level distributors, who in turn break the product down into the smaller quantities that reach street-level dealers. It’s these dealers who sell to individual users.

“The whole of the Bronx is a concern for us, again, because of the transportation avenues and routes that go through the Bronx, and because of the density [of the borough] and the anonymity of many locations. Hunt’s Point or some of the really densely populated high rises, those are great locations to store drugs. [Washington Heights] is equally attractive,” he said.

Other boroughs like Queens and Brooklyn also face significant challenges.

“In terms of Queens, Flushing is a major area of interest of ours, for drug trafficking and illicit finance, or money laundering, and in Brooklyn we’re seeing an increase in specific fentanyls like carfentanil. We’ve had more arrests and seizures in Brooklyn [related to carfentanil] than in the other boroughs,” Tarentino said.

‘Like Uber Eats’

Unfortunately, as the overdose data indicates, New York City isn’t only a distribution hub.

“You have a tremendous market here, almost nine million people,” Tarentino said.

It’s difficult to determine where drug sales are – the business is increasingly transient, and many dealers now deliver product to customers, Tarentino explained, mentioning the recent investigation of William Ortega, who ran a drug delivery service whose products killed three New Yorkers in a single day.

“It’s like how Uber Eats sends food,” Tarentino said.

‘A Very Sinister, Very Evil Business Model’

While a significant number of users do take fentanyl intentionally, many ingest it accidentally.

“When you have people who are substance-use dependent who are using coke, meth, or heroin, and they think that that’s what they’re buying, but they’re actually buying fentanyl-laced drugs, that’s a poisoning,” he said. “We are seeing more and more poisonings.”

If you thought drug dealers might be concerned about killing their clientele, think again.

“If you have a couple hundred pounds of cocaine coming into New York, at the wholesale or mid-level, it’s pure cocaine. It’s the street-level dealer who makes the decision of whether or not he or she is going to sell laced drugs.”

“It’s a profit-driven business, and their sole goal is to make money, to addict as many people as humanly possible, and so if you can drive addiction up, you can sell more of your product. Whether people die or not, it’s irrelevant, because enough people will still want to buy. So they intentionally mix fentanyl into other drugs, and if more people are addicted, they get an increased customer base.”

“It’s a very sinister, very evil business model.”

What Are The Feds Doing About It?

“We’re interdicting the entire supply chain,” Tarentino said, naming the recent criminal conviction of Mexico’s ex-Public Security Secretary Genaro García Luna. “We’re striving to defeat the cartels, Sinaloa and Jalisco, and the other trafficking organizations that are responsible for the drugs coming into our streets.”

Data is key.

“We have done things in the last 24 months that we haven’t done in my 26 years of drug law enforcement, and that is, in a very methodical and systematic way, we’ve mapped the threat to where we understand to a high degree where these cartels are across the U.S. and across the globe,” he said.

Back In New York

Closer to home, Tarentino walked through several approaches to prosecuting some of the smaller-scale drug crime that takes place in the city.

“From the DEA’s perspective, we try to always bring our cases through the federal system, for a variety of reasons, but primarily to ensure that we get the most aggressive and the most significant prosecution and sentence, and so we don’t experience the situations that happen at the city and state level with regard to the legal system,” he said, referring to recent city and state action (or inaction, depending on your perspective) on drug-related charges.

“We have had a great deal of success in the Southern District of New York, and we’ve been very successful in prosecuting street-level dealers responsible for causing ODs and poisonings, using ‘death resulting’ or ‘death by dealer’ charges. We’ve been successful in bringing some really great cases.”

"Death resulting" or "death by dealer" charges refer to criminal charges that can be brought against a drug dealer or distributor if the drugs they supplied result in someone's death.

Getting The Word Out

Outreach is essential, and Tarentino has recently visited about 15 high schools across the city.

“Educating the community on what we see – which is intelligence-led and data-driven – is critically important,” he said.

That includes events like nonprofit Facing Fentanyl’s recent Times Square takeover.

“It’s an opportunity to stand shoulder to shoulder with the families who have borne the burden and suffered the most, because they’re the ones who’ve had to bury their loved ones from an OD or a poisoning, and standing with them is really powerful,” Tarentino said.

More than 3,000 New Yorkers died of a drug overdose in 2022, the most recent year for which full year data is available. Opioids, and fentanyl in particular, were involved in the vast majority of these deaths.

“Fentanyl does not discriminate,” Tarentino said. “There is no race, creed, religion, no socioeconomic position in life that will allow you to escape this poison that’s killing Americans everywhere. It is the most widely accessible and most addictive drug that we’ve ever seen.”

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that about 100,000 Americans died as a result of a drug overdose in 2023. About 74,000 of those deaths involved fentanyl or other synthetic opioids.

Have you been impacted by fentanyl in New York City? Email michael.mcdowell@patch.com.