The federal government is not doing enough to stem the fentanyl crisis amid one of the largest seizures of candy-colored fentanyl pills in New York City last week, according to a drug-trafficking expert.
“The Mexican cartels are behind this new marketing campaign to flood the country with rainbow fentanyl, and it’s only going to get worse,” said Robert Almonte, a Texas-based consultant and former El Paso cop who has more than 30 years of experience cracking down on drug trafficking. “Unfortunately, it’s only going to get worse because the federal government is not providing the resources that border agents need to stop the flow of fentanyl at the border.”
According to Almonte, most of the fentanyl that makes its way to New York City originates with the Nueva Generacion and Sinaloa cartels.
“I don’t see our government treating this as a crisis, even though it’s been a real crisis for a long time,” he told The Post.
The cartels are increasingly manufacturing fentanyl to look like opioids such as Percocet and OxyContin in order to attract a new market, Almonte said: “You think you are taking a Percocet and you are really taking a dose of fentanyl that’s strong enough to kill you.”
Last week, authorities seized a $6 million trove of candy-colored fentanyl pills — the largest in the city’s history — at a Bronx rental building where they also found a semi-automatic weapon and ammunition, according to a report.
Agents from the federal Drug Enforcement Administration, working with the city’s Special Narcotics Prosecutor, seized 300,000 “rainbow” fentanyl pills as well as 20 pounds of powdered fentanyl in the Wakefield apartment, where they also found a Tec-9 semi-automatic assault weapon and 11 GPS devices, according to a Wednesday press release from the Office of the Special Narcotics Prosecutor for the City of New York.
“This investigation uncovered a trove of dangerous ‘rainbow fentanyl’ pills worth up to $6 million on the street, plus an estimated $3 million in powdered fentanyl,” said Special Narcotics Prosecutor Bridget G. Brennan. “The accused traffickers kept an assault weapon on hand and set up their stash house in a residential building near a highway, with easy access into and out of New York City. Fentanyl pills are masquerading in many different forms, and our city is flooded with them. Any street drug, whether it looks like a legitimate pharmaceutical or like candy, may be fentanyl, and it may be lethal.”
Federal agents charged Erickson Lorenzo, 30, and Jefry Rodriguez-Pichardo, 32, in the bust on the six-story apartment building at 4030 Bronx Blvd., according to the report. A criminal complaint charges both men with criminal possession of a controlled substance in the first and third degrees, criminal possession of a weapon in the third degree, and criminally using drug paraphernalia in the second degree. Bail for each man was set at $500,000.
Fentanyl is the most dangerous drug in the US, according to the DEA. In a recent expose, The Post found that much of the fentanyl destined for the city comes through the Hunts Point produce market — the largest such market in the country — in the Bronx. Smugglers regularly sneak the drug into boxes of fruits and vegetables, according to law enforcement sources. Densely packed fentanyl bricks, hidden in box trucks and 18-wheelers, travel by highways from the border with Mexico to the Great Lakes region before coming east.
“The drugs are offloaded in New Jersey and then into the Bronx, where they are milled into glassines,” Brennan told The Post last month. “The mills pump out millions of these glassines and they get distributed all over the country.”
Packaging operations inside apartments close to Hunts Point are staffed mostly by Dominican laborers decked out in full face masks, gloves and protective clothing to prevent them from being poisoned by the powerful narcotic, Brennan said.
They then move the drugs to nearby apartments, where they get chopped up and packaged before they are sold on the streets of the city.
The fentanyl in the Bronx apartment seized last week “took a wide array of forms and was contained in various types of packaging,” according to the DEA’s press statement. “Approximately 10 kilograms (over 22 pounds) of fentanyl in powdered form, wrapped in clear plastic packaging, was inside the kitchen, the living room and the bedroom,” where one of the suspects was allegedly found. The 300,000 multicolored fentanyl pills were inside two hallway closets and in the room used by Lorenzo, the statement said.
“The majority of these pills were sorted by color and contained in large zip-lock bags,” the statement said. “Some of the pills were pressed to resemble legitimate oxycodone and Xanax. One large black garbage bag held up to 100,000 pills in assorted colors and shapes all mixed together.”
A spokeswoman for the Special Narcotics Prosecutor’s Office did not provide details to The Post on where the fentanyl involved in the most recent seizure came from or on the identities of the two men arrested, citing an “ongoing investigation.”
Almonte said it’s likely that the fentanyl seized in the Bronx came from Mexico. “Millions and millions of fentanyl pills have been coming over the border, and there is almost nothing overwhelmed border agents can do because of the influx of migrants,” he said.
More than 2 million migrants crossed the border in this fiscal year, according to US Customs and Border Protection statistics.
Last month, the DEA warned about the appearance of the brightly colored fentanyl pills that were packaged to look like candy. The new form is “a deliberate effort by drug traffickers to drive addiction amongst kids and young adults,” Anne Milgram, the DEA’s administrator, said at the time.
