Federal agents have broken up a drug ring that paid police and airport security officers to protect the illegal shipment from Florida to Connecticut of enormous quantities of highly addictive pain medication. Hit the jump to read the rest of the story.
@WiL
Three federal Transportation Security Administration officers, two police officers and 13 drug dealers in Florida, New York and Connecticut were charged with working for the ring that, during some weeks, dumped tens of thousands of oxycodone pills in the Waterbury area, according to a variety of federal and local police agencies involved in the investigation.
Authorities said the TSA officers — two in Florida and one in New York — were paid to help drug couriers move pills and the stacks of cash they generated through airport screening systems. One of the police officers — a Florida state trooper — took drug money to travel to Connecticut, where he provided “protection” to a courier selling thousands of pills to a dozen or more lower-level dealers, authorities said.
“In these times, no one needs to be reminded about how dangerous it is when officers who have sworn to uphold the law accept money to ‘look the other way,’ ” said Connecticut U.S. Attorney David B. Fein, whose office is prosecuting the case.
We have “zero-tolerance for corrupt law enforcement officers and corrupt federal employees, and anyone who violates his or her oath and breaks the law will soon find him or herself in a federal courtroom, before a federal judge, answering to federal charges,” Fein said.
Oxycodone is a powerful, prescription narcotic, the abuse of which has become a growing law enforcement problem.
The investigation, called “Operation Blue Coast,” was put together by the federal Drug Enforcement Administration. In legal papers unsealed Tuesday in U.S. District Court, drug agents said the ring began operation when two Florida drug dealers — one recently arrived from Connecticut — agreed over the summer of 2010 to join forces and profit from the price differential for oxycodone between low-price Florida and high-price Connecticut.
Both dealers have become cooperating government witnesses and were not identified by authorities when arrests in the case were announced Tuesday. But an affidavit filed in court by a DEA agent said the two arranged to obtain the drug in Florida, to drive it or fly it north on commercial airlines and move it though a network of distributors known to the Connecticut dealer, most of them in Waterbury.
The drug couriers flew from West Palm Beach, Fla., to White Plains, N.Y. One of the dealers who organized the ring said he gave cash and gift cards worth $50 to $100 to the TSA officers who screened him, according to a DEA affidavit.
The dealer said he made payments totaling $20,000 to a Westchester County police officer assigned to the airport there in order to be permitted to carry — without being questioned — large quantities of cash back to Florida, according to a DEA affidavit.
While in Florida, the dealer said he paid a state trooper and the trooper’s fiancée in return for safe passage while driving drugs and money though the central part of the state. The same trooper flew north to provide protection for at least two oxycodone transactions in Connecticut, according to the affidavit.
After months in operation, the DEA began disassembling the ring when an informer reported that a large quantity of oxycodone was about to move from West Palm Beach to Stamford by courier.
DEA agents apprehended the courier — who turned out to be one of the dealers who had hatched the scheme the preceding summer — in a Stamford hotel. He was carrying 6,000 pills and quickly agreed to cooperate. Following the trail of drugs and money, authorities rolled up the network over the ensuing months, according to the affidavit.
