The Special Narcotics Prosecutor’s press releases describe at least three fentanyl packaging operations found in Bronx apartments since July. This one, in Williamsbridge, came with a brand name and a toddler.
According to the Office of the Special Narcotics Prosecutor, agents entered a first-floor apartment at 755 East 216th Street on Tuesday, Oct. 20, at about 1:24 p.m. Three adults were arrested. A two-year-old child was in the apartment. Prosecutors said about two kilograms of fentanyl mixtures, which they valued at more than half a million dollars on the street, were recovered from the apartment and from a bag that one defendant had carried out of it.
Tens of thousands of single-dose glassine envelopes were seized. Some were stamped with a picture of a goat and the brand name “G.O.A.T. Greatest of all Time.”
The charges
The defendants are José Cordero-Concepción, 37; Erik Jesús Reynoso-Burgos, 34; and Ariendy Jiminez-Hidalgo, 41. According to NBC New York, they were arraigned on Wednesday, Oct. 21, in Manhattan Criminal Court. The charges include first- and third-degree criminal possession of a controlled substance, endangering the welfare of a child, second-degree criminally using drug paraphernalia, fourth-degree criminal facilitation and first-degree unlawful dealing with a child.
These are accusations. None of the three has been convicted, and each is presumed innocent.
Bail was set at $150,000 for Mr. Cordero-Concepción and $50,000 for Mr. Reynoso-Burgos, NBC reported. Ms. Jiminez-Hidalgo was released on her own recognizance.
The prosecution’s account
The details come from prosecutors’ account as reported by NBC New York. They have not been tested in court.
The case grew out of a fentanyl-trafficking investigation by the Drug Enforcement Administration, the NYPD and other agencies. During surveillance, officers said, they saw Mr. Reynoso-Burgos enter the building. Minutes later, Mr. Cordero-Concepción left carrying a bag. According to prosecutors, officers found thousands of waxed-paper packets of suspected narcotics inside the bag.
When officers entered the apartment, they said, they found the child and a woman in a bedroom, and Mr. Reynoso-Burgos in a room allegedly used for packaging, sitting at a folding table stacked with filled envelopes. Prosecutors said envelopes were found in every stage of preparation: filled and sealed, filled and unsealed, and empty. They also said the apartment held all the equipment needed for the work.
Preliminary testing at a DEA laboratory, prosecutors said, found fentanyl mixed with medetomidine, a powerful veterinary sedative. About $30,000 in cash was recovered, some from a living-room closet and some from under the kitchen sink.
At arraignment, according to NBC, prosecutors said five children under 15 live in the apartment, and investigators found children’s belongings there. NBC also reported that the building is across the street from a day-care center and a playground.
Why a Bronx case is in Manhattan court
The Office of the Special Narcotics Prosecutor was created in 1971 to handle felony narcotics cases across all five boroughs. That is why three people arrested in Williamsbridge, in the northeast Bronx, were arraigned in Manhattan. The office brings these cases with the NYPD and federal partners, and the Williamsbridge raid came out of the same kind of joint investigation.
The prosecutor
“This police operation dealt a severe blow to a drug trafficking network. And, more importantly, it was a rescue mission,” said Special Narcotics Prosecutor Bridget G. Brennan. “The fact that they were grinding up chunks of fentanyl and filling thousands of small bags with this deadly powder in the same apartment where a two-year-old child was located reveals an absolute disregard for human life.”
The pattern
The office’s own releases show the pattern. On July 15, it announced the recovery of about 4.5 kilograms of suspected fentanyl from a third-floor apartment at 2075 Morris Avenue in Fordham. Two day-care centers in that building were evacuated. On Aug. 21, it announced that seven people had been arrested at a packaging mill in a sixth-floor apartment on Bronx Boulevard in Wakefield, where about eight pounds of fentanyl was seized in packages branded “Game of Death.”
The brand names change, and the apartments move from building to building. In the office’s telling, the method stays the same: bulk powder brought into an ordinary residential apartment, cut, and packed into single doses.
What comes next
Felony charges in New York generally require a grand jury indictment before a case can proceed to trial. The children in the apartment are not named in any public account, and they will not be named here.
Featured image: 100 Centre Street, home of Manhattan Criminal Court. Photo by Kidfly182 via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0.
Leave a Reply