An Indiana magnificence queen was swept up in a sweeping drug bust with ties to a Mexican cartel that’s been years within the making.
Glenis Zapata, 34, who was topped Miss Indiana Latina in 2011, allegedly used her job as a flight attendant to maneuver drug cash from Chicago to the southern states and into Mexico, based on a federal indictment.
She’s charged with two counts of cash laundering stemming from a $170,000 money transport on August 7, 2019, and no less than $140,000 on September 10, 2019.
Zapata was certainly one of 18 suspects arrested when federal legislation enforcement took down their foremost goal, Oswaldo Espinosa, who was among the many Drug Enforcement Administration’s (DEA) most wished fugitives.
Zapata, together with two financial institution tellers – Zapata’s sister, Ilenis Zapata and Georgina Banuelos – have been the most recent to be arrested within the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Process Forces’ take down of Oswaldo Espinosa.
Espinosa is the alleged ring chief of a multi-million greenback, Mexico-based drug trafficking ring that flooded US streets with hundreds of kilograms of cocaine, based on the most recent federal indictment filed on Could 16.
From 2018 to 2023, Espinosa recruited seemingly odd, under-the-radar staff like Zapata, as a part of his alleged felony enterprise, which used warehouses and garages everywhere in the Windy Metropolis to cover cash and medicines.
Money and cocaine have been loaded into semi-trailer vans and on planes from the Midwest stash homes to the southern a part of the US and into Mexico, “together with through industrial flights and utilizing the help of Glenis Zapata,” the indictment alleges.
Espinosa was the pinnacle of his personal Mexican worldwide drug trafficking group (DTO) known as the Espinosa DTO, based on court docket paperwork.
The final submitting, which included the fees towards Zapata, detailed eight drug trafficking operations from 2021 to 2023 and 15 money transports between November 2019 and March 2022.
The investigation into Espinosa was spearheaded by the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Process Forces, which was created to assault main drug rings within the US.
The ESPINOSA DTO is a small cartel compared to powerhouses like The Jalisco New Technology Cartel (CJNG) and El Chapo’s Sinaloa Cartel, which management practically all of Mexico and its maritime ports and unfold their tentacles all through the U.S.
In whole, researchers estimate there are about 150 Mexican cartels of assorted sizes with about 175,000 “lively members” (as of 2022), based on a September 2023 examine by Science.
And plenty of of those organized crime syndicates unfold their unlawful companies into the US, and smuggle medication and cash throughout the border.
A Could DEA report mentioned Mexico’s “strongest and ruthless cartels” — The Jalisco New Technology and Sinaloa cartels — function in all 50 states.
Each cartels’ major merchandise are meth and fenantyl, based on the report, which mentioned that Mexican cartels have “precipitated the worst drug disaster in US historical past.”
Dismantling main drug operations is amongst federal legislation enforcement businesses’ major objectives.
In 2023, legislation enforcement businesses inside 150 miles of the border carried out practically 600 bulk money seizures valued at $18 million, the DEA report says.
“DEA’s high operational precedence is to relentlessly pursue and defeat the 2 Mexican drug cartels … which can be primarily chargeable for driving the present fentanyl poisoning epidemic in the US,” the report says.
The operation “places sources into the US’s most violence- and overdose-plagued cities to focus on the violent sellers who kill hundreds of Individuals each week with fentanyl and with weapons.”
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