Heroin’s poisonous path to North Jersey

Heroin’s poisonous path to North Jersey
Sunday December 22, 2013, 12:57 AM
BY  REBECCA D. O’BRIEN AND TOM MASHBERG
STAFF WRITERS
The Record

The case began on a quiet suburban street in North Bergen, in the attic of a vinyl-sided Cape Cod, where in October 2008 investigators discovered 6 kilos of pure, uncut heroin wrapped with white packing tape, concealed in a blue Reebok duffel bag. Scattered throughout the Cottage Avenue house — above the refrigerator, tucked inside a love seat, in the master bedroom closet — was more than $2.7 million in cash. The man renting the house was Mario Villaman-Puerta, a 32-year-old Mexican citizen who had been deported several years earlier after a cocaine distribution conviction in Illinois. He was arrested along with another man.

Five years later, that investigation, dubbed Operation Shut Down by the Drug Enforcement Administration, has reached from the suburbs of North Jersey to the poppy farms of Colombia, exposing a 5,000-mile international narcotics network that connects the Cottage Avenue stash house to a Colombian drug-trafficking organization that supplies Mexico’s powerful and violent Sinaloa cartel with cocaine and heroin for distribution in the United States.

Ten days ago, the head of that Colombian organization, Jorge Milton Cifuentes-Villa — considered one of world’s most powerful drug kingpins — was extradited to the United States to face charges stemming from Operation Shut Down, a DEA official confirmed.

– See more at: https://www.northjersey.com/news/bergen/Heroins_poisonous_path_to_North_Jersey.html#sthash.Db8dZTJd.dpuf