The feds have him shaken and stirred.
A Mexican drug cartel boss with an affinity for goofy nicknames like “James Bond,” “Xmen” and “Diabolic” is now behind bars after getting extradited to the US and locked up by federal prosecutors in Brooklyn.
Jesus Ricardo Patron Sanchez, 39, was identified by the feds as boss of the H-2, a Sinaloa cartel trafficking operation that shipped tons of heroin, cocaine, meth and other drugs to the US in monthly deliveries since at least 2013, the US Attorney’s Office of the Southern District of New York said Monday.
“Sanchez was one of the principal leaders of the H-2 Drug Trafficking Organization, a brutally violent transnational criminal organization that flooded American streets with dangerous drugs and protected its operations through murder and corruption,” US Attorney John Durham said in a statement.
“This office is committed to working with its federal and international partners to bring leaders of cartels and transnational criminal organizations to justice in the United States and to hold them accountable for the death and destruction they have unleashed here and abroad,” Durham said.
Federal prosecutors said Sanchez took over the lucrative trafficking operation after his brother, Juan Francisco Patron Sanchez, was killed in 2017.
The ascension earned Sanchez yet another nickname — “H-3.”
That’s because the cartel was founded by Hector Beltran-Leyva, the original “H,” according to prosecutors. When the reins were turned over to the elder Sanchez, he was nicknamed “H-2,” while his kid brother got to be known as “H-3” when he took over the operation.
Once in charge, Sanchez continued to move drugs into the US while carrying out money laundering operations and conspiring to kill rivals and others who threatened the operation, prosecutors said.
But the operations took a hit in recent years as federal prosecutors and the Drug Enforcement Administration went after Sanchez, who was arrested in Mexico in 2019, and extradited to the US on Friday.
He was arraigned Saturday and charged with leading a criminal enterprise, conspiracy to distribute large-scale narcotics and using firearms in connection with narcotics offenses, the US Attorney’s Office said.
Read the full article here
