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Mariano Enrique Arroyo Perez – also known as “Humilde” – took a deal from the government rather than risk a trial. He’ll have to serve out the entire plea-bargained term because there’s no parole in the federal prison system.
The scheme involved smuggling more than a quarter-ton of cocaine into the United States on private planes flying into the small local airport in Bergen County from 2017 through July 2019, U.S. Attorney for New Jersey Philip R. Sellinger said.
It unraveled after four men not on the manifest boarded a private Teterboro-bound plane in Puerto Rico with "particularly heavy" luggage, the U.S. attorney said.
That raised the pilots' suspicions.
Tipped off by them, federal investigators ran wiretaps that picked up conversations between Arroyo Perez and a conspirator discussing a particular drop while identifying four of the passengers on the flight, he said.
Sellinger credited special agents and task force officers with the Drug Enforcement Administration in New Jersey, as well as special agents and task force officers with the Drug Enforcement Administration in Colombia, the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico.
He also thanked the U.S. Office of International Affairs and the U.S. Marshals Service for their assistance with the case, handled by Assistant U.S. Attorney Lauren Repole, chief of Sellinger’s General Crimes Unit and Assistant U.S. Attorney Francesca Liquori, chief of the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces Unit, both in Newark.
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