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Joselito Colindres, 42, of Riverside, CA, previously admitted in U.S. District Court in Newark that he knew the drugs were in the trailer when he got to Pennsylvania, but he kept going to New Jersey, anyway.
Authorities converged on the rig in North Jersey on Oct. 21, 2018, arresting Colindres, who they said had been living in the country legally with his family on a Temporary Protected Status visa.
Colindres, who told investigators that a friend asked him to drive the rig to New Jersey, will have to serve nearly all of the sentence he received Tuesday on the conspiracy plea because there’s no parole in the federal prison system.
U.S. District Court Judge William J. Martini cited Colindres’s lack of any criminal record since he sought asylum in the U.S. 30 years ago and said he believed he didn’t know the drugs were in the truck.
There wasn’t much that Colindres could do once he realized what was happening, the judge added.
Martini also recommended that Colindres be assigned to a prison near his family’s California home.
U.S. Attorney Craig Carpenito said the guilty plea and sentencing resulted from work done by the New York Strike Force, a crime-fighting unit comprised of federal, state and local law enforcement agencies supported by the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force (OCDETF) and the New York/New Jersey High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (HIDTA).
The principal mission of the OCDETF program, Carpenito said, is to “identify, disrupt and dismantle the most serious drug trafficking, weapons trafficking and money laundering organizations, and those primarily responsible for the nation’s illegal drug supply.”
The Strike Force is housed at the DEA’s New York Division and includes agents and officers of the DEA, ATF, Secret Service, IRS, U.S. Marshals Service, federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement – Homeland Security Investigations, Customs and Border Protection, Coast Guard, NYPD, New York State Police, New York National Guard, New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision and Clarkstown and Port Washington police departments.
Handling the case is Assistant U.S. Attorney Lauren E. Repole of the OCDETF.
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