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Jason “Juice” Arteaga-Loayza, 30, of Jersey City must serve out just about all of a plea-bargained 3½ years because there’s no parole in the federal prison system.
Arteaga-Loayza and three other men had the smuggling operation going for several months before officers at Fort Dix spotted a drone with a dangling fishing line hovering above a housing unit, authorities said.
The officers also found a cell phone that had been used to communicate with Arteaga-Loayza, who was an inmate at the facility beginning in June 2017 and has just been released a month earlier, they said.
Arteaga-Loayza's iCloud account contained screenshots of Google search results for “fort dix weather” and live chats with an unidentified co-conspirator, Acting U.S. Attorney Rachael A. Honig said.
A few days earlier, Jersey City police questioned a man in the common area of Arteaga-Loayza’s home who Honig said was carrying several plastic bags filled with cellphones.
The man told them he’d come to meet Arteaga-Loayza, who was on federal supervised release, she said.
A search of Arteaga-Loayza’s apartment turned up empty cell phone boxes, cell phone chargers, empty boxes of SIM cards and several phones, as well as a box from a phone that had been shipped to him the day before the drop, Honig said.
A suitcase in Arteaga-Loayza’s bedroom contained his driver’s license, 20 packets of suboxone sublingual film and a plastic bag containing more than a half-ounce of a heroin/fentanyl mix.
One of the seized phones was used to coordinate the drone drops, including one that brought Hydroxycut drink mix, vacuum-sealed bags of tobacco, cellphone batteries, reading glasses and a cell phone, the U.S. attorney said.
Among the other evidence, Honig said, were an aerial photo of Fort Dix marked with yellow lines and an accompanying text explaining the positioning.
“The planned drone drops during the late evening hours or at night, when the drones were less likely to be seen,” the U.S. attorney said.
The co-conspirators “flew the drones from concealed positions in the woods surrounding the prison. The lights on the drones were covered with tape to make it more difficult for prison officials to spot them.”
FCI Fort Dix is a low-security federal correctional institution with an adjacent minimum security satellite camp at the Joint McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst U.S. Army base in Burlington County, about 16 miles south-southeast of Trenton.
Arteaga-Loayza was charged with conspiring to smuggle contraband and to defraud the United States and possessing with the intent to distribute a substance containing heroin and fentanyl.
He was on the run when U.S. Marshals captured him in Vermont in October 2020, authorities said.
Rather than face trial, Arteaga-Loayza took a deal from the government, pleading guilty this past April to conspiring to defraud the U.S. Bureau of Prisons and possession of heroin and fentanyl with the intent to distribute it.
He also pleaded guilty to violating the terms of his supervised release.
In addition to the prison time, U.S. District Judge Susan D. Wigenton sentenced Arteaga-Loayza to three years of supervised release during a video conference from Newark.
Still awaiting trial are Adrian Goolcharran, Nicolo Denichilo, and Johansel Moronta.
Honig credited agents of the U.S. Department of Justice Inspector General’s New Jersey office, the U.S. Air Force Office of Special Investigations Detachment 307, and the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Northeast Regional Inspector General’s Office with the investigation leading to the sentencing.
She also thanked Federal Bureau of Prisons personnel at Fort Dix, the FBI, investigating agents from his own office, and officers with the Pemberton Borough, Pemberton Township and Chesterfield police departments for their assistance.
Assistant U.S. Attorneys Cari Fais and Jeffrey Manis of Honig’s office in Newark secured the plea and sentence.
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