https://www.dispatch.com/story/news/courts/2020/10/16/cellphone-store-drug-money-laundering-lands-3-local-men-court/3685946001/

A Hilliard man was sentenced and two Columbus residents pleaded guilty Friday in U.S. District Court in connection with a money laundering scheme to wire $44 million to Mexican drug lords through three local cellphone stores.

Julio Angel Homer Gonzalez, 43 of Hilliard, was sentenced at the federal courthouse in Columbus to 10 years in prison for his role in the scheme.

Eliezar Mendoza-Nava, 36 and Rodrigo Esqueda-Vazquez, 33, both of Columbus, pleaded guilty Friday, bringing to a total of eight defendants prosecuted by the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of Ohio in connection with the scheme. Five other defendants previously pleaded guilty and currently await sentencing.

Another 35 people were prosecuted in Franklin County Common Pleas Court.

According to court documents, from 2013 until September 2019, the defendants conspired to distribute heroin, fentanyl and marijuana and commit large-scale money laundering.

The scheme relied on three local cellphone stores — Los Rosales on Shady Lane Road, Los Rosales 2 on East Main Street and Express Cellular on Eastland Square Drive — which served as a location for drug dealers from multiple narcotics-trafficking cells to drop large amounts of narcotics money. The store owners would then falsify money sender names, addresses and phone numbers on wire transfers to conceal the wire transfers of drug money to Mexico, a release from the U.S. Attorney's office said.

The stores sold few, if any, cellphones, and the investigation removed approximately 34 kilograms of heroin, 516 grams of cocaine, 76 grams of fentanyl and 250 pounds of marijuana from central Ohio, according to the release.

Authorities also seized $458,500 in U.S. currency as part of the investigation and prosecution of these cases.

U.S. Attorney David M. DeVillers said that law enforcement spent years investigating large-scale narcotics traffickers that led to the end of the money-laundering ring.

“The agents and officers on these cases dedicated thousands of hours of good investigative work to expose a massive money-laundering scheme that was benefiting drug lords in Mexico,” DeVillers said in the release. “Thanks to our law enforcement partners, at least 40 defendants are no longer doing business in central Ohio and a significant amount of illegal drugs have been removed from our community.”