https://www.abc27.com/local-news/lancaster/owner-worker-at-lancaster-county-car-dealership-sentenced-for-money-laundering/

An owner and employee at a Lancaster County car dealership were sentenced on money laundering charges, the Department of Justice announced.

Christopher Lopez, 41 will spend one year and a day in prison, while Michael Torres, 43, will spend six months in prison after they were sentenced by United States District Court Judge Jennifer P. Wilson, the DOJ said in a news release.

Lopez owned C&D Motorsports, located at 1208 Manheim Pike, and Torres worked there as a salesperson. The DOJ says the duo worked together to cater to drug traffickers who bought vehicles at the dealership and were not properly filing reports with cash sales over $10,000 as required by law.

Investigators with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) began their investigation in 2019 after receiving reports of the illegal activity going on at the dealership. The release states that agents went undercover, posing as a drug trafficker and his girlfriend, and met with Torres and Lopez at the dealership.

The duo discussed using cash from drug trafficking, and putting the vehicle under the girlfriend’s name so the trafficker’s name would be omitted from the paperwork. In order to finalize the deal, the duo titled the vehicle in third party’s name, the DOJ states.

After a four-day trial in February 2024 that followed a grand jury indictment two years prior, both Lopez and Torres were found guilty of “conspiring together to accept more than $33,000 in cash proceeds that were represented to be from the sale of cocaine, and to conceal the nature, source, ownership, and control of those proceeds by having the vehicle titled in a third party’s name,” the release states.

Assistant U.S. Attorneys Christian Haugsby and Joseph Terz prosecuted the case.