Breaking Bad, Lower Manhattan-Style
The strange, gravitational tug that Lower Manhattan exerts on narcotics traffickers appears to continue unabated. At approximately 9am on the morning of Monday, September 16, two men driving a black Chevrolet Tahoe with Pennsylvania license plates were pulled over at the intersection of Battery Place and West Street by an unmarked police car.
The driver and his passenger, Fernando Penaloza-Reyes and Raul Cruz-Torres, may have briefly hoped the flashing red lights in their rearview mirror were an indication that they were about to receive a traffic ticket. But this possibility vanished when the men who had pulled them over turned out not to be New York City police officers. Instead, they were federal agents with the U.S Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), who noted two large duffle bags sitting in plain view on the back seat of the Tahoe.
Nor was this a random stop. The agents were part of a task force headed up by the New York City Special Narcotics Prosecutor, who was conducting a long-term investigation into interstate drug trafficking and had been surveilling Mr. Penaloza-Reyes and Mr. Cruz-Torres for many days.
The DEA agents immediately requested that colleagues back at their office apply for a warrant that would authorize a search of the car, including the black duffle bags. This process took almost seven hours, during which time Mr. Penaloza-Reyes and Mr. Cruz-Torres were detained at the scene. Finally, a few minutes after 3:30pm, the agents received the court order they had requested, and opened the duffle bags.
The satchels turned out to contain 50 vacuum sealed packages of a white rocky substance that tests confirmed to be crystal methamphetamine, 110 pounds of it, with a street value of more than $600,000. This quantity ranks the September 16 seizure among the largest ever by the Office of the Special Narcotics Prosecutor.
Mr. Penaloza-Reyes and Mr. Cruz-Torres were charged with criminal possession of a controlled substance in the second degree, which is categorized as a class A-II felony under New York State law. After being arraigned, they were released, because under New York law, possession of methamphetamine (regardless of the quantity) is not a bail-eligible offense. If convicted, the two men face up to life in prison without the possibility of parole, and a minimum sentence of three to eight years of incarceration.
Special Narcotics Prosecutor Bridget G. Brennan said, “methamphetamine, sometimes mixed with fentanyl, is claiming an increasing number of lives in our state and nation. Preventing more than 100 pounds of the drug from reaching our streets will save precious lives and prevent vulnerable communities from experiencing its destructive impact.”
The September 16 arrest appears to be part of a pattern in which street-level drug activity remains relatively rare (along with crime of any kind) at the southern tip of Manhattan, but the community seems to be emerging as a destination for major traffickers bringing large narcotics shipments to New York for eventual transfer to lower-level distributors. This may be because the absence of a retail narcotics trade on local sidewalks, which draws constant attention from law enforcement, makes such traffickers feel relatively comfortable that they needn’t fear being caught up in the kind of drug sweeps that occur frequently, for example, in Washington Square Park. Similarly, the comparative absence of violent street crime in Lower Manhattan means that stop-and-frisk searches by police remain rare in this community.
In December 2022, agents working for the Special Narcotics Prosecutor converged on the entrance of the AC New York Hotel by Marriott, at 151 Maiden Lane (near South Street). There, they approached 24-year-old David Carranza, freshly arrived from Pixley, California, who was loading a box into the back of a rented vehicle. A search determined that this box contained 50,000 fentanyl pills, worth more than $1 million.
And the arrest of Mr. Carranza was not the first time that the AC New York Hotel by Marriott has been the venue for a major drug seizure. In July 2022, DEA agents conducting undercover surveillance outside the hotel nabbed a team of alleged traffickers who were arrested with total of more than 140 pounds of crystal methamphetamine, worth more than $1.2 million.