One of the largest seizures of drugs in US history was made in San Bernardino County by Deputies with Drug Interdiction Task Force
Sheriff’s deputies found a tractor trailer packed with $45 million in drugs during a routine traffic stop in Rancho Cucamonga on Wednesday.
The bust was one of the largest ever made in San Bernardino County, and included thousands of pounds of marijuana, cocaine and methamphetamine, San Bernardino County sheriff’s officials said.
The sheriff’s Hi-Intensity Criminal Interdiction Unit stopped a big rig on the eastbound 10 Freeway for a traffic violation at 11 a.m.
The driver, Fernando Luevano, 32, of Los Angeles, did not have proper paperwork for his load. He gave deputies permission to search the trailer.
When deputies opened it, they smelled what they described as an “overwhelming odor of marijuana,” officials said in a press release.
The trailer was filled to capacity with large cardboard containers on pallets, holding thousands of heat-sealed packages of drugs.
Deputies seized about 38,000 pounds of marijuana, 2,700 pounds of cocaine and 67 pounds of methamphetamine.
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MEXICO CITY: A Mexican judge on Thursday recommended that a reputed leader of a Tijuana-based drug cartel not be extradited to the United States, after his defense argued he should not be tried twice on the same charges.
The judge made the recommendation to Mexico’s Foreign Relations Department, which has overseen an increasing number of extraditions in recent years.
While the opinion in the case of accused drug lord Benjamin Arellano Felix is not binding, the government is required to take such rulings into account. The department did not comment.
Arellano Felix was arrested in 2002 and has already been sentenced to 22 years in prison in Mexico on drug-trafficking and organized-crime charges. He faces indictments on similar charges in the United States. He also has been sentenced to more than five years for weapons possession.
Lawyer Americo Delgado, who represented Arellano Felix, said the judge’s ruling was based on the legal precept that suspects should not be tried twice on the same charge.
Mexico was once reticent to extradite its citizens to the U.S., but has recently stepped up the pace of extraditions. Some convicted drug lords have reportedly continued to run their gangs from behind bars in Mexico, something that presumably would be harder to do from U.S. prisons.
U.S. State Department officials said Mexico extradited 73 suspects to the U.S. in 2007. The law allows defendants to appeal their extraditions in court.
The Arellano Felix cartel emerged as a drug-trafficking powerhouse in the 1980s in Tijuana, across the border from San Diego, California. Operated by several brothers of the same name, the cartel recruited dozens of police into its ranks and paid millions of dollars in bribes to law enforcement and military personnel.
One of the brothers, Francisco Javier Arellano Felix, was sentenced to life in prison in the U.S. in November on charges that he led the cartel. Another brother, Ramon Arellano Felix, was killed in a shootout with Mexican police in February 2002.
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