From a prison cell in California, federal prosecutors allege, a 56-year-old inmate directed an Alaska drug trafficking ring that in recent years smuggled huge quantities of fentanyl, heroin and methamphetamine to some of the state’s smallest villages through a network of postal shippers and drug couriers.
In Alaska, meanwhile, a woman incarcerated at Hiland Mountain Correctional Center recruited a fellow inmate on the verge of release to join the drug ring, federal prosecutors wrote in an indictment unsealed in October. That woman, the U.S. Attorney now alleges, quickly rose through the group’s ranks, culminating in what prosecutors say was the killing of two Alaska women near Trapper Creek at the behest of the enterprise’s leader in California.
Prosecutors contend that the group was both brutal and prolific: During a 15-month period members allegedly sent a staggering amount of fentanyl — nearly 130 pounds — to Alaska communities, including small villages.
Now, a total of 16 people in Alaska and California have been charged across three federal criminal cases related to the alleged drug conspiracy and homicides, one filed in June and the others in October. Three of the defendants face a federal charge of engaging in a continuing criminal enterprise, which carries a mandatory life sentence with conviction.
Other defendants face charges ranging from money laundering to drug conspiracy to killing in the furtherance of continuing criminal enterprise.
The U.S. Attorney Office in Anchorage would not comment on the relationship between the three criminal cases filed in federal court.
The dynamics described in the cases follow a pattern seen often in Alaska, law enforcement officials say: Drugs produced outside the state are imported to the state via shipping, couriers or “anything else you can think of,” and then smuggled into smaller rural communities, where they can be sold at a markup, said Daron Cooper with the Alaska Department of Public Safety.
“Anchorage is generally the first stop for that product before it then grows legs and goes out to our outlying communities,” Cooper said.
Alaska’s drug market can be lucrative, with doses of methamphetamine, heroin and fentanyl selling for several times what they’d fetch on the streets of major West Coast cities.
According to figures from the Alaska Department of Public Safety, a dose of fentanyl that might sell in Anchorage for $15 could be worth $40 in Utqiagvik, $80 in Kodiak or $100 in Bethel. The smaller and more remote the community, the higher the price, according to the Department of Public Safety’s 2022 statewide drug report.
All that gives organized, multi-state drug traffickers an incentive to operate in Alaska, said Anchorage’s Sandy Snodgrass.
Snodgrass lost her son to a fentanyl overdose in 2021 and has since lobbied for federal legislation called “Bruce’s Law” addressing the national opioid epidemic. She has spoken with lawmakers, public safety officials and community groups across Alaska. Bringing contraband into remote communities has always been lucrative, she said, but it’s only in the past year or two that she’s heard more about large quantities of fentanyl manufactured by organized criminal groups south of the border have started arriving.
“They are targeting rural communities in Alaska because of the price they can charge,” she said.
The drug ring described in the federal indictments was operated out of a prison cell thousands of miles from Alaska, prosecutors assert.
Heraclio Sanchez-Rodriguez was serving a lengthy prison sentence at California’s Salinas Valley Prison when, in 2022 and 2023, he allegedly used smuggled cellphones to communicate with suppliers in Mexico and partners in California to send drugs to Alaska, according to one of the indictments. Two of his daughters and his sister have been accused by federal prosecutors of helping him.
From prison, one of the indictments says, Sanchez-Rodriguez communicated with a woman in Alaska, Christina Quintana, 38, who was then an inmate at Hiland Mountain Correctional Center in Eagle River. Quintana was sentenced to 22½ years on charges stemming from a violent robbery over a drug debt in Sitka in 2018.
It’s not clear how Quintana was able to allegedly communicate with Sanchez-Rodriguez. The indictment contends that Quintana was the main organizer of a criminal enterprise. She has pleaded not guilty to the charges.
While at Hiland, federal prosecutors charge, Quintana recruited Tamara Bren, 41, who had lived in Anchorage and North Pole and was incarcerated on a drug-related charge. After she was released, Bren went from receiving drugs to acting as a “high ranking member of the conspiracy.” Federal prosecutors assert she was responsible for recruiting new people to smuggle drugs and for obtaining guns.
Bren has pleaded not guilty.
The group is accused of moving a lot of drugs: In 2022 and 2023, prosecutors say police intercepted at least 50 packages containing drugs sent by group members from California and Oregon to destinations in Alaska that included major hubs as well as small communities including Sitka, Dillingham, Ketchikan, Tyonek, Goodnews Bay, New Stuyahok, Savoonga and Togiak.
One shipment alone included 1,877 grams of fentanyl to Savoonga, a community of 826 people, an indictment said. Another shipment, in March 2023, bearing 1,593 grams of fentanyl, was bound for Tyonek, population 415.
During that same time, a group of Alaskans charged in the indictments with money laundering are accused of using services such as MoneyGram, Western Union and CashApp to send tens of thousands of dollars to people in Mexico, Arizona, California and Oregon and to smaller communities in Alaska such as Sand Point, for drug transactions.
Sanchez-Rodriguez, the California man prosecutors say was at the head of the arrangement, kept a “handwritten ledger in his prison cell documenting approximately $215,100 in additional wire transfers to him and his associates,” according to one of the indictments.
Prosecutors say the drug conspiracy turned deadly in June 2023, when, the indictment alleges, Sanchez-Rodriguez, Bren and a 29-year-old Anchorage man named Kevin Glenn Peterson II conspired to kidnap and kill two women, Kami Clark and Sunday Powers.
Peterson II has pleaded not guilty to the charges.
According to prosecutors, starting in March 2023, Sanchez-Rodriguez began communicating about the plan. In May, attorneys allege the three coordinated to meet up with Powers and Clark. At some point, federal prosecutors allege Bren and Peterson restrained the two women, drove them to a hidden location, and executed them with gunshots to the head before burying them “in a shallow grave near Trapper Creek,” according to the indictment.
The indictments do not say why Clark or Powers were targeted or specify which of the indicted co-conspirators carried out which actions, charging all three of them with the murders.
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