Jesus Cabrera ‘Gee’ has been sentenced to 30 years in prison by U.S. District Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald for leading a drug trafficking organisation that sold deadly fentanyl in the Bronx. Cabrera previously pled guilty to participating in a conspiracy to distribute fentanyl and fentanyl analogue and to a related firearms count.
As part of his guilty plea, Cabrera admitted that the DTO’s drug trafficking resulted in the August 2021 death of Malik Rahman and that the DTO’s product was recovered from the scenes of seven other fatal fentanyl poisonings in 2021.
As alleged in the charging instruments, court filings, and statements in the public record:
Between approximately 2019 and February 2022, the DTO operated principally from a block on 142nd Street between Brook Avenue and St. Ann’s Avenue in the Bronx (the “Set”), where its members sold glassines of fentanyl in bulk to dealers who then re-distributed the DTO’s product on the Set and in other areas of the Bronx.
Members of the DTO also sold individual glassines to users struggling with addiction who lined up on the Set on an almost daily basis. Cabrera was the undisputed leader of the DTO, and co-defendant Michael Amaya ‘Miz’ worked as Cabrera’s second in command, managing and overseeing the DTO’s various street-level dealers, baggers, and lookouts, including the other defendants charged in this case.
Every day, members of the DTO, at Cabrera’s direction and often in his presence, packaged the DTO’s product in residential apartments for distribution on the Set. The DTO then relied on a roster of street-level dealers to push massive amounts of its deadly product into the community. Indeed, in the fall and winter of 2021 alone, the DTO distributed an estimated five to six kilograms of fentanyl per month, resulting in hundreds of thousands of dollars in profit for the DTO.
The DTO frequently used a signature ‘stamp’ on the glassines of fentanyl it sold—a step Cabrera took to continue making money at the expense of the victims and families affected by the DTO’s drug dealing and the opioid epidemic in this country. For many months, the DTO stamped its glassines with a “Supreme” logo.
Starting in or around December 2021, the DTO began using an ‘Off White’ logo and then switched to a ‘Thriller’ logo. Despite Cabrera’s awareness of the potential deadly impact of fentanyl, he and the other DTO members continued pushing the DTO’s product. Indeed, when Cabrera was asked by another DTO member whether people were overdosing from the DTO’s product, Cabrera laughed it off and said, “na man, people hating, they don’t want us making money.”
On or about August 25, 2021, one of Cabrera and Amaya’s co-defendants, Alberto Concepcion, sold a quantity of loose “Supreme”-stamped glassines to an individual on the Set (“Individual-1”), who subsequently provided one of those glassines to Rahman. Rahman died from an overdose shortly after ingesting the substances in the “Supreme”-stamped glassine, the residue of which later tested positive for, among other things, fentanyl and fentanyl analogue.
Both Cabrera and Amaya were directly involved in overseeing Concepcion’s narcotics sales at that time. Indeed, in the days leading up to Rahman’s fatal overdose, Cabrera and Amaya exchanged text messages referencing certain quantities of narcotics that were going to Concepcion for resale on the Set, as well as the cut of the over $110,000 in recent DTO proceeds they were going to provide to Concepcion.
Including Rahman’s fatal overdose, between in or around March 2021 and in or around December 2021, there were at least eight confirmed fatal overdoses in the Bronx at which the DTO’s “Supreme”-stamped glassines were found on the scene. In addition to the prison term, Cabrera, 46, of the Bronx, New York, was sentenced to five years of supervised release.
Many of Cabrera’s co-defendants, who were also members of the DTO, have also been sentenced after having been convicted of participating in the same fentanyl trafficking conspiracy to which Cabrera pled guilty. Amaya, who managed the DTO’s daily operations and reported to Cabrera, was sentenced to 16 years in prison.
Willie Harris ‘Light’, who was one of the DTO’s armed lookouts and dealers, was sentenced to 12 years in prison. Frankie Capellan ‘Nitty’, who helped package the DTO’s product with Cabrera and others, was sentenced to 10 years in prison, and Jose Figueroa ‘Chelo’, one of the DTO’s street-level dealers, was also sentenced to 10 years in prison.
