Los Angeles County man gets 4 years in prison for laundering over $15 million for drug traffickers
A Los Angeles County man was sentenced to four years in federal prison Monday for laundering about $15.5 million for international drug traffickers over a two-year span.
Gustavo Adolfo Aldana-Martinez, 57, must also pay a $25,000 fine for taking part in the money laundering conspiracy, which moved millions of dollars in drug money out of the U.S. and into the pockets of traffickers he worked for, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Central District of California.
A jury found the Pico Rivera man guilty of one count of conspiracy to launder monetary instruments in December 2021.
The U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency conducted an undercover sting on Aldana-Martinez in which he accepted wire transfers of what he thought was money made from drug trafficking but was actually funds coming from an account run by DEA agents, according to federal prosecutors. Evidence showed he laundered millions between 2015 and 2017, prosecutors said.
"After nearly $300,000 was sent to a bank account in the name of his bogus business, Aldana-Martinez made a series of wire transfers to unrelated companies to pay for electronic items that were then shipped to Colombia and Mexico, where they were sold to produce laundered funds for the drug traffickers," reads a statement from the U.S. Attorney's Office.
The leader of the money laundering ring, Daniel Shaun Zilke of Mexico City, approached the DEA in 2019 and offered to cooperate with investigators and launder $200,000 in U.S. government money, according to federal prosecutors. He was supposed to later return the money to the DEA, but instead, kept $150,000 without telling the federal agents he was working with.
He admitted to that theft as part of a plea agreement with federal prosecutors, who said he also repeatedly lied to DEA agents and made excuses when it started taking too long for them to get back the full $200,000.
Zilke, who is 49 and goes by "The Englishman," according to prosecutors, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to aid and abet drug distribution, conspiracy to launder money, and obstruction of an official government proceeding last December.
Meanwhile, Jeffrey Mark Thompson – a 62-year-old man from Springtown, Texas who prosecutors say goes by "The Cowboy" – pleaded guilty to conspiracy to aid and abet drug distribution, conspiracy to launder money, and money laundering in November 2023.
Both men will be sentenced in the coming months. The U.S. Attorney's Office said they face decades in potential prison time.
Juan Rachid Dergal-Zulbaran, a 49-year-old Mexico City man, is the last defendant and allegedly a fugitive, prosecutors said.
In late 2015, a DEA agent contacted Zilke while pretending to be a money launderer, launching the federal investigation. The agent helped Zilke by letting him use bank accounts associated with cash-intensive businesses, and Zilke, along with other people in the laundering ring, arranged pickups of large sums of cash from drug traffickers throughout the country, prosecutors said.
These funds were then deposited into certain bank accounts at his direction – including one in the name of Thompson's supposed charity, Peace Through Water Foundation, and another one that was overseen by Aldana-Martinez.
As part of his own guilty plea, Thompson also admitted that the charity's bank account was used to launder money.
When Zilke pleaded guilty, prosecutors said, he confessed to once telling an undercover DEA agent that "he had a client in Europe who needed hundreds of millions of dollars moved to Mexico, and that he could use the bank account of a charity in Dallas, Texas to assist in laundering the money," according to a statement from the U.S. Attorney's Office.
According to federal prosecutors, each of the three defendants pleaded guilty would receive a commission based on a percentage of however much money they laundered through their individual accounts.