Copyright, The Republic, Columbus
CHICAGO — A former Columbus resident has been sentenced to federal prison for his role in a drug trafficking case that involved a private jet that authorities say landed at the Gary/Chicago International Airport with 220 pounds of cocaine on board.
Rodrigo Alexis Jimenez-Perez, 27, was sentenced Jan. 12 in a plea agreement with prosecutors to three years in federal prison, according to filings in U.S. District Court in Chicago.
In September, Jimenez-Perez pleaded guilty to one count of conspiring to possess with intent to distribute at least 11 pounds of a controlled substance, court records show.
Jimenez-Perez was arrested in November 2021 in downtown Chicago following a stake out by Drug Enforcement Administration agents of an undisclosed hotel about a block from the city’s famed Magnificent Mile shopping district.
As the agents observed the hotel, a 2015 Toyota Highlander with an Indiana license plate pulled up near the hotel.
The driver of the vehicle, later identified as Jimenez-Perez, got out and helped a suspect the agents had under surveillance load a suitcase that “appeared to be significantly weighted down” into the trunk of the Toyota Highlander.
The agents had been following the suspect, later identified as co-defendant Sebastian Vazquez-Gamez, since he arrived at Gary/Chicago International Airport in a private jet a couple hours before on a flight from Mexico that stopped over in Houston that officials suspected had millions of dollars of cocaine on board.
Court filings state that DEA officials believe that the plane, a 1987 Bombardier CL-600 Twin Jet, was loaded with 220 pounds of cocaine in Houston after clearing customs.
In downtown Chicago, the DEA agents performed a traffic stop and found about 176 pounds of cocaine in the trunk of the vehicle that Jimenez-Perez was driving. According to a plea agreement, Jimenez-Perez had been instructed by one of his co-defendants to transport the drugs to the Indianapolis area.
DEA agents later search Vazquez-Gamez’s hotel room and seized another 44 pounds of cocaine.
According to a plea agreement, Jimenez-Perez had previously been paid $500 to pick up $30,000 in drug proceeds in the Cincinnati area at the request of co-defendant Sergio Ivan Blas.
Blas, who was currently awaiting sentencing as of Monday, admitted in a September plea agreement that he had been conducting bulk pick-ups of cash in Indiana and other locations in the Midwest for an undisclosed individual starting in or about 2021, picking up an estimated $5.2 million in drug proceeds before his arrest — the equivalent of the street value of just over a metric ton of marijuana.
Blas also admitted in the plea agreement that he would pick up cash, count it and transfer it to other individuals, as well as distribute packages he believed contained marijuana.
In November 2021, the undisclosed individual, identified in court filings as “Individual A,” asked Blas to conduct a pick-up in Chicago, but he “was too busy with work at his restaurant” and offered Jimenez-Perez the chance to go in his place.
For more on this story, see Tuesday’s Republic.