United States Drug Enforcement Administration

OAKLAND, Calif. – Jose Luis Garcia, the co-owner of Envios Express, a money transmitting business in Oakland, was sentenced this week to 12 months in federal prison. The Honorable Haywood S. Gilliam, Jr., United States District Judge, handed down the sentence on Jan. 15, 2025.

Garcia, 57, of Oakland, was indicted in July 2023 and pleaded guilty in September 2024 to one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1956(h).

According to court documents and Garcia’s plea agreement, Garcia and his wife, who was also charged in this case, owned a money transmitting business on International Boulevard in Oakland that operated under several names, including Envios Express.  The business was a local agent of and contracted with national wire service companies to provide wire transfer services to the public.  As a local agent, Garcia had access to wire services that facilitated the transfer of funds from Oakland to other parts of the United States, Mexico, Honduras, and other foreign countries.  

Garcia completed annual Anti-Money Laundering training through these wire service companies.  As the designated anti-money laundering compliance officer for Envios Express, he agreed to monitor the store’s outgoing wires for structuring activity intended to evade reporting requirements.  Garcia admitted using fake sender names and IDs to process multiple structured wires to conceal the fact that a single sender was wiring amounts greater than $3,000, which he knew would have triggered mandatory federal reporting requirements.  He accepted large amounts of cash, sometimes as much as $9,000 or more, from unidentified customers, who asked that the cash be wired to well-known drug trafficking areas of Mexico or to persons in Honduras, without recording the true identity of the sender.  Garcia misused the names and IDs of legitimate customers to send large amounts of cash for unidentified customers in order to evade reporting requirements.  He also kept roughly 15,000 digital images of California driver’s licenses and Honduran, Mexican, and other national identity cards on cell phones, which he used to meet the wire companies’ ID requirements. 

In August 2022, Garcia agreed to a request by a confidential source to wire $9,200 in cash to recipients in Mexico without providing an ID or using the sender’s real name as federal law requires. Garcia structured the $9,200 in cash in four wires, using fake names for the sender on the receipts, and charged an under-the-table fee of $50 for each of the wires.

In addition to the prison term, Judge Gilliam ordered the defendant to serve three years of supervised release. 

United States Attorney Ismail J. Ramsey, IRS Criminal Investigation (IRS-CI) Special Agent in Charge of the Oakland Field Office Linda Nguyen, and Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), San Francisco Field Division, Special Agent in Charge Bob P. Beris made the announcement.

This prosecution is part of an Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces (OCDETF) investigation. OCDETF identifies, disrupts, and dismantles the highest-level drug traffickers, money launderers, gangs, and transnational criminal organizations that threaten the United States by using a prosecutor-led, intelligence-driven, multi-agency approach that leverages the strengths of federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies against criminal networks.

Assistant United States Attorneys Daniel Pastor and Nicholas Parker are prosecuting the case with assistance from Amanda Martinez and Andy Ding. The prosecution is the result of an investigation by IRS-CI and DEA.