United States Drug Enforcement Administration

ANCHORAGE, Alaska - - Jose Ramon Canales, 37, of El Paso, Texas was sentenced on August 26, 2015, to 70 months in prison for his role in a conspiracy to launder drug money out of the United States and into Mexico.  Canales previously pleaded guilty to conspiring with others to launder the proceeds of drug trafficking internationally. As part of his plea, Canales admitted that he received nearly $100,000 in drug money, which he then worked with co-conspirators to secretly transport out of the country. Upon being released from prison, Canales will be on supervised release for two years.

According to information presented to the court, Canales was involved in longstanding conspiracies to distribute heroin and methamphetamine to Anchorage, Alaska based drug dealers and then transport the profits from those drug sales out of the United States to co-conspirators operating in Mexico. Canales joined the conspiracy by at least October 2013, when he received $70,000 in drug money from an Alaska co-conspirator. Canales then worked with Mexican co-conspirators to ship three kilograms of heroin from El Paso, Texas to Alaska for distribution.  Several months later, in March 2014, Canales received an additional $28,000 in cash sent as payment for the purchase of one kilogram of heroin. Canales later drove the funds, which he knew were the proceeds of drug trafficking, over the border into Mexico.

During the sentencing hearing, the court described Canales’ role in the conspiracy as “integral,” noting that Canales chose to become part of a team of drug traffickers whose goals are adverse to everything Americans hold dear. In announcing the sentence, Judge Beistline also focused on the need to deter others from committing similar crimes, the need to punish people involved in criminal activity, and the need to encourage respect for societal norms.

Canales’s sentencing is one of the first related to a string of indictments returned in late 2014 and early 2015 as part of ongoing efforts to dismantle and prosecute several large scale drug trafficking rings with ties to Alaska, California, Texas, Arizona, and Mexico. An Anchorage drug distributor, Daniel Harris, was sentenced in July 2015 to serve 135 months in prison for related drug, guns, and money laundering crimes. Several other defendants are set to be sentenced in the coming months for their roles in trafficking heroin, cocaine, and methamphetamine to Alaska and then transporting the cash proceeds of their trafficking activities back to Mexico.

The case was investigated as part of the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task (OCDETF) comprised of the following law enforcement agencies: The Drug Enforcement (DEA), the Internal Revenue Service Criminal (IRS-CI), the Federal Bureau of (FBI), the U.S. Postal Inspection (USPIS), U.S. Immigration and Customs (ICE), which oversees Homeland Security (HSI), the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and (ATF), the Anchorage Police (APD), the Alaska State (AST), and the Anchorage Airport Police Department. Additional assistance was provided by the U.S. Attorney’s Offices for the Western District of Texas, the Eastern and Central Districts of California, and the District of Arizona, as well as federal agents in all three states.