14 members of money laundering network are imposed a year of preventive prison

SANTO DOMINGO .— A judge in Santo Domingo Este imposed one year of pre-trial detention on 14 members of a network that laundered assets from drug trafficking, dismantled in November through a joint operation with the National Drug Control Directorate (DNCD). The court declared the case to be of complex processing and ordered the imprisonment of the accused José Augusto Rodríguez Sánchez (El Rubio), Melvin Manuel Fis Taveras, Wilmer Evangelista Rumaldo, Ángel David Félix Cuevas, Francisco Alberto Paulino Castro (Francis or El Compadre), Edwin Alberto Mejía Guerrero, Fernando Javier Castro Ramos, Wilson Tomás Altagracia de la Cruz, Leandro Manuel Arias Santana (Berni), Cleudi Zapata, Manuel Almancio Moreno de los Santos, Fernando de Jesús Ventura Segura, Mauricio Josué Castillo and José Alberto López Alcántara (Bururun).

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Among those arrested are employees and contractors of the Caucedo Multimodal Port, who allegedly used their access levels to facilitate the trafficking of drugs and other illegal movements linked to the criminal structure. The coercive measure was requested by prosecutors Pedro Medina Quezada, Luis Alberto García, Hitler Sánchez, and José Manuel Calzado, and was imposed by the judge of the Judicial Office of Permanent Attention Services of Santo Domingo Este, Leomar Cruz Quezada, who ordered that the preventive prison be served in the Correction and Rehabilitation Center (CCR) of San Pedro de Macorís. In the case of Manuel Almancio Moreno de los Santos, the court ordered house arrest. Also arrested in this process were José Francisco Sabino Castillo, Jonathan Ditrén (El Brujo) and the again-mentioned Fernando de Jesús Ventura Segura, who also received one year of pre-trial detention and were included in the complex declared file. The authorities explained that these measures are the result of several months of investigation, carried out with the support of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) of the United States. During the interventions, 200 packages of cocaine were seized, with the collaboration of State intelligence units and the Military Security of the Multimodal Port Caucedo, on November 7th. The arrests took place during a large-scale operation that included 36 raids, carried out by 40 prosecutors and 312 DNCD agents in different parts of the National District, Santo Domingo (including Boca Chica) and San Pedro de Macorís.