Here’s a story that illustrates the cozy relationship between the mainstream media, the banks, the Biden White House, and the Mexican drug cartels. Two different Wells Fargo employees in two different states have been sentenced for money laundering for Mexican drug cartels in the past two months.
Have you heard about this story? Probably not, since the media won’t touch it with a ten-foot pole. Meanwhile, a third Wells Fargo employee who allegedly laundered millions of dollars in drug money for a cartel was released by the feds – and now they can’t find him.
Stephen Roland Reyna was sentenced to 20 months in federal prison on March 9. He was the branch manager of a Wells Fargo bank in Harlingen, TX.
Federal prosecutors say Reyna helped set up multiple accounts with false identities in northern states for a drug cartel. The cartel would transport multi-kilogram shipments of cocaine to those states and sell them. The cash received from the sales was then deposited in the false accounts, and wired back to Mexico.
Reyna had laundered about $410,000 for the cartels when he was caught.
On February 27, a Wells Fargo accounts manager named Leopoldo Lora-Aguilera was sentenced to 33 years in prison for money laundering and bank fraud. He was working in a Wells Fargo branch in San Diego and was caught wiring $3.8 million to the Arrellano-Felix Cartel based in Tijuana.
The cartel was selling fentanyl in Midwestern states. They then used 26 Wells Fargo accounts set up under false identities by Lora-Aguilera to deposit the cash. The feds say Lora-Aguilera personally wired the funds from those fake accounts to the cartel and was paid thousands of dollars for his services.
Then there’s the weird case of Luis Fernando Figueroa. Mr. Figueroa was another accounts manager for a different Wells Fargo branch in San Diego. He was accused by the federal government of laundering $19.6 million for the Sinaloa cartel between 2014 and 2016.
The feds say Sinaloa cartel couriers would travel from San Diego to Los Angeles, Chicago, Charlotte, Boston, New Jersey, and New York City to pick up large amounts of cash from narcotics sales. They would then make deposits in a series of funnel accounts set up by Figueroa in amounts between $22,000 and $45,000 apiece. The feds say Figueroa then transferred the funds directly to the cartel in Mexico.
And get this: Luis Fernando Figueroa himself is a Mexican national. Apparently, there were no Americans willing to do those high-paying banker jobs, so Wells Fargo had to hire a foreigner!
Figueroa was arrested in 2018. He faces more than 20 years in prison for the alleged crimes he committed on behalf of the Sinaloa cartel. But he spent only four days in jail before he was released on bail.
That was in November of 2018, and he’s never been seen since. It’s possible that the cartel turned him into fish food, but a more likely scenario is that he just went back home to Mexico and has been hiding out ever since. He’s pretty obviously a flight risk when he lives right next to the border in San Diego, and faces 20 years in prison.
It just goes to show the sloppy, we-don’t-really-care attitude that the federal government and the Deep State have toward drug trafficking in our country. Donald Trump was the only president in modern history who slowed the flow of drugs and illegal aliens into the country and gained operational control over the southern border. Joe Biden threw all of that away.
These stories also illustrate how deeply the cartels have penetrated American society. It’s going to require hard choices from our political leaders to regain control of our country from these criminal cartels. Unfortunately, many of those leaders are probably lining their pockets with cartel cash.
