A 50-year-old Orlando man was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison for admitting to trafficking hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of cocaine over the past several years from Puerto Rico.
Luis Raul Perez Rodriguez was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison this week by U.S. District Judge Carlos Mendoza after he pled guilty on March 28 of this year for conspiracy to distribute cocaine.
According to court documents, on January 21, 2022, Perez Rodriguez arranged to receive a shipment of three parcels with approximately 19 kilograms of cocaine valued at around $570,000.
The parcels were being delivered from an address in Puerto Rico to an apartment in Orlando.
A few days before Perez Rodriguez made the arrangements, security specialists at the delivery service company detected the cocaine shipment and reported the parcels to the Drug Enforcement Administration.
On the day of the scheduled drop, an undercover officer working with the DEA posed as a delivery driver and delivered a fake package to the address listed on the shipment.
Perez Rodriguez was in the parking lot of his apartment and identified himself with the fake name associated with the parcels before showing the delivery driver that he was tracking the progress of the shipment on his phone.
Perez Rodriguez was apprehended as the driver loaded two of the three packages into Perez Rodriguez’s vehicle.
Additional evidence linked Perez Rodriguez to seven other suspected drug shipments of cocaine from Puerto Rico to Orlando that were delivered as early as 2018. All of those shipments were of “kilogram-quantity,” according to authorities.