A California truck driver was sentenced to 10 years in prison for hauling millions of dollars worth of illegal drugs into New Jersey.
Driver Sentenced to 10 Years in Prison Following Historic Drug Bust
Forty year old driver Henry A. Cruz-Ventura was sentenced on Friday to a decade in prison on charges of drug possession with intent to distribute. Last year, New Jersey police seized 141 pounds of heroin and 22 pounds of cocaine from his tractor trailer. The estimated street value of the drugs is approximately $5.4 million.
Routine CMV Inspection Turns Up Hundreds Of Pounds Of Drugs
Cruz-Ventura’s arrest came on August 24, 2016, after he was pulled over the in the eastbound lanes of I-78 in Greenwich Township for an inspection by “truck troops” from the New Jersey State Police Mobile Safe Freight Unit.
During the inspection, troopers “discovered boxes comingled throughout the load that were not consistent with the legitimate cargo, in addition to several other indicators consistent with criminal activity.” The troopers also noticed that Cruz-Ventura was behaving suspiciously, so they had the truck moved to the nearest weigh station for closer inspection.
The troopers found cocaine and heroin in the boxes and placed Cruz-Ventura under arrest.
The heroin bust was described as “one of the largest seizures of heroin by law enforcement in U.S. history,” according to a news release from the New Jersey Attorney General’s Office’s Division of Criminal Justice. The Attorney General also noted that the seized drug shipment “could have generated several million doses of heroin once cut and packaged for distribution.”