Members of Cartel-Connected Drug Trafficking Ring Sentenced to Federal Prison
Major Meth Trafficker Will Spend More Than Two Decades Behind Bars
WAYCROSS, GA: Two drug traffickers connected with a Mexican cartel that supplied a south Georgia methamphetamine conspiracy have been sentenced to federal prison.
Enio Camacho-Pineda, a/k/a “Tony,” a/k/a “Tony Montana,” 31, of Atlanta, was sentenced to 268 months in prison, and Donna Bazemore, a/k/a “Dirty D,” 45, of McRae, Ga., was sentenced to 216 months in prison by U.S. District Court Judge Lisa Godbey Wood, said Bobby L. Christine, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Georgia. Camacho-Pineda and Bazemore had each pled guilty to Conspiracy to Possess with Intent to Distribute and to Distribute Methamphetamine.
Each must serve a period of supervised release after their prison term. There is no parole in the federal system.
“These traffickers built a virtual pipeline for poison from illegal Mexican meth labs to drug users in Georgia, but good police work from the Telfair County Sheriff’s Office and many other agencies shut it down,” said U.S. Attorney Christine. “Our office is committed to taking the ball from our law enforcement partners and carrying it across the goal line, and in this case that effort secured guilty pleas from every one of these meth merchants.”
Camacho-Pineda and Bazemore were the final two defendants of 11 sentenced from an October 2018 indictment alleging they were involved in a drug trafficking organization that smuggled in kilograms of methamphetamine from the La Familia cartel in Mexico and delivered it by courier to south Georgia for distribution in Telfair County and beyond. According to testimony in court, Camacho-Pineda was a member of the cartel, while Bazemore admitted trafficking meth on behalf of the organization.
All 11 defendants in the operation have now pled guilty and been sentenced.
Robert J. Murphy, the Special Agent in Charge of the DEA Atlanta Field Division said of the sentencings, “Mexican drug cartels (in this case La Familia) are the source of so many dangerous drugs destined for the U.S. and are responsible for much of the violence in Mexico today. These sentencings illustrates how DEA, its law enforcement counterparts and the U.S. Attorney’s Office will not allow Mexico-based drug traffickers to wreak havoc on our society.”
“This case is the product of a concerted collaborative effort on the part of ATF and its law enforcement partners to target, investigate, and eliminate violent drug trafficking organizations,” said Beau Kolodka, Special Agent in Charge of the Atlanta Field Division of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF). “These sentences will ensure the incarceration of dangerous criminals and contribute to the restoration of order and peace.”
The case was investigated under the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces (OCDETF), the premier U.S. Department of Justice program to dismantle multi-jurisdictional drug trafficking organizations, and was conducted by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI), the U.S. Marshals Service, Telfair County Sheriff’s Office, Jeff Davis County Sheriff’s Office, the Douglas-Coffee Drug Unit, and other local law enforcement agencies. The case also falls under the umbrella of the U.S. Department of Justice’s Project Safe Neighborhoods (PSN), a program that has been successful in bringing together all levels of law enforcement to reduce violent crime and make our neighborhoods safer. The case is being prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorneys John Harper and E. Greg Gilluly, Jr.
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