Newport Beach man sentenced to 10 years in prison in heroin trafficking scheme
A Newport Beach man has been sentenced to 10 years in prison for his role in a scheme to traffic heroin from California to Louisiana.
Chief U.S. District Judge Brian Jackson on Thursday sentenced Logan Brannon, 32, and three others charged in connection with the scheme, according to the U.S. attorney’s office.
Six other people already had been sentenced in the case.
Brannon was three days into his jury trial in Louisiana when he pleaded guilty March 9 to conspiring to distribute heroin, distributing heroin and conspiracy to commit money laundering, authorities said.
He was one of 10 people indicted by a federal grand jury in 2015 following a years-long investigation into a drug-trafficking conspiracy involving the shipment of heroin from California to Baton Rouge, La.
The indictment alleged that the group conspired to distribute heroin that had been pressed to resemble oxycodone pills in California before they were shipped to Baton Rouge. When the pills arrived in Louisiana, they were distributed to mid-level drug dealers and ultimately sold to users in East Baton Rouge and Livingston parishes, according to federal prosecutors.
According to a news release, Brannon admitted that between December 2013 and October 2015 he conspired with others in California and Louisiana to distribute thousands of pills that contained more than a kilogram of heroin.
By disguising heroin as oxycodone, the traffickers sought the higher street price paid for oxycodone, according to prosecutors.
During a three-month period in 2015, Brannon supplied more than 30,000 heroin pills for distribution in Baton Rouge, authorities said. Between July 2014 and April 2015, Brannon and others involved in the scheme also tried to conceal and disguise the source of the money they received from distributing the heroin, prosecutors alleged.
“Our nation’s opioid crisis demands a strong response on all fronts and from all angles. Aggressively investigating and prosecuting heroin traffickers is one such front,” acting U.S. Attorney Corey Amundson said in a statement. “Dismantling this group is an important step.”
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