Anaheim Man and Son Sentenced in Drug Case

An Anaheim man who acted as the money handler in a major international cocaine network was sentenced to 12 years in prison Monday for his role in the family-style drug ring that prosecutors say stretched from Orange County to Florida, Panama and Colombia.

Abraham Ernesto Rojas, 51, received a $50,000 fine in addition to his sentence for his conviction on six narcotics trafficking charges, while his son, Ernesto Ivan Rojas, 30, was sentenced to 10 years in prison and a $50,000 fine on five drug trafficking charges.

“One can only conclude that this was a major operation,” U.S. District Judge Pamela Ann Rymer said of the sophisticated network of electronic beepers, foreign bank accounts, multiple residences and false identifications with which Rojas and his son initially eluded detection.

Rojas and his son were two of 30 people arrested in a weeklong series of raids on a cocaine distribution ring in Southern California in November, 1985. Four of those were also convicted of federal drug charges but received sentences of four years or less.

Rymer said the Rojases’ harsh sentences reflect that “simply to be clever about how one protects oneself from detection is not going to make the price any less if one is convicted by a jury.”

Federal authorities believe that the elder Rojas, a Colombian national living in an Anaheim condominium, was the leader of an organization that sold at least $50 million in cocaine to street dealers, laundering profits through a Fullerton currency exchange that has since been closed down by the state.

Ledgers at Rojas’ residence showed he had taken in large sums of money payable to “ edificios, “ as money men are known in Latin American drug organizations. His son was arrested with $10,000 in cash and a separate drug ledger in his possession.

Defense attorneys argued that less than a gram of the 60 pounds of cocaine seized in the 1985 raids was found at the Rojas house. Rojas, they said, was not the leader of the ring but merely its bookkeeper.

“I am guilty, but not as seriously as the government contends,” Rojas said in a letter he read to the court. “You can’t imagine how much I have suffered during these 17 months, particularly taking into account that I was arrested with my son, which is supremely terrible.”

But Assistant U.S. Atty. Sharon K. McCaslin said Rojas and his son are simply “remorseful that (they) got caught. . . . You do truly have a major drug dealer standing before you today,” McCaslin told the judge. “It is rare that we get someone this key in a drug organization.”