Businessman Pleads Guilty in Drug Plot

The owner of a prominent Los Angeles food importing business pleaded guilty Tuesday to conspiring to use a 1,416-foot-long “narco-tunnel” to smuggle drugs into the United States, the U.S. attorney’s office said.

Once described as the “Taj Mahal” of tunnels, the underground passageway ran north from a Tijuana warehouse. Equipped with lights and ventilation, it ended at Otay Mesa, where a cannery was being built to conceal the operation by executives of Reynoso Bros., a Los Angeles-based family business, prosecutors said.

Jose Reynoso, 65, of Rowland Heights admitted to using his food importation business in the United States to import cocaine from Mexico and to buying the $1.1-million Otay Mesa lot where the tunnel was to have its U.S. exit, according to Cynthia Bashant, an assistant U.S. attorney and lead prosecutor in the case.

Reynoso was allegedly a member of a vast ring that reportedly transported cocaine in everything from Lear jets to soapboxes, boilers and chili peppers, the U.S. attorney’s office said.

He and two others, Luis Fernando Gonzalez and Ricardo Yudice, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to import and possess cocaine before U.S. District Judge Leland Nielsen, prosecutors said. The three were arrested a year ago.

Among the 17 still at large are two other Reynoso brothers, Jesus and Antonio, who are believed to shuttle between Tijuana and Guadalajara, U.S. officials said.

The defendants face minimum 10-year sentences and maximum terms of life in prison with a $4-million fine, prosecutors said.

Discovered in May 1993 by Mexican federal police hunting for the killers of the Roman Catholic cardinal of Guadalajara, the tunnel was allegedly commissioned by the now-imprisoned Mexican drug lord Joaquin “Chapo” Guzman. Mexican investigators said the cardinal, an outspoken critic of the drug trade, was killed in a shootout between forces of Guzman and the rival Arellano Felix organization, now the reputed leaders of the so-called Tijuana cartel.

With $30 million in reported earnings, Reynoso Bros. ranked 13th on a 1992 survey of minority-owned businesses in Los Angeles.

“It’s a shame. He held himself out as the American dream--coming to this country, selling produce from the back of a truck and making it into a million-dollar business,” Bashant said.