Agents Get the Dirt on Drug Suspect

It was a bust in more ways than one.

When drug agents opened the three carefully wrapped packages a Modesto dishwasher had wanted to sell them for $54,000, they found six pounds of dirt. The soil had been pressed into neat bricks and encased in layers of cellophane. But the agents didn’t need to do a lab test to figure out it was not the heroin Rogelio Arroyo allegedly boasted of.

“There were pieces of grass,” said Lt. Raul DeLeon of the Stanislaus Drug Enforcement Agency. “It was your garden variety dirt, and it was right out of his yard. We found the area where he had dug the dirt out.”

Unfortunately for Arroyo, 29, it doesn’t matter if you’re trying to pass a chunk of your backyard off as heroin. You still get arrested--for sales in lieu of a controlled substance.

DeLeon said agents targeted Arroyo because he had sold them a small amount of heroin and insisted he usually dealt in much larger quantities.

“We thought he was a big dealer,” DeLeon said.

Suspects in the past have tried to disguise sugar or flour as drugs. “But I think this is the first time we ever bought dirt,” he added.

Arroyo, who is being held in the Stanislaus County Jail, was arrested this week in a parking lot near his home. An undercover agent had arranged to buy three kilos of heroin from him for $18,000 each, according to DeLeon.

Arroyo’s luck could have been worse. “If this guy had done this to someone in the business, he would have wound up dead,” DeLeon said.