Seventy-six people have been charged in a “massive drug trafficking investigation,” according to a newly unsealed federal indictment that is the “largest ever” in southern Georgia.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Georgia on Wednesday announced the defendants were involed in a conspiracy that distributed methamphetamine, fentanyl and other illegal drugs in the greater Glynn County area.
Two of the defendants were charged with distributing illegal drugs – fentanyl and methamphetamine – that resulted in the overdose deaths of three people, the office said in a press release.
The indictment comes days after President Joe Biden met with Mexican officials to discuss how to stop illicit drugs from coming through the southern border amid a new wave of the deadly fentanyl crisis.
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The charges are the culmination for more than two years of work from multiple federal, state and local law enforcement agencies that tracked the “sprawling drug trafficking network” operating in south Georgia counties, the state’s attorney’s office said.
According to the indictment, the conspiracy “operated inside and outside state prison facilities with assistance from at least one compromised corrections officer, who worked with a leader of the conspiracy who is serving a life sentence for murder.”
The defendants include members of multiple gangs, including a “white supremacist criminal street gang” and a neo-Nazi prison gang, the indictment said.
Authorities also seized 43 firearms, one vehicle and more than $53,000 in cash in the investigation.
The defendants are scheduled to appear in district court in Brunswick, Georgia, this week. More than three dozen others also face prosecution on state charges, the office said.
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Meanwhile, the Justice Department announced several other indictments Wednesday in gun and drug trafficking operations.
“The actions taken today represent the work that is being done by this Department every single day to disrupt violent crime, combat gun violence, and get deadly fentanyl out of our communities,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement.
Thirty-four people from Maryland, Virginia and West Virginia were indicted on charges related to the sale of fentanyl, heroin and other drugs tied to a spike in overdoses in the region, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of West Virginia said.
Two Baltimore-based drug trafficking organizations supplied fentanyl to West Virginia and caused at least two deaths, the office said.
“Fentanyl continues to be the number one threat to public safety in the region and much of it flows here from Baltimore,” U.S. Attorney William Ihlenfeld said in a statement.
In New York, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York unsealed a seven-count indictment charging four gun traffickers with selling more than 50 firearms in Brooklyn, including one also charged with trafficking fentanyl.
In a statement, the Justice Department noted the New York indictment is “the first in the state and among the first in the country” to charge the gun trafficking provisions of the landmark bipartisan gun deal passed this summer.
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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Drug trafficking conspiracy tied to overdose deaths in Georgia: DOJ
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