NJ Man Used Drones to Smuggle Crucial Things; Contraband into Federal Prison

A NJ Man pleaded guilty to smuggling contraband into a Federal Prison with a drone and possession of heroin and fentanyl on Tuesday. Jason Arteaga-Loayza, also known by the name Juice, was an inmate at the correctional facility in Fort Dix from June 2017 to September 2018. A month after he got out, he started conducting susceptible activities across the prison’s jurisdiction.

He and his conspirators started coordinating plans to fly a drone over the prison guards and drop cell phones, tobacco, weight loss supplements and other forms of contraband to an inmate or his alliance still present inside the federal correctional facility. The smuggling business went on further automation mode in the prison as then they would sell the Contraband to other prisoners for a profit. The staggering thing was that these cell phones weren’t authorized to a single name which means they might have been stolen or hacked.

Adrian Goolcharran, Nicolo Denichilo, and Johansen Moronta have also been charged with the scheme. Goolcharran, who is accused of flying the drone, would camp out in the woods near the prison and fly the drones in the evening hours to night to avoid detection. He also indulged in smuggling tobacco to the prison which was another illegal activity adding to his role.

Authorities eventually got wind of the scheme and searched Arteaga-Loayza’s residence on June 27, 2019. They found cell phones, empty cell phone boxes, empty boxes of SIM cards, and a Bugler tobacco box. When authorities arrested Goolcharran and Denichilo last year, they said they found “marijuana, steroids, more than 160 cell phones, 150 SIM cards, 74 cell phone batteries and chargers, two metal saw blades.” All this could have been only possible with a viable network that runs all the activities behind the scene. The authorities were suspicious of a big scandal coming their way and soon they restricted all the transfers of these contrabands.