DEA busts multi-million dollar Afghanistan heroin smuggling ring with Bay Area connection – By Nate Gartrell (eastbaytimes.com) / April 2 2018
Authorities had seized around 13 pounds of pure heroin, worth between $3.5 and $8.33 million.
OAKLAND — Two men have been convicted of charges related to what authorities call a large-scale conspiracy to smuggle heroin from Afghanistan into the United States.
One of the defendants, Shamsuddin Dost, reportedly bragged to an undercover federal agent during a meeting in San Jose that he had friends in the Taliban and Afghanistan’s government, and said he was willing to kill people who interfered with his business.
“National security people had detained their guys as part of the Taliban…. I secured their release,” Dost said, according to a DEA transcript. He later told the agent, “Don’t worry, those are people that are tied to me….They are Taliban and I know their relatives, uncles and I know their business. If they deviate, I know how to deal with them.”
On March 28, Dost’s co-defendant, Jawed Ahmadi, was sentenced to 70 months in federal prison after peading guilty to conspiracy to distribute heroin. He was arrested in 2016 — on the same day he flew from Kabul to San Francisco — and is facing deportation after completing his sentence.
Meanwhile, Dost is facing a minimum of 10 years in federal prison, as well as deportation. He took his case before a jury and was convicted on Jan. 28 of three felony charges related to trafficking heroin, including conspiracy. In 2016, a confidential drug informant told DEA agents working in Kabul that Dost had an uncle who owned Afghan heroin manufacturing facilities, and that they smuggled the drug into the United States inside shipments of rugs.
During the investigation, authorities seized around 13 pounds of pure heroin in undercover buys, but say that amount would have been diluted to about 150 pounds before it was sold on the streets at a value federal agents estimate fell between $3.5 and $8.33 million.
The confidential informant also told authorities that Dost had a connection with a man who’d spent the past 26 years importing heroin from the Nimroz Province, a section of southwestern Afghanistan that shares a border with Iran and Pakistan, and is known as a hub for drugs and weapons smuggling.
The investigation led DEA agents to Dubai, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and other parts of the Middle East, including a meeting with undercover agents where Ahmadi arranged a heroin deal of 100 to 200 pounds, and said he had personally visited Afghan factories where “Grade A” heroin was being produced.
In November 2016, Ahmadi was instructed to travel to San Francisco and meet with a man named Mustafa, a purported drug trafficker who was really working for the DEA. Ahmadi got on a plane to Dubai, then flew to San Francisco International Airport, where he was arrested upon landing. Dost was arrested later that day in Alameda County, records show.
While the DEA and Afghan police were investigating Ahmadi, federal agents in the Bay Area had their eyes on Dost, who moved to the Bay Area from Afghanistan in 2014. In the summer of 2016, agents set up several phone calls and meetings between him and Mustafa, where the two men discussed the drug smuggling business in great detail.
During one May 2016 meeting, Mustafa, playing the role of a large-scale dealer, told Dost he bribed port officials with ease. Dost, meanwhile, said his connections could “provide as much as you like,” and in one conversation, reiterated several times he could import “tons” of the drug. They eventually set up a deal for 100 kilograms, or 220 pounds, according to the transcript.
Dost also said the Dallas sniper who in July 2016 killed five police officers and injured 11 people had done a “great job,” according to court records. Federal agents later recovered a video of him firing a semiautomatic handgun, where he says if someone double-crossed him, he would pay a hitman $5,000 “to slice him like ground beef.”
Ahmadi’s attorney, federal public defendant Hanni Fakhoury, wrote a brief saying his client deserved a lesser 48-month sentence. He wrote that Ahmadi had been born in a mud hut in the Shamshatoo refuge camp in the early 1990s, after his parents fled the Afghan-Soviet War, moved to Afghanistan in 2010, and began smoking heroin to deal with the “trauma and violence around him,” eventually leading to his involvement in the international drug trade.
Fakhoury also referred to a U.S. Department of Justice report that described Mexico and Colombia, not Afghanistan, as North America’s primary sources of heroin.
“For many Afghans, drugs are not just a way to numb the pain of living, but also a way to make a living. As the economy has failed, illicit cultivation of opium poppies — the key ingredient in heroin — has dramatically increased, particularly since the U.S. wound down its troop presence in Afghanistan in 2013,” Fakhoury wrote on Ahmadi’s behalf. He later added, “Like many other young Afghans struggling to make a life for themselves, Mr. Ahmadi found himself lured into the drug trade.”
