A defense lawyer for Hermida said that in 2011 in the port of Veracruz authorities recovered more than 1,000 bodies, many of which were rendered unidentifiable due to dismemberment.
Julio Vidal Hermida was sentenced to five years in prison for his role in a Mexico-to-Texas-to Hampshire County cocaine trafficking ring. SPRINGFIELD - A conspirator in a cocaine dealing ring intended to flood Hampshire County with kilos of the drug was sentenced Tuesday to five years in federal prison.
A three-year investigation focused on Joaquin "Chito" Carrillo and Pablo "Pete" Drullard, who were trafficking drugs from Texas and Mexico to Hadley, Easthampton and Northampton, according to court records.
Carrillo and Drullard already were sentenced in the case to eight and 10 years, respectively. Julio Vidal Hermida, an illegal immigrant from Veracruz, Mexico, a region riddled with drug trafficking and largely ruled by violent drug cartels, also pleaded guilty in the case - opting to stay mum to government officials lest he return to his country and be killed by drug lords, according to statements made in court.
All three defendants had ties to Mexico; Carrillo is portrayed in court records as the ring-leader. A driver unnamed in the criminal complaint behind the wheel of a green Ford Taurus registered to Carrillo was stopped by the Texas Highway Patrol in 2010. Police there recovered 10 kilos of cocaine bound for New England.
The three local defendants were arrested the following year as the investigation unfolded. Police and federal agents recovered three kilos of cocaine from a large safe in Hermida's Easthampton home. A lawyer for Hermida, 26, said his client was a low-level player who made a number of sales to an undercover informant and allowed Carrillo to use his apartment.
Hermida stopped "doing favors" for his co-defendants months before the federal indictment was issued and spent many hours working in local pizza shops, sending money back to his family in Mexico, according to defense lawyer Raymond A. O'Hara.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Kevin O'Regan told U.S. District Judge Michael A. Ponsor that Hermida declined a chance at a so-called "safety valve" concession in federal law, a very narrow loophole around a mandatory minimum sentence. Primarily, it requires that the defendant has no prior criminal record and tells investigators about his or her role in a given conspiracy and what he or she knows.
Hermida declined even to meet with investigators to consider the option, O'Regan said, a rarity among criminal defendants facing mandatory sentences who qualify for safety-valve departures.
The prosecutor told Ponsor that he had been trained in the strategies of drug lords in Latin American countries seeking to squelch cooperation with law enforcement officials. O'Regan said he had seen photos related to killings of police witnesses that were "shocking and horrific."
"In recent years the tentacles of narco-trafficking have reduced Veracruz and its
surroundings to what one journalist describes as the 'Black Hole' of Mexico," O'Hara wrote in a pre-sentencing memo.
He added that in 2011 in the port of Veracruz authorities recovered more than 1,000 bodies, many of which were rendered unidentifiable due to dismemberment.
Hermida had hoped to remain in the United States pending certain immigration reforms, his lawyer noted, but will be deported back to Mexico upon serving his sentence.