Or - Black Tar Heroin dealer/human smuggler busted

Portland dealer pleads guilty to running black-tar heroin ring that led to two overdose deaths in 2009

Published: Monday, September 13, 2010, 9:15 PM Updated: Monday, September 13, 2010, 11:45 PM
Maxine Bernstein, The Oregonian

MCSOJose Hernandez Flores
A Portland heroin dealer pleaded guilty Monday to conspiring with his brother-in-law to run a major black-tar heroin distribution ring that led to the overdose deaths last year of Patrick McGinnis and Joshua Reeves.

The two dealers referred to their business as "The Store," operated the sales like a dispatch center and paid for sellers to be smuggled into the United States from Mexico, Assistant U.S. Attorney Kathleen Bickers said.

Share Under a plea deal, Jose I. Hernandez Flores, 38, nicknamed "Pepe," is expected to face 13 years in prison, then deportation. He'll be sentenced in November.

His brother-in-law, Jose Luis Torres Rojas, 30, known as "Chad," is scheduled to plead guilty on Friday, and face an 11 1/2-year sentence, mostly due to his greater degree of cooperation.

With the plea agreements, the two men avoid a minimum 20-year sentence under the federal Len Bias law, named for the University of Maryland basketball star who died of a cocaine overdose in 1986. The law punishes those whose drug dealing leads to serious injury or death.

But Hernandez Flores and Torres Rojas did acknowledge, as part of the plea deals, that their heroin sales led to both McGinnis' and Reeves' overdose deaths and have agreed to pay each family full restitution for the expenses stemming from the men's deaths. It marks the first time local prosecutors identified a single source for multiple deaths after a yearlong investigation by Portland police, and the Regional Organized Crime Narcotics Task Force.

The combination of the heroin's purity and the fact that both McGinnis, 38, and Reeves, 28, had curtailed their drug use for some time before injecting it again contributed to their deaths, prosecutors said.

The two co-defendants also admitted that they sold up to 30 kilograms of heroin in the Portland area, and have agreed to forfeit $200,000 to the federal government, their estimated drug profit over the past three years.

Reeves' mother, Toni Rae Macy, quietly watched Hernandez Flores plead guilty Monday to one count of conspiracy to deliver heroin and two counts of delivery of heroin. She said afterwards she felt guilty that she felt sorry for her son's drug suppliers.

"He's 38 years old, only 10 years older than Josh was, and he's got so much more life," Macy said, wiping tears from her eyes as she emerged from Herandez Flores' plea hearing. "He's obviously intelligent enough to run a drug business. Just think what he could do if he steered his talents toward something beneficial to society. . . . Then I feel guilty for feeling sorry for him."

But Macy said she's glad the government put such effort into dismantling the drug ring, knowing it's not just her son and McGinnis who were victims.

McGinnis, the son of retired FBI agent John McGinnis, had been in and out of treatment for several years before he went to Hawaii to live with his younger brother in 2007. He seemed to keep clean and returned to his parents' home in Bend by October 2008. That New Year's he went to Portland to attend a party, and stayed at the Pearl District condo of one of his parents' former neighbors. The morning of Jan. 4, 2009, his host found McGinnis dead.

Investigators identified the victims' immediate suppliers by tracing their cell phone records and then worked their way up the ladder to identify the higher-level dealers.

Hernandez Flores and Torres Rojas both came from Nayarit, Mexico, and paid human smugglers, or coyotes, to bring illegal immigrants into the United States to work for them. In one case, they paid $2,000 to bring in someone to be their "runner" to help distribute the drug, Bickers said.

Macy found her son on July 29, 2009, curled up dead in a fetal position in the back of the van he was living in. His van had broken down and he left it parked on the edge of Holladay Park. His mother had put money in the parking meter as her son took public transportation to his painting job. That night she stopped by after dinner, and entered the van and found her son dead. An uncapped syringe lay next to Reeves' left arm. Another syringe full of heroin was propped up nearby. In the van were his Bible, a Narcotics Anonymous book and a mirror that he marked in crayon noting the 44 days he'd been clean.

"I didn't want to see the signs because I was so angry he could be using a substance and I couldn't get past it," Macy said.

When it first happened, she said she went into "mother mode," doing what she needed to do to raise her two other sons. Now, watching the court proceedings, she said, her suffering is resurfacing more intensely.

"It seems harder emotionally," she said. "Everything just is coming back. You want to feel his presence, you know. What I'd do for just one more hug."

Maxine Bernstein


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