How a California prisoner allegedly took over Alaska's fentanyl trade from inside his cell

As Sunday Powers drove along a remote highway in Alaska, her boss tracked her every move from 3,000 miles away.

A former Girl Scout raised in a town called North Pole, population 2,427, Powers had gotten involved in the drug business. She sold blue fentanyl pills and smuggled money for a dealer in California, according to court documents and interviews.

Powers had never met her boss, Heraclio Sanchez Rodriguez — he had been serving a life sentence in the California prison system since 1998. Authorities charge that Sanchez ran one of the largest drug trafficking organizations in Alaskan history without ever setting foot in the state.

Using contraband cellphones, Sanchez spun a web that stretched from Mexico to Los Angeles to far-flung Alaskan villages, authorities say. Flights carried women traveling with drugs and cash. Packages stuffed with fentanyl pills flowed through the U.S. postal system. Cash App payments linked senders in Alaska to recipients in Mexicali and Culiacán.

“This guy’s very intelligent,” Powers’ brother, Charles Hills, said of Sanchez. “He created a network and bought his way into enough circles of trust, whatever you want to call it, and just destroyed the area.”

By 2023, Powers was running from Sanchez. After working for him for about six months, she’d lost some of his money, according to her family. Prosecutors say he turned Powers’ phone into a tracking device and sent a man into the Alaskan wilderness to find her.

Sanchez, whose attorney didn’t respond to requests for comment, has pleaded not guilty to charges of trafficking drugs, laundering money, obstructing justice, carjacking, kidnapping and murder. Grand juries have indicted 58 people in the last year on charges of selling drugs, laundering their proceeds and committing violence on Sanchez’s behalf. He worked mostly with women like Powers, officials say. The highest-ranking ones he called his “wives.”

According to court documents and testimony, Sanchez turned his cell at Salinas Valley State Prison into the headquarters of what was essentially his own cartel. He fielded a steady stream of calls from underlings and documented payments received and owed in a handwritten ledger, authorities say, all under the watch of correctional officers who failed to prevent him from repeatedly obtaining phones.

California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation officials declined to be interviewed about Sanchez’s case. In a written statement, a spokeswoman said CDCR helped tap phones, search prison cells and analyze seized devices in the DEA’s investigation. Prison officials developed leads that thwarted “planned violence” at Sanchez’s prison, said the spokeswoman, Terri Hardy.

When the DEA tapped one of Sanchez’s phones in 2023, it opened a window onto what a man can achieve from prison when he has a line to the outside and no fear of incurring more time.

An agent testified that during the single month Sanchez’s line was monitored, he ordered two homicides, told one underling to douse a woman with acid and instructed another to shoot up a home with automatic weapons.

Sanchez’s reach extended as far as Togiak, a fishing village where authorities say the number of fentanyl pills supplied by his organization outnumbered residents 5 to 1. The drugs ruined families. Among the casualties: a father who obtained the fentanyl that killed him from his own daughter.

When Togiak’s mayor learned authorities had traced the addiction and death in his village to a prisoner in California, he had one question: How?

“How did that happen unchecked, unmonitored?” he asked. “This elaborate system, how did he set it up unobserved? That doesn’t make sense to me. Maybe I’m naive.”

‘Normal people’ turned into ‘monsters’

Powers’ family remembers a time before she worked for an imprisoned drug dealer.

Raised in Fairbanks and the tiny city of North Pole, she played football and soccer and danced ballet, but she loved rocks more than anything else.

“Collecting them, picking them up, painting them,” said her mother, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of reprisal. “I figured she’d be a geologist.”

Her life took a turn at 17. After a lengthy surgery to treat chronic blood clots, doctors gave Powers fentanyl and Dilaudid to blunt the pain, her mother said. “I told the doctor: ‘Addiction runs in the family. I see a train wreck coming.’”

Powers’ mother spent the next 13 years wondering when she’d learn her daughter was dead.

“She slept in her car sometimes,” she said. “I thought maybe she’d freeze.”

Wary of enabling her daughter, she only paid for two things, she said: car insurance so Powers wouldn’t go to jail if she got pulled over, and her phone bill so she could always call 911.

By early 2023, her mother said, Powers had gone from using drugs to selling them. Her brother said she was recruited by one of Sanchez’s “wives,” who had served time in an Alaskan prison.

According to Hills, Sanchez’s network used the U.S. Postal Service to transport the drugs. Shipping them in small amounts reduced the risk of suffering a bust large enough to damage the entire operation, Hills told The Times. “You can use the mail to make millions without really taking a hit.”

Drug users all over Alaska gave up their mailing addresses in exchange for money or pills, Hills said. His sister’s role was to collect the packages of meth, heroin and fentanyl after they arrived. The job took her from bigger cities like Anchorage to remote villages like Valdez, Tok, Cantwell and Tanacross, Hills said.

Hills said he believed that it wasn’t just the lure of drugs and money but also the threat of violence and blackmail that kept women tethered to Sanchez.

“He takes normal people and turns them into monsters,” Hills said. “Puts people in terrible positions. Makes them hurt each other.”

‘It’s got tentacles. It’s a huge octopus.’

It is difficult to imagine a more isolated place than Togiak.

Home to a fishery that produces half the world’s consumption of sockeye salmon, the village can only be reached by boat or small plane. About 90% of the 800 residents are Yupik, descendants of Siberians who crossed the Bering land bridge.

Around 2022, Togiak’s mayor, Tom Lowe, noticed people stepping off expensive chartered flights carrying only backpacks. It was clear to Lowe these people were smuggling drugs.

“Why didn’t that stand out to the carriers?” he said in an interview with The Times. “You’re paying $8,000 for a flight and coming back the same day?”

Fentanyl overdoses peaked that year in Togiak, Lowe said. He contacted the commissioner of Alaska’s Department of Public Safety, who stationed undercover state troopers in Togiak’s airfield.

“They nailed a bunch of the mules,” Lowe said.

Togiak has hired more police, coordinated enforcement with state troopers and the DEA and distributed naloxone, Lowe said. Even still, he said, “the drugs have infiltrated a lot of families.”

A mother and daughter from one village family are charged with distributing fentanyl on Sanchez’s behalf.

In 2023, the daughter, Kaytreana Green, found her father dead on the floor of the family home, an Alaska state trooper testified. Prosecutors allege that Green supplied the fatal dose of fentanyl.

“Give your siblings drugs kill them to while you at [it],” her boyfriend wrote in a Cash App message cited by prosecutors.

Sanchez paid for her father’s funeral and Green went on selling, prosecutors wrote in a bail motion. Six months later, she delivered a boy nine weeks premature, an employee of Alaska’s Office of Children Services testified. Toxicology tests found fentanyl and meth in the stillborn child’s blood stream.

Green has pleaded not guilty to conspiring to distribute heroin, methamphetamine and fentanyl. Her lawyer called the 23-year-old “another victim in this tragic story.”

“Like many Native Alaskan women, she was raised in a rural village surrounded by poverty and drug abuse,” the attorney, Daniel Norman, wrote in an email. He said rather than prosecuting women like Green, the federal government should put its resources toward drug treatment and other social services.

The cycle played out again and again. A woman working for Sanchez in North Pole sold fentanyl to a 32-year-old man who thought he was buying heroin, according to testimony at the woman’s bail hearing. He overdosed while driving, crashed and died after 11 days in the ICU.

Shanda Barlow was charged with selling drugs for Sanchez. Released on bail in February, the 34-year-old died three days later of an overdose in Anchorage. Agents found Western Union payments linking Barlow to people in Tijuana and Culiacán, a stronghold of Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel.

Prosecutors have not said whether Sanchez has ties to Mexican drug trafficking groups.

“It’s got tentacles,” Lowe said of Sanchez’s organization. “It’s a huge octopus. And it’s a sad deal when you watch it happen around you.”

A robbery, a gun, a life sentence

Sanchez, 57, has spent more than half of his life in prison.

He was 12 when his family brought him from Mexico to California, his attorney said at a parole hearing. Raised in La Habra, he dropped out in ninth grade when his parents split. He worked in landscaping and construction to support his mother and four younger siblings, according to his lawyer.

In 1985, an 18-year-old Sanchez was headed with friends to a party. Stopped at a red light, he thought he saw members of a gang called the Westsiders inside a red Chevrolet Impala, according to testimony at a preliminary hearing.

Sanchez shot at the car, missing the young married couple and infant inside. Convicted of assault with a firearm, Sanchez served less than a year in prison. Three weeks after getting out, he was arrested for burglary and sent back to prison.

Released in 1988, he started a gardening business and raised a family in Pomona for the next nine years. But these trappings of a middle-class life fell away the morning of Aug. 7, 1997.

A Pomona police officer found him wandering in the street, frantic, at 7 a.m., a police report says. Sanchez said men posing as police had pushed their way inside his home. Demanding guns, drugs, gold or money, they bound him with duct tape, beat him with gun butts, doused him with vodka and threatened to set him on fire.

Sanchez said he managed to free himself and ran out a back door. Seven others were still in the house, he told the officer, bound with bags over their heads.

The officers freed the people inside and interviewed them. None were relatives of Sanchez, according to the police report. Some said they’d recently come from Mexico to work for his landscaping business. One woman, who lived in Tennessee, said she was his girlfriend.

Sanchez told the police he had no idea why his assailants thought he’d have drugs or guns. He hung flyers around Pomona offering $100,000 for leads on the suspects.

“I hope they get what they deserve,” Sanchez told his local paper, the Daily Bulletin.

Two weeks after the robbery, Sanchez got into a fight with one of his employees whom he accused of setting up the crime. The police searched Sanchez’s house and found a small handgun in a drawer.

Sanchez was convicted of possessing the gun as a felon, a third strike. Before he was sentenced, his attorney showed the judge dozens of letters written by relatives, friends and employees.

Sanchez was a good boss and loyal friend, the letters said. He cut the lawns of elderly neighbors for free. His mother and three children needed him, the bedrock of their family.

The judge put Sanchez away for 25 years to life. In 1998, that meant he’d effectively been banished from society.

Cellphones would change that.

‘She was going to knock on trouble’s door’

After landing in 2018 in the coastal city of Sitka, Alaska, prosecutors say, Christina Quintana drew up a list of things she needed: zip ties, gloves, black clothing.

A city of about 9,000 at the foot of mountains carved out by glaciers, Sitka was a world away from the Orange County barrio where Quintana grew up.

Her childhood in Stanton was marked by neglect, addiction and abuse, according to court records and interviews. Her mother was hooked on heroin. Her father fled the law and his own family, said Quintana’s aunt, Contessa Villagrana. He jumped bail on a drug case and went to Mexico, where he was killed when Quintana was a teenager, Villagrana said.

At 12, Quintana was sexually abused by her uncle, court records show. He was sentenced to six years in prison. “Six years,” Villagrana said of her brother, “versus a lifetime of what she has to go through.”

Quintana started cutting school and hanging around her father’s old gang, Big Stanton. Her rap sheet read small-ball and desperate: Trespassing in vacant homes. Shoplifting $45 worth of saw blades. Smuggling drugs into jail. Crashing a stolen car.

Prison became Quintana’s home. Whatever time she spent out was “vacation,” her aunt said.

It’s unclear when or how she connected with Sanchez, who was last out of prison when Quintana was 12, but prosecutors say she became one of his trusted “wives.”

Villagrana said she saw her niece for the last time in 2018. Quintana dropped by and said she was flying to Alaska the next day to visit a friend.

“She was lying through her teeth,” Villagrana said. “She was going to knock on trouble’s door. And trouble answered.”

Quintana was looking for a dealer in Sitka who owed $17,000, prosecutors alleged in an indictment.

The woman wasn’t home when Quintana showed up with several associates. One took the dealer’s children to get a soda. When she and her boyfriend returned home, the dealer told a local radio station, “I was met with a Mossberg 500 in my face.”

One man trained the shotgun at the dealer; another beat her boyfriend with a hammer. Quintana ransacked the home, demanding money and drugs. After the woman said she had neither, Quintana shot her in both kneecaps.

Arrested days later hiding on an abandoned yacht in the Sitka harbor, Quintana pleaded guilty to using a firearm in commission of drug trafficking. She began serving a 22-year sentence at Alaska’s Hiland Mountain Correctional Center.

Less than three years later prosecutors indicted her again, alleging she turned the prison into a recruiting pool for her boss. Women released from Hiland Mountain began flying Sanchez’s drugs and money between California and Alaska, the indictment said.

Quintana has pleaded not guilty to drug trafficking charges. Her attorney didn’t respond to requests for comment.

At a hearing over the conditions of her confinement at Hiland Mountain, Quintana described a bleak scene. She was held with mentally ill women who “bang and scream and yell and throw feces all day long,” she testified.

One of the women she allegedly recruited at the prison was Tamara Bren.

By 2023, Bren had been released. She cut off her ankle monitor and was living as a fugitive — only to surface when Sanchez needed to track down someone who’d lost his money.

Smuggled phones, a kidnapping, a fugitive in the attic

DEA agents were watching in 2023 when Sanchez’s daughter dropped off two women from Alaska at John Wayne Airport in Santa Ana.

The agents had a warrant to search their luggage. The Alaskan women claimed to have no knowledge of the fentanyl and heroin in their bags, a DEA agent, David Rose, wrote in an affidavit. Allowed to board their flight, Rose wrote, the women called Sanchez first.

It’s unclear what they said, but Sanchez’s next call was to Bren, Rose testified at a hearing. The former Hiland Mountain inmate had risen from recipient of drug parcels to another of Sanchez’s “wives,” an indictment says.

The DEA listened to her conversation with Sanchez through a wiretap on his contraband phone, Rose testified.

At a parole hearing in 2021, Sanchez was questioned about the four times he’d been caught using cellphones in the previous year. He said he rented the phones from other inmates for $50 to call his family during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Hardy, the CDCR spokeswoman, would not say how many times Sanchez has been disciplined for possessing phones.

According to Hardy, the number of phones seized in California prisons decreased from 7,399 in 2020 to 4,109 in 2023 after authorities used new technology and partnered with federal agencies to root out the contraband devices.

Sanchez denied trafficking drugs to the parole board. “I walk the yard by myself or I don’t come out of my cell,” he said. “Why? Because I don’t want to be around nothing negative.”

With the DEA listening, Sanchez told Bren he wanted to kill the women who’d been stopped at the airport, Rose testified.

Sanchez sent his people to wait for the women in Alaska when they landed, according to the agent. One woman managed to flee, while the other was “escorted” to an apartment in Anchorage, Rose said.

According to the DEA agent, Sanchez ordered an underling, Kevin Peterson, to find the courier who ran and throw acid on her. Peterson was arrested near the woman’s home in Anchorage, Rose testified. Neither woman was apparently harmed.

Peterson has pleaded not guilty to charges of murder, kidnapping, carjacking and drug distribution. His attorney didn’t return a request for comment.

State troopers tracked Bren the next day to a shabby apartment building in Anchorage. When they tried to arrest her, she smashed her black Jeep through a cordon of police cruisers, Rose wrote in an affidavit. Troopers found the Jeep abandoned a few miles away with eight guns and a kilogram of fentanyl inside.

Eight days later, the DEA raided the Pomona home where Sanchez’s sister lived — the same house where men posing as police had accosted him 26 years earlier. Agents found 60 kilos of fentanyl, 47 pounds of meth and a kilo of heroin, Rose wrote.

Sanchez’s sister, Veronica Sanchez, and daughter, Amy Garcia, have pleaded not guilty to drug trafficking charges. Their lawyers didn’t return requests for comment. No trial date has been set.

Bren was captured in June 2023. A SWAT team found her in the attic of an Anchorage home, burrowed into the roof insulation, prosecutors wrote in court papers. By then, they allege, Bren had already conspired to have two women killed.

‘He’s sitting right where he wants to be’

One day last year, Powers’ mother got a notice in the mail from the DEA. Agents had stopped Powers at an airport in Alaska before she boarded a flight to California, it said. She’d been carrying $15,000 in money orders and another $5,000 in cash.

Around this time, Hills said, he got a call from his sister.

“Things are bad,” she said, according to Hills. “The feds were waiting for us at the airport.”

She said she needed to disappear.

On May 22, 2023, Powers was driving along Parks Highway in her red GMC Yukon with an acquaintance, Kami Clark. Sanchez followed her using “tracking applications,” an indictment charges. Hills said Sanchez made his employees download an app called Life360 — designed for parents to monitor their children — that allowed him to see where all his people were at any given time.

Sanchez turned to Peterson, the man he’d allegedly ordered to douse the courier with acid, to abduct Powers and Clark, prosecutors charged.

The last time anyone heard from Powers was a garbled 911 call, prosecutors wrote in court papers. Before the line went dead, a dispatcher heard Powers say, “Don’t shoot me!”

State troopers found the Yukon 11 days later, abandoned near an area called Trapper Creek. Dogs led them to the nearby grave, Powers’ mother said.

After his sister’s death, Hills said all of their family but him “packed up and moved the hell out of” Alaska, he said. Powers’ father died later that year, Hills said. “Just kind of gave up. Broke his heart.”

Bren is also charged with Powers and Clark’s murders, although prosecutors haven’t detailed how she was involved in their deaths.

Hills believes Sanchez’s indictment has made it easier for him to do business. Extradited to Alaska in 2023, Sanchez is jailed with inmates who will eventually be released to the villages and cities that he is accused of flooding with drugs, Hills said. “I think he’s sitting right where he wants to be,” he said.

At a recent hearing, Sanchez said he was held at the Anchorage Correctional Complex in a windowless, one-man cell that measures eight by 10 feet. He is chained and escorted by two guards during what little time he spends outside his cell, he said.

Rose of the DEA testified that Sanchez is still trying to run his organization. Guards recently seized from his cell a list of names and phone numbers of underlings. They were identified as attorneys, apparently in an attempt to register them as unmonitored lines in the jail phone system, Rose said.

No date has been set for Sanchez’s trial. Regardless of its outcome, he is serving a life sentence in California. Hills wonders what motivates a man who could have all the money in the world without ever enjoying what it buys. Where all of the drug profits went remains a mystery.

Sanchez offered a flicker of insight at his parole hearing. He’d seen other inmates reduce their horizons to the prison walls. Not him. Even after all these years behind bars, Sanchez told the board, he still considered himself a “designer.”

“I just love to think,” he said. “I can visualize something and I can build it. That’s what I did. My whole life’s work.”

Times staff writer Ruben Vives contributed reporting.