After helping feds bust agent he bribed in Jacksonville, drug trafficker gets 11-year term
A drug trafficker who bribed a federal agent in Jacksonville for inside information has been sentenced to 11 years and three months in prison.
Francisco Gonzalez Benitez, 37, faces the same term behind bars as Nathan Koen, a former U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration special agent and supervisor who was sentenced three months ago in Arkansas for taking more than $40,000 in payoffs over several years.
Gonzalez Benitez, who lives in Orange, Calif., shipped heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine and marijuana to Jacksonville, where his brother handled distribution along with some others, court records including his plea agreement show.
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Gonzalez Benitez, a Mexican immigrant raised in a drug-dealing family, became a confidential informant for Koen in 2014, two years before the agent was promoted and transferred from Jacksonville to Little Rock, Ark.
Meth and cocaine trafficking
The DEA tipster also ran a busy trafficking ring, and federal investigators found evidence that more than 100 shipments were made to Jacksonville between 2016 and early 2019, according to an announcement from the Internal Revenue Service’s Tampa field office.
Between October 2016 and September 2017, the postal service delivered 28 parcels from southern California to a home on Fox Tail Lane in the Dinsmore area, each one “generally similar” to the size and weight of a package that agents intercepted containing a kilogram of cocaine, according to a 2019 plea agreement for another figure in the drug ring. The agreement said another 33 similar packages were shipped from California to a home on Deermoss Way off Baymeadows Road near Goodbys Creek.
While Gonzalez Benitez handled multiple drugs, a U.S. Justice Department release in May said a judge found Koen had taken bribes to help a conspiracy involving at least 33 to 99 pounds of methamphetamine.
In return for cash payoffs, the DEA agent was providing what Gonzalez Benitez called “top cover protection” for the ring, information that helped the ring stay off investigators’ radar, according to a Justice Department description of the bribes.
What Koen didn’t know was that the FBI had flipped Gonzalez Benitez in 2018, turning him into a source of information about a corrupt investigator.
The trafficker wore a wire to secretly record Koen at a meeting where a $9,000 bribe was delivered, according to court records and the Justice Department release describing the meeting at a Las Vegas hotel.
“Did you make this worth it?” Koen asked the secret informant.
“Come on, man, you know I always make it worth it for you,” the trafficker answered the agent, who warned his briber to get rid of all his phones and change his address because a search warrant could be executed soon.
Federal prosecutors sought a lesser punishment
Gonzalez Benitez was so helpful to investigators that prosecutors this month asked U.S. District Judge Brian J. Davis for a downward departure from the long punishment he could have faced.
The trafficker’s brother, Jose Manuel Gonzalez, pleaded guilty in 2019 to conspiracy to distribute drugs and launder money and in May was sentenced to 10 years in prison. Another figure in the ring, Tina Watson, is scheduled for sentencing Aug. 29.
This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: DEA bribery sentence: 135 months for drug trafficking to Jacksonville
