LIHUE — A man who grew up on Kauai was sentenced in federal court Tuesday to over 15 years in prison for drug trafficking.
Carlos Olvera, 36, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to distribute a controlled substance for his role in orchestrating a shipment of crystal methamphetamine to Kauai from inside a jail in California, according to federal court documents.
Olvera arranged and organized the two-pound meth shipment on Aug. 30, 2018, “while incarcerated in a San Diego County Sheriff’s facility,” a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agent said in an affidavit attached to charging documents in Olvera’s case.
In the affidavit, DEA Special Agent Jennifer Hull said that during the course of the investigation, DEA agents reviewed “jail calls, jail emails, and telephone text messages” to form a time line of the drug trafficking organization’s activities and linked Olvera to the drug shipment through recorded phone calls he made from jail to his co-conspirators, discussing their plans and involvement.
Hull’s affidavit also said DEA agents browsed Olvera’s Facebook account to learn the nicknames of associates they suspected were involved in his illegal activities and then used voice recognition technology to identify one of the men Olvera ordered to ship the methamphetamine.
Two packages, each containing roughly a pound of crystal meth, arrived on Kauai in early September 2018, where a Kauai police officer intercepted them, with the help of a drug-sniffing dog, according to charging documents in federal cases brought against five people involved with organizing, shipping and receiving the drugs.
Police confiscated the bags of ice, and decoys, pager devices and florescent powder were placed inside the boxes, which were then delivered to the Koloa address by an undercover KPD officer posing as a UPS employee.
The sting operation led to federal charges against two people inside the Koloa home, Leonard Aguinaldo, who signed for the parcels, and Nancy Igaya, who opened them and later admitted to ordering the meth, according to charging documents in the case.
Both Aguinaldo and Igaya later pleaded guilty and got about five years in prison for their role in the failed drug smuggling operation.
Two men responsible for shipping the meth from California at Olvera’s request also pleaded guilty in the past few months to federal charges and are awaiting sentencing.
After Igaya’s arrest, DEA agents “downloaded” her cell phone and reviewed the text messages and calls to Olvera, further establishing a timeline of the group’s activities and “revealing conversations about drug trafficking activities,” Hull said in an affidavit.
The text messages show Olvera and Igaya growing concerned about the shipment when it still hadn’t arrived in Kauai six days after it was sent from California.
“So the presents are delayed?” Olvera asked.
“Yeah, but the thing went back to Honolulu and it said it went out for delivery on Tuesday, but the thing then just go back to the post office in Lihue,” Igaya responded on the evening of Sept. 6, 2018, less than 24 hours after the parcels had been seized by KPD.
Three days later, Olvera placed a call from jail to Victor Miranda, one of the men in California he had instructed to make the shipment, according to excerpted transcripts of the conversations included in the DEA agent’s affidavit.
“I got some bad news for you,” Miranda said.
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Caleb Loehrer, staff writer, can be reached at 245-0441 or cloehrer@thegardenisland.com.
