Five people have been sentenced in U.S. District Court for an oxycodone trafficking and money laundering scheme that operated between Sacramento, California and Juneau.
They included four Juneau residents:
Jason Rivera, 26, was sentenced to five years in prison and three years of supervised release for fronting at least 4,500 pills between June 2009 and June 2010.
Brent Maki, 33, was sentenced for his role selling drugs and depositing $104,300 in proceeds. According to court documents, he was sentenced to four years in prison and three years of supervised release.
Michael Travis Miller, 32 was sentenced to 28 months in prison and three years of supervised release for meeting a courier at the airport who had 500 pills of 80 milligrams each.
And Sally Jean Maki, 27, was sentenced to eleven months of home confinement and three years probation for depositing drug proceeds.
There was also 31-year old Marquis Thomas of Sacramento who was sentenced to five years of probation after his arrest at Sea-Tac while transporting oxycodone pills in June 2010.
Meanwhile, a Juneau business owner arrested for accepting a drug shipment has been sentenced two years in federal prison in a separate case.
Kenneth Edward Hausinger, 49, was sentenced on Friday in U.S. District Court in Juneau. He will also be on supervised release for three years.
Charging documents indicate that Hausinger, also owner of Southeast Computers and Photography, was trying to make quick money to cover growing expenses, like hockey training for his children.
Investigators say they intercepted a package that contained cocaine and ecstasy pills, replaced the drugs, and fitted it with an electronic beacon for potential delivery in July 2011.
Hausinger accepted the package at his business and took it over to the Alaskan Hotel. Investigators say the beacon went off when Hausinger and Darren Louis Wigg opened it in the room. Besides cocaine and ecstasy, the package contained methamphetamine because of what was called bad production in the ecstasy. Investigators also say both men’s hands showed trace evidence of a chemical sprayed on the package’s contents.
Hausinger was charged with conspiracy with intent to distribute methamphethamine and conspiracy to possess with the intent to distribute cocaine.
Investigators says there were just over 79-grams of cocaine, over 2000 methamphetamine pills totaling 580-grams, and nearly 980 ecstacy pills totaling nearly 297-grams in the package.
Defense attorney Darryl Thompson said in a court filing that his client “made foolish choices to both use and turn over a very small relative amount of cocaine for the money.”
Assistant U.S Attorney Jack Schmidt said that Hausinger was “part of a significant conspiracy to import and sell ecstasy and cocaine in Juneau during a relatively short period of time.” Schmidt also noted that Juneau youth and young adults home from college would’ve been the likely buyers of the drugs. He said there was an increased potential risk to the community because nearly a third of the pills were actually methamphetamine instead of ecstacy.
A co-defendant in the case, Darren Louis Wigg, is due to appear during a sentencing hearing on August 22.
