When federal prosecutors announced yesterday that Refugio "Cuco" Ramirez-Garcia will spend the next 20 years in federal prison for helping run a pair of heroin-distribution conspiracies, they gave a shout-out to the local law enforcement agencies who helped bring him down.
That's standard practice. What's unusual about Ramirez-Garcia's case is the hat-tip to Dallas ISD's police force.
DISD cops deal with drugs on a regular basis, of course, but it's mostly small-time stuff, cases of possession and low-level dealing. In Ramirez-Garcia's case, however, DISD's investigation helped lead federal agents far enough up the supply chain to secure a drug-conspiracy conviction.
See also: Why Does Dallas Keep Forgetting About its Cheese-Heroin Problem?
Ramirez-Garcia pleaded guilty earlier this year to participating in two heroin-distribution conspiracies. The first was active in 2006 and 2007. The second ran two years, from August 2010 to August 2012. In each case, Ramirez-Garcia was selling in bulk, ounces or pounds at a time.
DISD police chief Craig Miller tells Unfair Park that Ramirez-Garcia's "end product played into the cheese heroin incidents that we had going on in the schools at that time."
You probably don't need to be reminded about cheese, the dirt-cheap and often deadly mix of heroin and Tylenol PM that hit the district hard in the mid-2000s and has popped up occasionally since then.
Several of Ramirez-Garcia's co-conspirators from the 2006 and 2007 case--Martin and Francisco Laguna, Marco Antonio Romero, Jaun Curz, and Timothy Ryan Daniels--have already received federal prison sentences ranging from 15 months to 15 years.
