44 lbs. of death

Mex. drug carrier busted with load of fentanyl

A HIGH-LEVEL drug trafficker from Mexico was arrested and charged with smuggling more than 44 pounds of fentanyl into the city, authorities announced Tuesday.

Francisco Quiroz-Zamora, 41, a suspected leader of the powerful Sinaloa cartel, faces drug-trafficking conspiracy charges.

Late last year, authorities seized some of the fentanyl inside a hotel in the Bronx where the drugs were jammed into a duffel bag and put above a vending machine.

Additionally, more than 5 pounds of the drugs were seized from a posh apartment on Central Park West being used as a stashhouse.

Officers also found cash and a loaded gun inside the apartment.

The drugs were in packages labeled “Uber” and “Wild Card.”

All told, the more than 44 pounds of fentanyl was enough of the highly potent drug to kill 10 million people, authorities said.

QuirozZamora (photo inset), of San Jose del Cabo in Baja California, is nicknamed “Gordo,” which means “the Fat One” in Spanish.

He was apprehended during a sting operation late last year after he came to New York to collect money from an undercover agent who was pretending to be a drug dealer, according to prosecutors.

Before his arrest, QuirozZamora was expecting a big payday. He was selling the fentanyl for $45,000 to $50,000 per kilo, authorities said.

He was busted when he arrived by train at Penn Station.

Fentanyl busts by the special narcotics prosecutor in the city have gone way up, to 491 pounds last year from 35 pounds in 2016.

The drug is over 50 times more potent than morphine and was the cause of 44% of all overdose deaths in the city in 2016. The drug was first used as a pain reliever in 1959.

But the black market for the deadly synthetic opioid has exploded over the past five years.

The drug is hard to produce and almost all of the illegal versions are made overseas, according to reports.

In the entire country, fentanyl overdoses spiked by 620% over three years, killing more than 20,000 people.

The investigation was conducted by the federal Drug Enforcement Administration, the office of special narcotics prosecutor Bridget Brennan and other law enforcement agencies.