Jersey trio busted in massive cocaine ring
Tosses latest suit by 5 landlords in fight over 2019 reforms
Federal authorities broke up a cocaine importation ring run out of a New Jersey warehouse, prosecutors said Monday, announcing the arrests of three people and seizure of 120 kilos and $1.3 million in cash.
Adriano Rodriguez-Diaz, Ironellys Paulino-Nolasco and Robert Nuñez are accused of conspiring to import the eye-popping amount of cocaine from the Dominican Republic. Prosecutors say some of the coke arrived on a shipping vessel that docked at the Port of Newark. The drugs were then delivered to a produce warehouse the DEA began investigating late last year.
“A stakeout turned into a threeday enforcement operation taking 6 million dollars’ worth of cocaine sales away from alleged drug traffickers while saving lives,” DEA Special Agent in Charge Raymond Donovan said.
The DEA watched on March 10 as Paulino-Nolasco took some of the cocaine from the warehouse, “Sweet Produce,” to a Bronx apartment, according to a complaint. A search of the apartment found 20 more kilos and $1.3 million in “banded and bundled” cash, prosecutors wrote. Nuñez was arrested leaving the apartment with 14 hard-case cylinders containing a total of 1 kilo of cocaine.
Two days later the DEA pulled over a produce van leaving the warehouse with 100 kilos of cocaine in packages. The driver, who was not identified in court papers, told the feds Rodriguez-Diaz had ordered the packages delivered to a Newark cigar bar. A search of that bar uncovered a cocaine packaging operation.
In an unusual twist, prosecutors wrote that Nuñez was released after his arrest and is now at large. A spokesman for the Southern District of New York did not explain why Nuñez was allowed to walk.
“This massive shipment of potentially deadly narcotics has been kept off the streets,” Manhattan U.S. Attorney Audrey Strauss said.
A Manhattan judge dismissed a lawsuit brought by five New York City landlords in the latest ruling upholding the constitutionality of sweeping rent reforms passed by the state Legislature in 2019.
Manhattan Federal Court Judge Edgardo Ramos in his March 8 decision found the landlords’ case to overturn the Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act couldn’t continue even if their financial woes will.
“Plaintiffs … cannot argue that the 2019 Amendments interfered with their reasonable investment-backed expectations. Rent regulation has existed in some form in the city for over seventy years, and rent stabilization in particular has existed for over fifty years,” Ramos wrote.
The judge added the landlords “knowingly entered a highly regulated industry.”
The sweeping consumer protection laws, which apply to 1 million rent-stabilized New York City apartments, made it unlawful for landlords to reject tenants over their history in court with previous landlords, gave more time to tenants to fight evictions, and made it harder to convert rent-stabilized units to condos or co-ops.
The package also made the rent regulation system in the five boroughs permanent and allowed municipalities outside the city to opt into rent regulation.
Three of the landlords who brought the suit manage buildings with a mix of rent-stabilized and unregulated apartments in Manhattan. The two other plaintiffs in the suit are no longer landlords — one managed a rent-stabilized apartment building in the Bronx and the other owned a rent-stabilized building in East Harlem.
All claimed they’d suffered enormous financial damage from the 2019 regulations, which the landlords said prevented them from profiting from their property, using their units how they
want, and exiting the market if they wish to do so.
Ramos accepted the landlords’ litany of complaints as true in his ruling — including their assertion that the sweeping reforms had “an enormous negative economic impact” on their lives — but dismissed all of the lawsuit’s points as moot.
“Loss of profit alone” does not
count as a regulatory taking of their property, the judge wrote in his decision, adding that landlords “have no constitutional right to an unregulated market.”
The landlords filed the suit against the city, the Rent Guidelines Board, and RuthAnne Visnauskas, who heads the Division of Housing and Community Renewal, a state agency that monitors New York’s rent regulation rules.
It’s the fifth lawsuit brought by landlords since state Democrats, in control of the state Senate and Assembly for the first time in years, passed the comprehensive reforms that radically strengthened New York’s tenant protections.
“We understand that part of the reason for bringing these cases … is that there’s a well-financed plan to try to get one of these five cases before the Supreme Court with the new justices,” Ellen Davidson, an attorney with the Legal Aid Society who represented several tenant advocacy groups in the suit, said Monday.
“An immense amount of money is being spent on this effort,” said Davidson. “Not because there’s a belief that so much has changed constitutionally with the new law. There’s a belief that they can buy their way up to the Supreme Court, and then bring property law back to 19th century jurisprudence.”