Millennial’s fentanyl empire reveals how easily drug moves around the world
SALT LAKE CITY — The photo that flashed onto the courtroom screen showed a young man dead on his bedroom floor, bare feet poking from the cuffs of his rolled-up jeans. Lurking on a trash can at the edge of the picture was what prosecutors said delivered this death: an ordinary U.S. Postal Service envelope.
It had arrived with 10 round, blue pills inside, the markings of pharmaceutical-grade oxycodone stamped onto the surface. The young man took out two, crushed and snorted them. But the pills were poison, prosecutors said: counterfeits containing fatal grains of fentanyl, a potent synthetic opioid that has written a deadly new chapter in the American opioid epidemic.
The envelope was postmarked from the suburbs of Salt Lake City.
That’s where a clean-cut, 29year-old college dropout and Eagle Scout named Aaron Shamo made himself a millionaire by building a fentanyl trafficking empire with not much more than his computer and the help of a few friends.
For three weeks this summer, those suburban millennials climbed onto the witness stand at his federal trial and offered an unprecedented window into how fentanyl bought and sold online has transformed the global drug trade. There was no testimony of underground tunnels or gangland murders or anything that a wall at the southern border might stop. Shamo called himself a “whitecollar drug dealer,” drew in coworkers from his time at eBay and peppered his messages to them with smiley-face emojis. His attorney called him a fool; his primary defense was that he isn’t smart enough to be a kingpin.
How he and his friends managed to flood the country with a half-million fake oxycodone pills reveals the ease with which fentanyl now moves around the world, threatening to expand the epidemic beyond America’s borders. It is so potent, so easy to transport, experts say, large-scale traffickers no longer require sophisticated networks to send it to any corner of the globe. All they need is a mailbox, internet access and people with an appetite for opioids.
The case against Shamo detailed how white powder up to 100 times stronger than morphine was bought online from a laboratory in China and arrived in Utah via international mail; it was shaped into perfect-looking replicas of oxycodone tablets and resold on the internet’s black markets. Then it was routed back into the postal system in thousands of packages addressed to homes across the U.S., country awash with prescription painkiller addiction.
When Shamo took the stand to try to spare himself a lifetime in prison, he began with a nervous chuckle. He careened from one topic to the next in a monologue prosecutors would later describe as masterful manipulation to convince the jury he thought his drug-dealing was helping people. Customers wrote thank you notes because their doctors refused to prescribe more painkillers, he said. It felt like “a win-win situation” — he got rich and his customers got drugs.
One of them was a struggling 21-year-old named Ruslan Klyuev who died in his bedroom in Daly City, California, the envelope from Utah at his feet. Shamo was charged in connection to that overdose alone, but when investigators scoured the list of customers, they counted dozens more dead.
The question before this jury is being debated all across America: Two decades into the opioid epidemic, is there such a thing as justice for 400,000 lost lives?
The largest civil litigation in history is testing how the pharmaceutical industry should be held accountable for inundating the country with billions of addictive pain pills. Purdue Pharma, seen by many as the primary villain for deceptively pushing the blockbuster drug OxyContin, reached a tentative $12 billion settlement last week with about half the states and roughly 2,000 local governments. Attorneys general who didn’t sign on say the figure is far too low. A trial of other pharmaceutical companies is scheduled for next month, in which communities will contend that their mass marketing of prescription painkillers sparked an epidemic.
This crisis began in the 1990s and has since spiraled into waves, each worse than the one before: Prescription opioids spread addiction, then a crackdown on prescribing paved the road to heroin, which led to fentanyl — a synthetic opioid made entirely in a laboratory. Traffickers added it to heroin to boost its potency and profitability. That transition happened slowly at first, then with extraordinary ferocity.
By 2017, deaths from synthetic opioids had increased more than 800%, to 28,466, dragging the United States’ overall life expectancy down for a third consecutive year for the first time in a century. Fentanyl deaths have been reported abroad, in Canada, Sweden, Estonia, the United Kingdom. Countries with surging prescription opioid addiction, like Australia, fear they are on the brink.
“Fentanyl will be the bubonic plague,” said Mike Vigil, former chief of international operations for the Drug Enforcement Administration, warning that any country with a burgeoning prescription opioid problem could soon find itself following American footsteps. “It’s just a matter of time.”
There are two sources of sup
ply. Mexican cartels and packages shipped direct from China, where it is produced in a huge and under-regulated chemical sector. A Senate investigation last year found massive quantities of fentanyl pouring in from China through the Postal Service.
By the time a seized package heading from China to Utah led investigators to Shamo, he had already turned fentanyl into at least 458,946 potentially poisonous pills, the government said. There are many more like him, officials say, upstart traffickers pressing pure Chinese-made fentanyl into pills with unsophisticated equipment. In a single batch, one pill might have no fentanyl and another enough to kill a person instantly. One agent at Shamo’s trial compared it to making chocolate-chip cookies, only if too many chips ended up in a “cookie,” whoever ate it dropped dead.
For traffickers, the profit margins are irresistible: The DEA estimates a kilogram of fentanyl synthesized for a few thousand dollars could make a dealer more than $1 million.
Aaron Shamo dreamed of en
trepreneurial riches. He idolized Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, and studied self-improvement books like “Think and Grow Rich.”
He and a longtime friend, Drew Crandall, worked at eBay after failed stints in college. But Crandall was fired and Shamo decided it was “unfair” that he still had to work, so he quit. They wanted easy money.
The pair concocted a plan to sell their Adderall, prescribed for attention deficit disorder, on the dark web. There are underground marketplaces there that mimic Amazon or eBay, where guns and drugs and pirated software are traded. Money is exchanged anonymously through cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin.
They learned what they needed on the web, searching with queries like “how to ship drugs.” It was so easy. They expanded, ordering drugs in bulk, breaking them down and selling at a markup, all while barely having to leave the house.
They used the postal system like a drug mule. They recruited friends, offering them $100 to have parcels mailed to their homes, no questions asked.
But the profit margins were slim and their ambitions were greater: They bought a pill press, ordered the sedative alprazolam online from India and watched YouTube videos to figure out how to turn it into fake Xanax, an anti-anxiety medication. Crandall, math minded, created the recipe. They mixed it up by shaking it in mason jars.
Then a local drug dealer made a suggestion to Shamo that would change the course of his life: There was a fortune to be made in producing fake oxycodone.
Crandall fell in love and left the country with his girlfriend, so Shamo enlisted his gym buddy, Jonathan Luke Paz, to help him. Shamo ordered fentanyl online from China, set up the pill press in the basement and bought dyes and stamps to match popular pharmaceuticals.
They went online with the products. Some were specified as fentanyl, but some weren’t, purporting instead to contain 30 milligrams of oxycodone. Shamo named this new store PharmaMaster.
As winter turned to summer,
sales skyrocketed. Pharma-Master started selling thousands of pills a week, charging around $10 each.
On June 6, a relatively small order came in: 10 pills, to be shipped to an apartment house in Daly City, a working-class suburb of San Francisco.
Like every order, it was sent in an encrypted email to two former eBay co-workers in charge of distribution. Alexandrya Tonge and Katherine Bustin counted out the pills in their suburban condo, packaged the shipments and dropped them in the mail.
The envelope arrived at Ruslan Klyuev’s doorstep at 3 p.m. on June 11.
After drinking vodka, Klyuev — who was having personal and professional difficulties — crushed two of the pills with a battery and snorted the powder with a rolled-up sticky note, according to testimony. He started drifting in and out of sleep. He couldn’t stand up.
He was found dead the next day, with fentanyl, alcohol and a substance associated with cocaine in his system.
His was the only death with which Shamo would be charged. His defense attorney, Greg Skordas, argued that neither his death nor any others can be definitely linked with Shamo’s operation.
But in documents, prosecutors connected Shamo to a veritable slaughter:
A 24-year-old man in Seattle overdosed three weeks after he bought pills from Pharma-Master in March 2016.
Later that spring, 40 pills were shipped to a 21-year-old in Washington, D.C. He died in his dorm room 11 days later.
In Utah, a 29-year-old software analyst who used opioids to manage his cluster headaches bought a backup supply from PharmaMaster and died the first time he took one.
Online, Pharma-Master was
getting rave reviews: “These will make u a millionaire in under a year, guarantee,” wrote one shopper who called himself “Trustworthy Money.”
Shamo offered steep discounts for bulk buyers. Tonge testified that she began to question Shamo’s claim that he was helping patients who couldn’t get medication: Why would one person need 5,000 pills?
She and her partner complained that the orders were coming too quickly, so Shamo hired a “runner” named Sean Gygi to pick up the packages and drop them in the mail, dozens of them a day.
The money was pouring in, and out.
Meanwhile, a suspicious customs agent at the Los Angeles International Airport had flagged a box from Shanghai, China, pulled it off the belt and looked inside. The agent found 98.7 grams of fentanyl powder — enough to make almost 100,000 pills. The box was destined for Utah.
Agents looked for more packages making their way from China to Utah, and eventually one arrived, said an agent with Homeland Security Investigations who spoke on condition of anonymity to protect ongoing investigations. On Nov. 8, 2016, postal inspectors seized a box en route from a port city in China known to law enforcement as a fentanyl-trafficking hub. It was addressed to Gygi, Shamo’s “runner,” so agents arrived at his house with a search warrant.
Gygi said he thought the hundreds of envelopes he’d put in the mail contained the party drugs he sometimes took himself. Told it was fentanyl, the agent recalled, Gygi drooped.
He agreed to wear a wire while he picked up the packages. But instead of dropping them in the mail, he delivered them to police.
This single day’s shipment contained 34,828 fentanyl pills destined for homes in 26 states.
Four days later, on Nov. 22, 2016, agents stood on Shamo’s stoop, shouted through a bullhorn, then broke the door down with a battering ram.
Shamo came up the stairs in a T-shirt and shorts, a mask and gloves in his pocket. A pill press downstairs was running, in a room with powder caked on the walls and the furniture.
Others were raiding the stash at Bustin and Tonge’s condo. Veteran vice officers would say they had never seen so many pills, even in international operations. In total, they packed up over 74,000 fentanyl pills awaiting distribution.
In Shamo’s sock drawer, agents found stack after stack of cash. There was more money in a safe in the closet. Agents totaled up more than $1.2 million, not including the money he had tied up in bitcoin or bags he’d stashed with his family. Investigators eventually caught up with Paz, whom Shamo paid around a dollar per pill, and he surrendered $800,000 more.
Crandall was apprehended in 2017 upon returning to the U.S. to get married. He and Shamo’s other ex-partners and packagers pleaded guilty, agreed to testify against their friend and hoped for mercy.
The story they told convinced the jury to convict Shamo of 12 counts, including continuing criminal enterprise, the so-called “kingpin charge” that is typically reserved for drug lords like El Chapo and carries a mandatory life sentence. The jury deadlocked, though, on the 13th count: the death of Klyuev.
The bust was one of the largest operations in the country in 2016. But the fentanyl trade has only grown more sophisticated since.