Cocaine kingpin will do way less time

A Southern California cocaine kingpin — whose exploits have prompted criminal investigations spanning the globe and captured the attention of Hollywood — is getting out of prison early.

Owen Hanson has shaved roughly nine years off his 21-year prison term, according to records filed in San Diego federal court. The motion for a sentence reduction and all supporting documents were filed under seal. The order granting the request merely cites “extraordinary and compelling reasons.”

Oftentimes, that’s code for cooperation with authorities, and, at the very least, we know that Hanson played nice for Australian prosecutors by testifying for them in a related case.

Hanson, 41, has been in federal custody since his 2015 arrest at a Carlsbad golf course, the result of an undercover FBI sting targeting his global drug-trafficking and illegal sports-betting empire.

Raised in Redondo Beach, Hanson earned a walk-on spot on the University of Southern California football team in 2004, giving him status and access to an elite crowd. He leveraged that to kick-start his illegal enterprises. He trafficked cocaine, methamphetamine, ecstasy and heroin in the U.S., Mexico, Canada, Australia and elsewhere. And he ran an offshore sportsbetting website that relied on violent enforcers to collect debts.

He made millions.

It all began to unravel when he linked up with a professional gambler he saw as a way to launder money through casinos. One night, the gambler, RJ “Robin Hood 702” Cipriani, lost $2.5 million at the tables in Australia, was threatened and ran. But not before he reported a man with a gun in the Sydney hotel room of a Hanson associate, which led to police discovering $702,000 in drug money. More on that later.

Back in the U.S., Hanson stalked Cipriani with the help of a private investigator, sending graphic threats to him and his wife, and pouring fake blood on his parents’ grave. Cipriani went to the San Diego FBI. Hanson ultimately pleaded guilty to a racketeering conspiracy and conspiracy to distribute drugs. The investigation into his organization opened doors to even bigger criminal enterprises. The undercover agent on the Hanson case had been able to snag an encrypted cellphone, which was the key to the FBI’S subsequent take down of a Canadian operation that supplied such devices to biker gangs, drug cartels and corrupt officials around the world.

That then sparked an even more ambitious FBI undercover sting, also based in San Diego, that supplied fake encrypted phones to criminals globally.

As a reporter covering the San Diego federal court for nine years, I followed each of these cases closely. I attended Hanson’s sentencing. So I was surprised when Cipriani called me Thursday to tell me of Hanson’s rather large sentence reduction. It had been granted by U.S. District Judge William Hayes in November, but Cipriani was only now learning of it.

“It’s troubling he’s going to walk away from a sentence that should’ve been 21 years,” Cipriani said. “That’s not justice, especially with what he tried to do to me and to my mother and father’s grave, and to a host of other people he victimized. And what about all the people he lured with drugs? Who knows what happened to their lives.”

Hanson agreed to travel to Australia in 2020 to testify as a prosecution witness in the case of an attorney accused of assisting Hanson and his associates with that problematic bag of hotel-room cash. The lawyer helped falsify the claim that the cash was for a notorious rock promoter, a story that Hanson admitted on the stand “was all made up. The money was from cocaine.” The lawyer was convicted.

Hanson’s new release date is June 26, 2025. After that he will spend the next 10 years on supervised release.

There had been previous talk of Australia possibly extraditing Hanson to face charges there once his U.S. case had cleared. But it's unclear if that remains on the table. Until then, Hollywood is competing for the story. A book is already in the works.

kristina.davis@sduniontribune.com