Vallejo man gets six years in heroin trafficking case
Case related to Aryan Brotherhood investigation
A Vallejo man was sentenced to more than six years in federal prison, months after he agreed to plead guilty to heroin trafficking to avoid a potential maximum sentence of 40 years, court records show.
Brian Butler, 61, was sentenced July 12 by Chief U.S. District Judge Kimberly Mueller, who agreed with a prosecution request for the 77-month sentence. Butler will be credited for the two years he’s spent in federal custody in Sacramento awaiting a resolution in his case.
Prosecutors wrote Butler deserved the sentence because he’s “a significant drug trafficker with a lengthy criminal history.” It was unclear whether the defense filed court papers requesting a lower sentence; a document was filed within a day of the prosecution sentencing memo, but it is sealed and its contents are unknown.
“Moreover, Butler’s crimes were not the product of youthful indiscretion,” assistant U.S. Attorney Jason Hitt wrote. “He committed these crimes in his 50’s, after sustaining a number of significant prior convictions.”
Butler was implicated in heroin trafficking in 2016, after he sold drugs to an undercover DEA agent, on one occasion meeting with the agent inside a Home Depot in Vallejo to conduct a $2,950 drug deal, court records show.
After he was indicted, prosecutors formally linked his case to “related” investigations into the Aryan Brotherhood prison gang, writing that while investigating Butler, “the United States obtained wiretaps which resulted, in part, in the evidence” leading to indictments against more than a dozen Aryan Brotherhood members and a Sacramento-area heroin ring. In court records requesting Butler’s 77-month sentence, though, Hitt wrote, “the investigation of Butler did not reveal any links or connections to the larger investigation and indictment returned against members of the Aryan Brotherhood for RICO-related offenses.”
Additionally, one of Butler’s suspected heroin suppliers, a Turlock man allegedly caught with 300 early-stage opium plants, is facing federal charges in a separate case.
Butler pleaded guilty in April, signing a plea agreement that named his co-defendant, Vincente Castro Zavaleta, as one of his suppliers. He admitted to one heroin deal with an undercover agent, where he picked up drugs from Zavaleta at a fast food restaurant in Concord then drove to the Vallejo Home Depot.
Butler remains in the Sacramento jail awaiting transfer to the Bureau of Prisons, according to jail records. After his sentence, he will be on supervised release for four years.