Opinion ID: 4175415
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Heading: The Cast and Crew of the Conspiracy

Text: The story of the Gonsalves brothers' drug-trafficking conspiracy begins around the end of 2009, when Stanley (Joshua wasn't on board yet) started buying oxycodone pills in bulk from Florida resident John Willis. Stanley's objective: to get (and resell for profit) as many pills as possible. Here's how the operation worked: both Stanley and Willis paid runners who carried money down to Florida to buy oxycodone pills from Willis, Stanley's primary supplier. Willis (or other members of his Florida operation) hid the pills in vitamin bottles, doctored to look never-opened, then gave the bottles to the runners to carry back to Stanley in Massachusetts. Stanley (and members of his Massachusetts-based crew) counted the pills and packaged them into lots of 100. Stanley then sold those lots to lower-level drug dealers. At first, Stanley paid Willis $14 per thirty-milligram pill and sold them to dealers for $19 each. Over time, the wholesale and the resale prices went up to $17 and $21, respectively. Dealers sold the pills on the street for $30 a pop. Joshua joined his brother's conspiracy in 2010, shortly after he was released from jail on an unrelated charge. At first Joshua worked as a runner, but he eventually took over some of Stanley's responsibilities in the conspiracy, such as buying pills from suppliers. He sold some pills on his own, too. - 3 - The runners for the Gonsalves brothers--all friends, family, girlfriends, and exes--made regular trips to Florida. At first, they flew. Then they switched to driving after one of the runners was busted in the airport on his way back to Massachusetts carrying a bottle of about 8,000 pills. The runners each transported at least 1,000 pills per trip, though some reported as many as 8,000 or 9,000 per trip, and one reported that she once carried almost 20,000 pills. The brothers' operation flooded the Cape Cod market, bringing in an estimated 371,327 pills in under three years (and that's an allegedly conservative estimate). II. Johnny Willis meets Johnny Law--and so do the Gonsalves Brothers Now, (presumably) unbeknownst to Stanley and Joshua, Willis was the subject of a multi-agency criminal investigation originally initiated by the FBI's Asian Organized Crime Task Force to target two other, Boston-area crime lords. (The Willis-specific branch of the investigation was known as Operation White Devil.) While they were looking into the Willis operation, the FBI-led task force (that also included ATF and IRS2 agents, Massachusetts State Police, plus some Boston police officers to boot) found out about Willis' top customers--the Gonsalves brothers. The FBI-led task force also learned that the Barnstable Police Department and 2 Respectively, these stand for the Federal Bureau of Investigation; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; and the Internal Revenue Service. - 4 - a DEA-led Cape Cod Drug Task Force were already looking into the Gonsalveses' activities, so the task forces joined forces. Operation White Devil culminated in the May 2011 arrest of Willis and some of his henchmen, which turned off the Florida-toMassachusetts pill faucet. Undeterred, the Gonsalves brothers regrouped and started selling oxycodone bought from new suppliers. But, the post-Willis era did not last long because by this point, law enforcement had new information from arrested Willis crew members, as well as from their own posse of confidential informants (CIs), clueing them in on more of the particulars of the Gonsalves brothers' illegal dealings. A tip from one informant, CI-1, led to the February 2012 arrest of Joshua and crew member Katelyn Shaw (Joshua's thengirlfriend) and the seizure of over twenty grand in cash, drug paraphernalia, and a good lot of oxycodone pills. About a month later, police seized another $75,000 from another Gonsalves crew member (turned informant) which had been earmarked for an oxycodone resupply; and since that was the end of the money, the seizure brought the Gonsalveses' operation to a near-halt. On November 1, 2012, a grand jury indicted the brothers on a charge of Conspiracy to Possess with Intent to Distribute and Conspiracy to Distribute Oxycodone in violation of 21 U.S.C. § 846. A second superseding indictment, issued eighteen months later on May 8, 2014, further charged (1) Money Laundering Conspiracy in - 5 - violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1956(h); (2) multiple counts of Concealment Money Laundering in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1956(a)(1)(B)(i); (3) Possession of a Firearm in Furtherance of a Drug Trafficking Conspiracy in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 924(c); (4) Drug and Money Laundering Forfeiture allegations under 21 U.S.C. § 853 and 18 U.S.C. § 982(a)(1); and, against Stanley only, (5) Unlawful Monetary Transactions in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1957.