Authorities Uncover $8 Million-a-Week Drug Operation in Pennsylvania

It was a typical, single-family house with a landscaped yard and Christmas decorations in a quiet neighborhood in eastern Pennsylvania. But this week investigators, acting on a tip, uncovered a secret in the basement — a drug operation worth an estimated $8 million a week.

On Wednesday, prosecutors announced that 11 people were charged with felony drug offenses in the bust, which was believed to be one of the largest in the county.

“This is a regular, middle-class, 9-to-5 neighborhood,” Matthew D. Weintraub, the Bucks County district attorney, said in an interview on Friday. “This is the place you would think of as Middle America.”

When Mr. Weintraub announced the drug bust on Wednesday during a news conference, local television stations showed footage of the house at 669 Cheryl Drive in Warminster Township and its broken window and door. Acting on an anonymous tip received in July, F.B.I., county and state law enforcement agents carried out the raid on Tuesday night.

A statement from Mr. Weintraub’s office said that investigators found more than 130 pounds of loose heroin and fentanyl and thousands of baggies stuffed with smaller quantities of the drugs throughout the house.

In the basement, 10 work stations were set up to package the drugs, along with other equipment and dilution agents for processing. About $32,000 in cash was fastened into bundles with rubber bands. Records tracked the production of packaged heroin and fentanyl, the district attorney’s statement said, and the authorities seized a loaded handgun.

“The drug trafficking organization processed hundreds of thousands of doses of heroin and fentanyl worth an estimated $8 million every week,” the statement said.

Two men were charged with running the operation, prosecutors said. The men, Dariel Vasquez, 38, and Moises Rodriguez, 42, were arraigned in Bucks County District Court on Tuesday night on felony drug charges, including manufacturing and delivering drugs, according to court documents.

The men used vehicles to transport heroin and fentanyl to the house to be repacked, and then moved it out of the residence after packaging, the documents said. They are being held at the Bucks County Correctional Facility, on $10 million bail.

Nine other people were charged with various offenses related to the manufacture and processing of the drugs, prosecutors said: Luigi Ortega, 30; Delvin Perez, 36; Roberto Espinal, 46; Jose Luis-Morales, 45; Carlos Garcia-Perez, 33; Eleni Saturrie, 38; Yocasta Maria-Mercedes, 37; Nuris Martinez, 45; and Luis Torres, 31.

They were being held on $5 million bail, the documents said.

A preliminary arraignment is scheduled for Thursday, according to court documents.

Mr. Weintraub said in the interview Friday that the authorities estimated the weekly worth of the operation from evidence gathered during the raid, including 200 discarded wrappers from bricks of drugs that had weighed a kilogram each.

“This is just trash at this point,” he said of the used wrappers. “But if you connect all the dots, in the very recent past, 200 kilos passed through that location. You get a snapshot.”

“Anecdotally, that is a massive amount of product being moved in Bucks County,” he said.

Warminster Township is about 18 miles north of Philadelphia, with a population of more than 32,000 people. Nearby Philadelphia County has the highest overdose rate of any of the 10 most populous counties in America, as The New York Times recently reported.

Pennsylvania is among the places in the United States that have been struggling with the opioid crisis. In 2017, more than 5,400 Pennsylvanians died of opioid overdoses, which would include heroin, fentanyl and prescription opioids, according to April Hutcheson, a spokeswoman for the state’s Department of Health.

Patrick Trainor, a special agent for the Drug Enforcement Administration, said 231 of the deaths were in Bucks County. But he said the seizure in the county had added relevance because of its proximity to Philadelphia.

“This is a substantial seizure,” he said. “We often see mill houses and packaging houses are very often in quieter, more residential locations. They are rarely in locations where the drugs are being sold.”

In the interview Friday, Mr. Weintraub, who has served as district attorney for more than two years, said the raid shattered one of the largest such operations that he could recall in the county.

“Unfortunately here in this area we have the purest and cheapest heroin and fentanyl in the country,” he said.

He said the smaller baggies found in the house each held about 0.03 grams of drugs, or about the weight of a grain of rice, estimated to be sold for $5 to $10. They had brand stamps — Wild Wolf, Domino, True Religion, Black Panther — that have been associated with fatal drug overdoses that law enforcement officers have seen in the county, he said.

Mr. Weintraub said the 11 defendants had been renting the house. Neighbors told local news outlets that the occupants were casually friendly, but that some of the activity at the house seemed unusual.

“They would back their cars into the garage, which didn’t fit a car,” a neighbor, Steve Puglisi, told ABC’s WPVI. “You hear the cars like they were taking them apart, doing something. All the neighbors would say something. Then we would tell someone we knew in law enforcement and they would say, ‘Don’t worry about it.’ I guess they were investigating it.”

Mr. Weintraub added that he did not know the source of the drugs and where they were sold.

“It is very fair to say the investigation is not over,” he said.