Pico Rivera man sentenced to federal prison for drug-related money laundering – San Gabriel Valley Tribune

A Pico Rivera man was sentenced Monday, July 8, to four years in federal prison for his role in a money laundering conspiracy that prosecutors say moved millions of dollars in drug narcotics proceeds from the United States to international drug trafficking organizations.

Gustavo Adolfo Aldana-Martinez, 57, was sentenced in downtown Los Angeles by U.S. District Judge R. Gary Klausner, who also ordered him to pay a $25,000 fine, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

Aldana-Martinez was convicted in December 2021 of one count of conspiracy to launder monetary instruments.

Prosecutors said Aldana-Martinez accepted wire transfers of drug proceeds sent from an undercover account run by agents with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. After nearly $300,000 was sent to a bank account in the name of his bogus business, Aldana-Martinez made a series of wire transfers to unrelated companies to pay for electronic items that were then shipped to Colombia and Mexico, where they were sold to produce laundered funds for the drug traffickers, federal prosecutors said.

Prosecutors said Aldana-Martinez laundered about $15.5 million between 2015 and 2017.

The man who oversaw the money laundering enterprise — Daniel Shaun Zilke, known as “The Englishman,” 49, of Mexico City — pleaded guilty in December to conspiracy to aid and abet drug distribution, conspiracy to launder money, and obstruction of an official government proceeding for stealing and attempting to cover up the theft of $150,000 in DEA undercover funds.

Zilke is expected to be sentenced in the coming months.

The third defendant in the case —Jeffrey Mark Thompson, known as “The Cowboy,” 62, of Springtown, Texas — pleaded guilty in November to conspiracy to aid and abet drug distribution, conspiracy to launder money, and money laundering. He is expected to be sentenced in the coming months. Zilke and Thompson face decades in prison.

A fourth defendant — Juan Rachid Dergal-Zulbaran, 49, of Mexico City — is a fugitive, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

According to court documents, the investigation into Zilke’s operation started in late 2015 when an undercover DEA agent posing as a money launderer contacted Zilke. When he pleaded guilty, Zilke admitted telling the undercover “he had a client in Europe who needed hundreds of millions of dollars moved to Mexico, and that he could use the bank account of a charity in Dallas, Texas to assist in laundering the money,” prosecutors said.

The undercover agent agreed to assist Zilke by allowing him to use bank accounts associated with cash-intensive businesses. Subsequently, Zilke and his associates arranged numerous pickups of large sums of cash from drug traffickers in cities all over the country, funds that were deposited at Zilke’s direction into various bank accounts, including one controlled by Aldana-Martinez and another in the name of Thompson’s purported charity, Peace Through Water Foundation.