Men Who Mailed Drugs to Quakertown, Coopersburg Sentenced to Prison

Four members of a former drug trafficking organization that distributed methamphetamine and cocaine by mailing the drugs to locations throughout eastern Pennsylvania–including some in the Coopersburg and Quakertown areas–were recently sentenced to federal prison terms, Acting United States Attorney Nelson S.T. Thayer Jr. announced Friday.

According to a news release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Eastern District of Pennsylvania, organization leader Michael Sanchez, 33, of Los Angeles, was sentenced in January to 14½ years in prison, and Aived Abel Garcia, 26, of Chula Vista, Calif., was sentenced this week to 70 months in prison. Earlier this month, Miguel Aliaga, 37, of Whitehall, Lehigh County, and Avrian Haywood Mack, 22, of Reading, Berks County, were each sentenced to 60 months in prison. The sentences for Aliaga, Mack and Garcia will be followed by five years of supervised release, the release said.

“The defendants were charged by indictment with drug trafficking offenses in January 2024 and entered guilty pleas late last year,” the release noted.

According to investigators, Sanchez oversaw and managed the mailing of packages of drugs from California to Pennsylvania, where other members of the organization would pick them up and distribute them to dealers.

“These defendants took part in a cross-country conspiracy that brought significant amounts of methamphetamine and cocaine from California to the Eastern District of Pennsylvania,” Thayer said. “This office and our law enforcement partners at every level will continue to investigate and prosecute such traffickers, as we work to take illegal drugs off the street and make our communities safer.”

The case was investigated by a multi-agency task force including Homeland Security Investigations offices in Philadelphia, Allentown, Los Angeles, San Diego and LAX; the Bucks County District Attorney’s office’s Drug Strike Force; Quakertown Borough Police; Pennsylvania State Police; Richland Township Police; Liberty Mid-Atlantic High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas program; Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department; Berks County Detectives; United States Postal Inspection Service; Pennsylvania Office of the Attorney General; Bensalem Police; Montgomery County Detectives; and the Orange County Probation Office.

Assistant United States Attorney Lizmar Bosques and Special Assistant United States Attorney Thomas Gannon, assigned from the Bucks County District Attorney’s Office, are the prosecutors in the case, the release said.

This local news story was reported with generative AI assistance.