The price to party without inhibitions in Southern California likely just went up.
Federal law enforcement officials announced this afternoon that a grand jury has indicted 15 individuals in Los Angeles and Orange County for conspiracy to possess and distribute at least $17 million worth of the party drug commonly called “ecstasy.”
During the investigation, DEA and Beverly Hills police confiscated 1,134,000 ecstasy tablets, 33 kilograms of cocaine, more than $500,000 cash and 21 firearms.
According to federal officials, the kingpin the case is Jimmy Luong, 29, of Monterey Park.
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Two Orange County residents–Duy Nguyen, 22, of Fountain Valley; and Long Nguyen, 22, of Santa Ana–worked in Luong's operation and have been arrested, according to a press announcement by Thom Mrozek, public affairs officer for the United States Attorney's Office in LA.
WIth the indictments, DEA Special Agent Timothy J. Landrum boasted, “We have crushed a criminal organization that distributed huge quantities of ecstasy tablets.”
The feds claim that the group distributed hundreds of thousands of the illegal ecstasy pills every month.
Several weeks ago, a young female allegedly suffered a fatal overdose on the drug at an LA rave party.
— R. Scott Moxley / OC Weekly
CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.
