A 31-year-old Garden Grove man arrested last year by federal and state police in Massachusetts for allegedly piloting a plane loaded with 74 pounds of marijuana pleaded not guilty on Tuesday, according to news reports.
Using police drug sniffing dogs, officials claim they found three duffel bags loaded with pot as well as $77,000 in cash when they searched Hoang Nguyen's plane in September 2011.
Nguyen, who has lived in Oregon, is free from custody on bail.
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Authorities valued the 74 pounds of marijuana at $370,000.
Federal agents tracked Nguyen's single-engine, 2003
plane as it departed Santa Monica, CA on its cross country trip to Illinois and
then Massachusetts.
According to Federal Aviation Administration
records, the plane is registered to a Maricopa County, Arizona company,
Olson Aviation LLC.
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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.