An investigative trail (or line?) led a Riverside-based coalition of drug enforcement cops to an empty house in the 23300 block of Red Robin Lane in Lake Forest–and 88 pounds of cocaine with a street value pegged at $4 million.
It also led to the arrests of Julio Cesar Perez-Arellano of Aliso Viejo and Tomas Agustin Della Rocca of Lake Forest for suspected possession and distribution of blow.
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The law enforcement operation was led by the Inland CrackDown Allied Task Force (INCA), whose primary focus is on cocaine distribution and money laundering in the Inland Empire region of Southern California.
Investigators were keeping watch Friday night when they noticed two men leaving the Red Robin Lane home, near Cavanaugh Park. Task force officers asked the Orange County Sheriff's Department to pull the pair over on the 5 freeway, where deputies discovered an empty compartment in the men's car. They were later identified as Rocca and Perez-Arellano.
A search warrant was served at 2 a.m. Saturday on the Lake Forest home, where a similar compartment in a second vehicle parked in the garage was loaded with 40 kilos of cocaine, according to authorities.
The home was empty, save for a bed and television. The task force figures the abode was used solely to store cocaine before the drugs were distributed across the country.
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OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.