An accused narco queen and her boyfriend were the alleged masterminds behind a drug ring that funneled fentanyl and methamphetamine into crime-ridden MacArthur Park, bombshell charges revealed.
Mallaly Moreno-Lopez and beau Jackson Tarfur allegedly controlled a string of storefronts along Alvarado Street on the park’s perimeter that were responsible for the lion’s share of illegal narcotics feeding desperate addicts that flooded the park daily, prosecutors said.
A swarm of Drug Enforcement Agency officers raided the couple’s South Los Angeles home on Wednesday as part of a broader operation that led to nearly 40 arrests and the recovery of millions of dollars in potentially deadly drugs.
Both have been hit with federal charges of drug possession and distribution, and they face 10 years to life in prison.
Investigators say they caught the couple delivering narcotics to local storefronts for street-level dealers to sell, according to a criminal complaint.
“Moreno-Lopez, and her boyfriend, Jackson Tarfur, were hand-delivering drugs to the Alvarado Corridor here across from MacArthur Park,” LA’s top federal prosecutor, Bill Essayli, said at the park on Wednesday. “And they were storing and stashing the drugs at the business, as you see across the street.”
The pair is accused of working for the brutal 18th Street gang, a violent, transnational criminal organization thousands of members involved in drug trafficking, extortion and murder.
Moreno-Lopez was born into the gang and both her parents are active in the group, prosecutors said. Her mother was arrested during another raid in March, authorities said.
In one brazen move, investigators watched as the couple allegedly met an associate at a Food4Less to transfer a brown Nike bag stuffed with nearly 1,000 grams of fentanyl and meth, the complaint said.
Moreno-Lopez was even caught on camera unloading a foldable black shopping cart from a white Jeep Wrangler and stuffing it with eight large paper bags before wheeling it into a business, according to prosecutors.
Businesses in MacArthur Park were taxed by the gangs — including MS-13 and the Crazy Riders — whose members rarely, if ever, dealt the drugs themselves, the complaint said.
The scene was so wild that one street-level soldier was spotted by an undercover buyer with guns and piles of drug baggies sitting out in the open on a set of steps.
On Wednesday, when agents descended on Moreno-Lopez and Tarfur’s home, the suspects allegedly tried to get rid of their stash by filling the toilet with baggies of fentanyl in a desperate attempt to flush them.
Meanwhile, DEA agents carried two other simultaneous raids, including one at a Calabasas mansion where agents recovered nearly 40 pounds of fentanyl containing 190,000 doses, with a street value of roughly $10 million. In all, 25 dealers were targeted in the raids and a total of 39 people were arrested.
