Through secret wiretaps, electronic surveillance and arrests of alleged couriers, federal agents traced a man to Oregon and identified him as the leader of a multi-state drug trafficking ring with direct ties to Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel, records show.

The monthslong investigation led to the single biggest seizure of fentanyl in the United States, the nation’s top law enforcement officials said.

But when agents raided Heriberto Salazar Amaya’s most recent home in Salem and a nearby storage unit he leased, they found no drugs, but $2.8 million in bundles of $100 bills stashed in a black duffel bag and a black backpack in his house, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration.

“The top guy -- he insulated himself. He had no drugs on him. He had millions of dollars. He had a Mercedes. He had a truck. That’s what these cartels do. The highest leaders insulate themselves,” U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a televised news conference last week as she pointed to a photo of Salazar Amaya.

Court records filed in Oregon and New Mexico provide a detailed look at the inner workings of the sprawling network, how it moved drugs and its massive profits.

DEA agents, working with state, local and tribal officers and the Internal Revenue Service, used undercover operations, trackers placed on vehicles, physical surveillance and monitoring of financial accounts to identify Salazar Amaya and his co-defendants, according to court records.

They coordinated raids in five states on April 28 and arrested 16 people, including Salazar Amaya, a Mexican national who had been in Salem for a short time and moved around various states to avoid detection, prosecutors said.

Salazar Amaya, 36, received orders from customers and dispatched couriers to deliver drugs in a broad swath of the West, including Albuquerque, Denver, Phoenix, Las Vegas, Layton, Utah and Salem over about nine months that ended with his arrest, prosecutors said.

Investigators identified Phoenix as Salazar Amaya’s “source city” for drugs smuggled in from Mexico, which he then arranged to distribute, according to court records.

Bondi and DEA Acting Administrator Director Robert Murphy said the DEA confiscated about 4.2 million fentanyl pills – the most at one time – as well as 11.5 kilograms of fentanyl powder, 79 pounds of methamphetamine, 4.5 kilograms of heroin and 7.6 kilograms of cocaine, according to prosecutors .

U.S. Attorney Ryan Ellison of New Mexico, who is leading the prosecution, said the teams of officers “dismantled one of the largest and most dangerous fentanyl operations in U.S. history.”

In addition to the drugs seized, DEA agents also confiscated a total of $4.4 million in cash , 41 guns and seven vehicles, according to a detention memo. Ellison said among the firearms were ghost guns and guns with switch devices that turn them into automatic fire.

Agents began intercepting Salazar Amaya’s phone conversations and text messages through wiretaps placed on three phones he used starting in August 2024, according to a search warrant affidavit.

“The couriers followed a daily schedule, which involved load vehicles and stash locations, all coordinated by HSA (Salazar Amaya), to conduct bulk deliveries across several metropolitan areas,” the detention memo said.

Salazar Amaya would rent Airbnb and Vrbo properties for himself and his couriers and was spotted mostly staying in Phoenix, Las Vegas, Lakewood, Colorado, and Ogden, Utah, according to the affidavit.

Investigators had never seen him travel to Oregon before January and believed he was previously living in Las Vegas, according to the affidavit.

Agents suspected that his “transiency is designed to evade law enforcement detection,” a DEA agent wrote in the affidavit.

In some intercepted calls, Salazar Amaya was heard telling customers that he operated in multiple cities, such as Denver and Colorado Springs, the affidavit said.

At other times, they tracked him driving from Phoenix to the New Mexico border and then passing the so-called “load vehicle” off to his couriers, the affidavit said.

Another man arrested in November identified Salazar Amaya as the “primary operator” for the drug ring with a direct line to the Sinaloa cartel, according to the court documents.

The investigation into the trafficking ring took hold last August and lasted through April, prosecutors said.

Less than two weeks before Salazar Amaya’s arrest, agents intercepted an April 16 phone call he placed about 6:30 p.m. to another man, Cesar Acuna Moreno, instructing him to get “la gringa’s” order ready, according to the affidavit in support of a search warrant.

Acuna Moreno asked what the order was.

Salazar Amaya then told him, according to the affidavit: “diez papas” (10 potatoes), “treinta tres cajas” (33 boxes) and reminded him to put in “diez Leones” (10 lions).

He told Acuna Moreno the meeting time was set for 7:30 and a customer named Bacardi “would give you half and owe half,” which agents took to mean money owed for the drugs, the affidavit said.

The agents said the language was code for various drugs: Potatoes referenced pound amounts of methamphetamine; boxes for bundles of 10,000 fentanyl pills; leones meant a higher quality or potency of specific fentanyl pills labeled “Leon,” a brand unique to Salazar Amaya and confiscated by agents at various couriers’ homes.

In November, agents said they captured a conversation between Salazar Amaya and another co-defendant, Brian Sedillo.

Investigators suspected the two were arranging a drug sale at Sedillo’s home in Albuquerque, a DEA agent wrote in the affidavit.

Two days after watching what they believed was the drug delivery to Sedillo’s home, federal officers raided the house with a search warrant and seized about 150,000 suspected fentanyl pills labeled “Leon” and “GSV,” about $72,000 in cash, multiple guns and silencers, the affidavit said.

They found the “Leon” and “GSV” pills in the trunk of a vehicle parked in the garage and another 22,000 pills labeled “Diablo” hidden in a vent of the home, according to a federal complaint filed against Sedillo.

Sedillo then identified Salazar Amaya as the “primary operator” of the ring “for the Sinaloa cartel” and identified other couriers involved, according to the DEA.

Sedillo said Salazar Amaya supplied the pills marked “Leon” and “GSV,” the affidavit said. He knew Salazar Amaya as “Juan” and identified him by a photo, though he said he had only seen Salazar Amaya once years earlier.

Salazar Amaya not only repeatedly changed locations in response to police pressure but changed his phone number after the arrests of couriers tied to him, DEA agents said.

After Sedillo’s arrest, Salazar Amaya got a new phone number.

On Jan. 5, Salazar Amaya appeared to be traveling from Ogden, Utah, to Oregon, based on GPS data that pinged three of his phones along the trip. Six days later, agents tracked two of Salazar Amaya’s phones leaving the Salem area in Oregon and arriving in Phoenix the next day.

On Feb. 7, an Oregon state trooper pulled over a silver Ford F-150 truck with a New Mexico temporary tag that appeared to be traveling with a gray GMS Yukon bearing a New Mexico plate in La Grande. At the same time, agents received pings from Salazar Amaya’s three phones in the La Grande area, the affidavit said.

The state trooper stopped the truck due to its temporary tag and saw a lot of cash in plain view. Salazar Amaya was driving, provided a New Mexico driver’s license and vehicle registration and told the trooper he was going to be staying with his family in Salem for about two months, prosecutors said. The truck’s registration came back to the name of a co-defendant.

On April 1, intercepted phone calls suggested Salazar Amaya and a girlfriend were calling Portland General Electric to set up service for a residence in Salem, which he said he had been living in for a week. He provided his full name to PGE, his date of birth and email address, according to the affidavit.

A Republican state lawmaker in Oregon suggested Salazar Amaya was in Oregon because it’s a sanctuary state but court records make no mention of the sanctuary status of any of the states cited.

Ten of the 16 charged are U.S. citizens, according to the DEA and the New Mexico U.S. Attorney’s Office.

Investigators seized most of the drugs and guns in Albuquerque and Santa Fe, New Mexico, and the cash and vehicles from Salem, Phoenix and Las Vegas, according to prosecutors.

DEA agents in New Mexico asked their counterparts in Salem to help find Salazar Amaya’s home.

Federal agents ultimately set up a pole camera allowing electronic surveillance of his newly built home in northeast Salem.

They later reviewed footage and saw Salazar Amaya and a woman walk out of the front door of the home toward an orange F-150 truck parked in the driveway on April 23, according to the search warrant affidavit.

The woman returned to the house, but Salazar Amaya later walked to a gray Ford Bronco Raptor with Colorado plates that backed into his driveway. Salazar Amaya opened the trunk, unloaded items and took them into the home, the affidavit said.

Federal agents placed Salazar Amaya at the home on April 23, 24 and 25, leading up to his arrest April 28. He was found there with his girlfriend, her mother and his infant daughter, tons of cash, seven phones and documents regarding a storage unit he leased from Highway 22 Storage on 50th Avenue Northwest in Salem, investigators said.

Agents obtained another search warrant that day for the unit, J21. They busted in at 12:45 p.m. but found “zero items,” the search warrant return said.

“The unit was completely empty,” it said.

Salazar Amaya is being held in Oregon before his return to New Mexico, where he was indicted on charges of conspiracy to distribute fentanyl, illegal reentry to the United States, unlawfully employing undocumented workers and conspiracy to harbor illegal immigrants.

Salazar Amaya is accused of illegally entering the U.S. two times, in 2010 and 2012, and was found both times in Bernalillo County, New Mexico, according to the indictment. He also went by several aliases, including Juan, El Paisa and Viejo, the indictment said.

Ellison, New Mexico’s U.S. attorney, called the scale and potency of drugs seized “sobering.”

The 4.2 million fentanyl pills equates to more than 1.5 million lives potentially saved, “which is nearly enough fentanyl to kill the majority of people in the entire state of New Mexico,” DEA officials said in a statement.

Before this, the DEA in Phoenix held the record for the largest single fentanyl pill seizure of 1.7 million pills in 2021, according to the DEA.

Agents also seized a “fleet of luxury vehicles,” including a Ford Raptor, GMC Denali, F-150 pickup, Mercedes AMG and a Dodge TRX Mammoth, as well as more than $50,000 in jewelry in the investigation.

-- Maxine Bernstein covers federal court and criminal justice. Reach her at 503-221-8212, [email protected], follow her on X @maxoregonian , on Bluesky @maxbernstein.bsky.social or on LinkedIn .

Maxine Bernstein