HSI investigation leads to sentencing of marijuana trafficker

NEW YORK — The primary member of a massive racketeering organization was sentenced Monday to 20 years in prison at the federal courthouse in Manhattan following an investigation by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Homeland Security Investigations (HSI).

Oscar Rodriguez, 37, was sentenced on racketeering, conspiracy and marijuana trafficking charges a following his conviction in April 2014. Rodriguez’s convictions stem from “Operation Green Venom,” a coordinated multi-agency investigation led by HSI. With this conviction, a total of more than 50 defendants have been convicted in this and related cases.  Those defendants include former Roc-A-Fella music founder Kareem Burke and High Times Magazine Editor Matthew Woodstock Stang.

According to the indictment and evidence presented at trial, Rodriguez was a member of the Rodriguez Enterprise, a massive racketeering organization whose members sold large quantities of marijuana, engaged in murders and other violent acts, transported and laundered millions of dollars, obstructed justice and committed perjury, and engaged in firearms offenses. 

The Rodriguez Enterprise was led by Manuel Geovanny Rodriguez-Perez, Oscar Rodriguez’s cousin.  Rodriguez’s role in the organization included trafficking truckloads of marijuana, managing a lucrative block in Washington Heights, Manhattan.  He perpetrated violent assaults – including the 2005 near-fatal assault of a young man who sold marijuana for him – and participating in a plot to locate and move the body of another young man who had been strangled to death and buried in a park in the Bronx years earlier.  The assault victim and the murder victim both were targeted for violent retaliation for stealing marijuana from the Rodriguez Enterprise. 

In 2005, Rodriguez also threatened the family of the employee he assaulted, in a successful effort to cause the employee to stop cooperating with state authorities.  Rodriguez participated in these acts on behalf of the Rodriguez Enterprise from at least 1998 through his arrest Oct. 14, 2010.