The story of how a clean-cut, 29-year-old college drop-out and Eagle Scout named Aaron Shamo built a fentanyl trafficking empire.
In this Monday, Sept. 9, 2019, photo, Rod and Tonya Meldrum hold a portrait of their son Devin Meldrum, in Provo, Utah. He suffered from debilitating cluster headaches and fatally overdosed after taking a single fentanyl-laced counterfeit oxycodone pill purchased from a dark-web store run by Aaron Shamo, according to his family and authorities. Shamo was not charged in Meldrum’s death, and his lawyers have argued that and other alleged overdoses can’t be definitively linked to him.
The case against Shamo detailed how white powder up to 100 times stronger than morphine was bought online from a laboratory in China and arrived in Utah via international mail; it was shaped into perfect-looking replicas of oxycodone tablets in the press that thumped in Shamo’s basement and resold on the internet’s black markets. Then it was routed back into the postal system in thousands of packages addressed to homes across this country awash with prescription painkiller addiction.
This crisis began in the 1990s and has since has spiraled into waves, each worse than the one before: Prescription opioids spread addiction, then a crackdown on prescribing paved the road to heroin, which led to fentanyl — a synthetic opioid made entirely in a laboratory. Traffickers added it to heroin to boost its potency and profitability. That transition happened slowly at first, then with extraordinary ferocity.
It was a frightening development: The DEA estimates 3.4 million Americans misuse prescription painkillers, compared to 475,000 heroin users — meaning the pool potentially exposed is 10 times bigger. “Any moron can basically become a major drug kingpin by dealing in fentanyl,” said Vigil. “You can have somebody with an IQ minus 100 who becomes an overnight multimillionaire.”Aaron Shamo dreamed of entrepreneurial riches. He idolized Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, and studied self-improvement books like “Think and Grow Rich.”
They learned what they needed on the web, searching with queries like “how to ship drugs.” It was so easy. They expanded, ordering drugs in bulk, breaking them down and selling at a mark-up, all while barely having to leave the house. Shamo enlisted his gym buddy, Jonathan Luke Paz, to help him. Shamo ordered fentanyl online from China, set up the pill press in the basement and bought dyes and stamps to match popular pharmaceuticals. Then they handed them over to the local dealer, who tested them on his own customers. The first batches were weak or speckled in color, he told them, or didn’t react like real oxycodone when users heated it on tinfoil to smoke it.“Close to being money in the bank,” the dealer messaged Shamo.
But his relationship ended, his web design business sputtered and he became estranged from his family, said Barry, a roommate who spoke on the condition that his last name not be published. His emotions toggled between sorrow and elation, and he struggled with substance abuse. Later that spring, 40 pills were shipped to a 21-year-old in Washington, D.C. He died in his dorm room 11 days later.
Shamo offered steep discounts for bulk buyers. Tonge, one of his distributors, testified that she began to question Shamo’s claim that he was helping patients who couldn’t get medication: Why would one person need 5,000 pills? Crandall and his girlfriend posted photos on Instagram of trips to Laos, Thailand, Singapore, kayaking and partying. But he was running out of money and agreed to become a remote customer service representative. The list of people accepting packages from China ballooned to more than a dozen. Everyone was making easy money and getting text messages from Shamo dotted with “lol” and “awesome!”But even as he cheered himself on, there were signs of danger.
Gygi said he thought the hundreds of envelopes he’d put in the mail contained the party drugs he sometimes took himself. Told it was fentanyl, the agent recalled, Gygi drooped. In Shamo’s sock drawer, agents found stack after stack of cash. There was more money in a safe in the closet. Agents totaled up more than $1.2 million, not including the money he had tied up in Bitcoin or bags he’d stashed with his family. Investigators eventually caught up with Paz, who Shamo paid around a dollar per pill, and he surrendered $800,000 more.
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