A flight attendant and 2011 Indiana beauty pageant winner is accused of using her job as a flight attendant to smuggle profits from a Mexican cartel.
Glenis Zapata34, who was crowned Miss Indiana Latina in 2011, is named in an indictment filed by a federal grand jury in Chicago for transporting hundreds of thousands of dollars in drug proceeds.
According to ABC 7, while Zapata worked as a flight attendant he also dealt with the movement of cash for a criminal organization aboard commercial airplanes to Mexico, as well as a private jet.
Detectives estimate that the former beauty queen moved around $170,000 on August 7, 2019, and allegedly repeated the operation on September 10 of the same year, but with 140,000, giving a total of $310,000. In the accusation they point out that this money came from illegal activities.
Her sister helped her “launder” the money
Like Glenis, her sister Ilenis, 33, is part of the prosecution. She is an employee of an Indiana bank and supposedly helped launder drug trafficking profits by exchanging low denomination bills by others of greater denomination. A second bank employee, identified as Georgina Bañuelos, is also accused.
Both Ilenis Zapata and Bañuelos “knowingly and intentionally failed to file monetary reports for the transactions,” as required by federal law, the indictment states.
Authorities say the leader of the drug trafficking organization is the fugitive Oswaldo Espinosaalias “Scrambler”, 41 years old.
From 2018 to 2023, Espinosa allegedly moved cocaine from Mexico to Chicago and other cities using various stash houses to inventory the drugs and cash.
Hundreds of thousands of dollars seized
The organization allegedly operated from 2018 to 2023. The traffickers smuggled drugs using semi-trailer trucks and a private jet that had flown from Toluca, Mexico, via Houston to the International Airport in Gary, Indiana, where authorities seized it in 2021.
Court documents say the traffickers operated in towns and cities across the United States, using warehouses, commercial garages and “stash places” such as apartments and offices, to store and pick up packages and send cash.
Law enforcement seized hundreds of thousands of dollars linked to the network throughout 2019 and 2020 in Illinois, Indiana, Maryland, Tennessee and Florida. They kept paper and electronic ledgers to track their debts for cocaine, drugs, cash payments and transfers.
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