SAN JOSE — Maybe Jesus Salamanca-Benitez should have stayed at the Panda Express assembly line.
As an employee of the popular Chinese food chain living in Mexico, Salamanca-Benitez was “in the throes of a gambling addiction” and struggling to make ends meet, his attorney wrote in court filings. His solution was to broker several high-end methamphetamine deals over the phone, leading to a drug courier taking a total of 30 pounds of the drug to an undercover DEA agent in San Jose and Redwood City, court records show.
The 2021 undercover drug bust came with major repercussions to Salamanca-Benitez, who was sentenced to 13 years in federal prison earlier this month. Court records say he was arrested in 2022, after coming into the United States through Southern California, then brought to San Jose to face federal charges. He pleaded guilty to a federal methamphetamine trafficking offense earlier this year.
Prosecutors painted Salamanca-Benitez, 31, as a well-connected drug dealer who had worked for an organization tied to the Nueva Plaza Cartel. He has a previous conviction in Washington, stemming from “very similar” allegations, prosecutors wrote in a sentencing memo.
“This Washington conviction stemmed from an investigation into a drug trafficking organization with ties to a Mexican drug cartel that was distributing multi-kilogram quantities of heroin and methamphetamine in western Washington and from California to Washington,” the sentencing memo says. “Specifically, during one transaction, on March 20, 2014, Salamanca and others agreed to deliver six pounds of methamphetamine from the Olympia area of Washington to Vancouver, Washington.”
But Salamanca-Benitez’s lawyer rejected the notion that he is some sort of “kingpin,” describing him instead as a man who was “desperate” for money, working at Panda Express and doing home repairs on the side, and using much of the proceeds to fuel his drug and gambling addictions. He falsely painted himself as a high-roller in the methamphetamine world, organized the California drug deal, but then ran into a road block, a defense sentencing memo says.
“He was clearly no high level manager: he couldn’t find a single person willing to drive the methamphetamine to the buyer for weeks,” Assistant Federal Public Defender Gabriela Bischof wrote in court filings.