Cocaine trafficker sentenced to 13 years in prison

April 4 (UPI) -- The Justice department on Thursday sentenced a Dominican Republic national to 13 years and one month in prison for his role in an international conspiracy to traffic more than 2,000 pounds of cocaine into the United States, officials announced.

"From 2014 through May 2019, Lazaro Viton Rodriguez, 55, a long-time resident of the Dominican Republic, participated in a drug trafficking network based in the Dominican Republic that transported cocaine from South America, through the Caribbean, to the United States," a release from the Justice Department said.

Court documents show the drug trafficking network used sailing yachts and sport fishing boats to transport the cocaine, often stopping in various Caribbean ports while transporting the narcotics to create the impression that each voyage was legitimate.

The U.S. Customs and Border Protection's Marine Interdiction Unit stopped one of the vessels, the Casablanca, in November 2018 as it entered U.S. waters near Key Biscayne, Fla. Officers boarded and searched the ship, seizing more than 327 kilograms of cocaine.

Rodriguez was involved in purchasing, registering and maintaining vessels used by the drug trafficking network to transport cocaine, prosecutors said.

"He assisted in registering vessels in the names of straw purchasers, constructed secret compartments on the vessels to hide the cocaine and coordinated with crew members via satellite phone as they sailed to locations in the Caribbean to pick up cocaine," the department said in a release.

Rodriguez pleaded guilty in November to participating in a conspiracy to distribute five kilograms or more of cocaine for importation into the United States.

The New York office of Homeland Security Investigations oversaw the case.