Task force wins national award for bust

The regional anti-drug agency based out of Havre, the Tri-Agency Safe Trails Task Force, has won a national award for a case that resulted in 11 indictments, most of them drug dealers on Rocky Boy's Indian Reservation.

Task force project director Aaron Wittmer, and fellow task force agent C.J. Reichelt attended a banquet ceremony in Washington, D.C., last month to receive the Outstanding Enforcement Prevention Treatments Efforts on Tribal Land award, given out by the national drug-prohibition enforcement program, the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area program.

Wittmer said that at the banquet he was told by the head of the program that it is most likely that no agency in Montana has won an award like this. Wittmer said he likes and is proud of the award, but he and Reichelt were just doing their job.

The case, dubbed Operation Rocky Bear Paw, started years ago, Wittmer said, but they did not get the breakthrough they needed until 2015.

"Back in 2008, 2009, I started investigating a lot of these individuals, and they were distributing large amounts of meth on the Rocky Boy reservation," he said.

Wittmer said he then started building a conspiracy case, largely theories, based on the information he had. He began doing interviews based on his case. He said he started "putting weight on these individuals."

"Eight or nine of these individuals, their names kept coming up pretty frequently, that they're distributing large amounts of meth on Rocky Boy," he said.

The problem, he said, was he kind of knew the source of the large amounts of meth - "a rich guy" in Yakima, Washington - but he didn't know who he was.

The case reached a standstill and sat for years, with binders and binders of information on file, until 2015, when Reichelt found a vital piece of information, Wittmer said.

"C.J. (Reichelt) ended up doing a search warrant out in Rocky Boy and, in the wallet of one of the bad guys, he had a name of our bad guy and a bank routing number. That pretty much just started the case open again," he said.

After Reichelt's discovery, Wittmer said, he called someone at the Yakima Drug Enforcement Agency to look up a Rafael Cervantes, the suspected "rich guy."  

Wittmer said he started working with the agent in Yakima, who happened to have an informant who could get to Cervantes. They used the informant for controlled sales in Yakima from Cervantes.

A DEA release says of the case that phone conversations were intercepted from September through November 2015, a time during which "significant actionable intelligence was gathered for exploitation."

A simultaneous bust was conducted in Yakima and on Rocky Boy in February 2016, during which nine pounds of meth was seized, as well as over $10,000 in cash, a house and five vehicles, among other things.

Wittmer said Cervantes, who is probably responsible for hundreds of pounds of meth having hit this region, has taken a plea deal and is waiting sentencing. There may be more indictments coming up, he added.

People like Cervantes are driven by greed and money, and there will always be another one waiting to fill the void, Wittmer said. But, he said, that doesn't make his job futile, nor does it discourage him. He said the interruption in supply could very well keep someone from becoming an addict, and it could very well cause others to reconsider before breaking the law.