In a Miami courtroom, a band of four men were handed stiff prison sentences for their roles in a brazen scheme to violently rob drug traffickers, the Justice Department said. The ringleader, Palacio Valdes Farley, known as BoBo, will be behind bars for an additional 20 years, atop a 14-year term he's already serving for drug-trafficking and money laundering conspiracies.
The three other members of the crew received similarly heavy sentences. Joassaint Josiah Aristil Jr., aka JoJo, and Jamar Brandon Nattiel, known as Debo and D-Boy, were convicted last December by a jury, while Andrew Francois Martin entered a guilty plea back in November. Martin is to notably serve a 210-month federal sentence, which will run consecutively to a 25-year rap for an armed robbery he carried out with Farley in Florida.
According to a statement from the U.S. Attorney’s Office, the conspiracy spanned from May 2016 to December 2017, with the group perpetrating violent home invasions against their targets, one of which left two victims shot multiple times in California.
U.S. District Judge Roy K. Altman imposed Farley's sentence to run consecutively with his existing term, marking a compounded retribution for his orchestration of cross-country crimes. In a December 2017 heist, at Farley's behest, Aristil and Nattiel, alongside accomplices Karen Williams and Lisa Flood, bound and held a drug trafficker and his wife at gunpoint in Orange County, making off with drugs, cash, and jewels. They later delivered the contraband to Farley, who was under house arrest in Miami at the time.
The case was a result of collaborative efforts between the FBI's Miami Field Office and the Broward Sheriff’s Office, with additional support from police departments in Lauderhill, Los Angeles, and Daytona Beach. It forms part of the Justice Department’s Project Safe Neighborhoods and Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces’ initiatives, aimed at tackling violent crime and drug trafficking operations.
