A Washington State man has landed himself an 84-month stint in the clink after being fingered as a dealer of the deadly opioid fentanyl, and for his role in a scheme that terrorized a 14-year-old kid, the U.S. Justice Department reports. Levi Joseph Blomdahl, 38, of the probably less-than-sleepy town of Vancouver, Washington, won't be seeing much in the way of Pacific Northwest rain for a while, as he's set to swap those showers for a different kind inside a federal prison, along with a chaser of five years' supervised release.
Blomdahl's not-so-neighborly activities came to light during a 2021 Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) probe of the fentanyl traffic wreaking havoc in and around Portland; he was scoped as a dealer hauling his poison from Phoenix, Arizona up I-5 to the Pacific Northwest—or at least that was the plan until HSI special agents played the spoiler, executing a search warrant at his place and finding about 600 grams of the drug, weapons, ammo, and a few lesser assorted controlled substances, court documents laid out.
The hapless dealer's track record took another hit when it was disclosed that prior to his own victimhood in a drug-related Hayden Island shootout—a showdown that left him with bullets in his hide and his antagonist, a certain Anthony Pastorino, 44, also from Vancouver, fleeting the scene and leaving police with a head-scratcher until his capture—Blomdahl had a hand in ripping off a 14-year-old's motorcycle, according to a release from the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Oregon. The teen's two-wheeler was listed online and Blomdahl had a conspirator posing as a cop pinch it, later trying to get into the kid's sales account by bamboozling the victim's mother pretending to be her son.
Come March 10, 2022, and Blomdahl's shenanigans had earned him an indictment for possession with intent to distribute fentanyl and possessing a firearm in furtherance of that, but it wasn't until September 14, 2023, that he copped to a superseding criminal information pleading out to the fentanyl distribution and helping steal the motorcycle, and before you knew it, on May 3, 2023, Pastorino found himself on the receiving end of a 77-month prison package, for his role in the armed dust-up with Blomdahl.
With the HSI's dragnet coiling, and teamwork from the Portland Police Bureau, sharpshooting Assistant U.S. Attorney Cassady A. Adams ensured both Blomdahl and Pastorino will be spending many a night recounting their misdeeds from the confines of a less-than-cozy cell—the detailed investigation knitting a tight web around the men who sought profit from pain and peril. Now, thanks to the dogged pursuit of justice, a clear message is sent: the streets, and certainly schoolchildren, you say, are not a playground for predators looking for an easy mark.
