A Las Vegas woman has been sentenced to 188 months, or nearly 16 years, in federal prison for her role in a large-scale operation that mailed methamphetamine from California and Las Vegas to central Ohio. Tiauna Castro, 36, was sentenced in U.S. District Court, with prosecutors saying federal authorities seized about 83 pounds of meth and at least 128 packages tied to the conspiracy.
According to the United States Department of Justice, Southern District of Ohio, Castro participated in the operation that shipped methamphetamine into central Ohio by mail. Per U.S. Attorney Dominick Gerace II, Castro shipped drug packages from Las Vegas to Columbus, and the U.S. Attorney's Office said she met with bulk-narcotics distributors and negotiated prices directly with suppliers, as reported by 10TV.
How the Scheme Moved Drugs by Mail
Castro bought large amounts of narcotics and then stored and repackaged them before shipping the drugs through the U.S. mail, the station's report states. The U.S. Postal Inspection Service and the Central Ohio High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area Task Force began investigating the conspiracy in 2021, according to Gerace's office. Castro and seven co-defendants were indicted in connection with the operation in April 2022.
In March 2026, Castro pleaded guilty to conspiracy to distribute methamphetamine and to submitting false tax claims, per the same account. The separate trafficking ring ran from February 2023 to April 2024, as reported by cleveland.com.
A Tax Fraud Scheme on the Side
While out on pretrial release for the drug charges, Castro submitted false federal tax forms tied to two sham businesses, according to 10TV. In January 2025, she was charged with submitting false federal tax forms and receiving more than $500,000 in unauthorized federal refunds.
A Pattern of California-to-Ohio Trafficking
Castro's case echoes a separate, comparable prosecution detailed by cleveland.com, in which five people were sentenced to federal prison in September for their roles in a different California-to-Ohio drug trafficking ring involving methamphetamine and cocaine. In that case, Terrance Gainer received the longest sentence — 20 years in prison followed by five years of supervised release — while Darquan Dixon was sentenced to about 16 years and eight months. Investigators in that ring seized more than 33 pounds of methamphetamine, more than two pounds of cocaine and multiple guns, with prosecutors saying drugs were regularly mailed from the Los Angeles and San Diego areas to multiple Ohio cities and also carried in suitcases on commercial flights.
The pattern tracks with what Ohio's drug monitoring data has been showing. According to the Ohio Substance Abuse Monitoring Network, methamphetamine and fentanyl have remained highly available throughout the regions it tracks. A related semi-annual report examined substance-use data from July through December 2024 that included responses from 439 people, as detailed by Spectrum News 1.
Respondents in that survey reported that methamphetamine was highly available in every region of the state, and the report described the drug as inexpensive, high quality and abundant, with law enforcement respondents saying most of the methamphetamine they encountered originated with drug cartels in Mexico. Smoking remained the most common way people reported using the drug, according to the same report.
