A federal grand jury has indicted 41 people in a drug trafficking conspiracy that distributed heroin, methamphetamine and other hard drugs across the Upper Midwest and on two large Minnesota Indian reservations, according to court documents unsealed Wednesday.
At least 10 people were booked into Beltrami County jail as of Wednesday.
U.S. attorney Andrew Luger will announce Thursday what he calls the "takedown" of a multistate organization that transported illicit drugs largely out of Detroit and Chicago and sold them to Indian communities in Minnesota and elsewhere, according to court documents.
The indictment identifies Omar Sharif Beasley, 37, as ringleader of the trafficking network, alleging that he located and recruited sources, supervisors, distributors and couriers from Detroit, Chicago and Minneapolis to aid in the distribution of controlled substances.
In addition to heroin and meth, defendants transported "oxycodone, hydromorphone, hydrocodone, and methadone to communities in and surrounding" the Red Lake and White Earth Indian reservations in northwestern Minnesota, according to the indictment.
Court records indicate that Beasley has drug convictions going back more than a dozen years. Over the past decade, most of his run-ins with the law were for possession of drugs with the intent to distribute.
In 2009, the Grand Forks Herald reported Beasley had been arrested on the Red Lake Indian Reservation in connection with possessing more than 2,000 tablets of prescription drugs. Beasley had been under investigation for selling drugs on the Leech Lake and Red Lake reservations. He was wanted at that time on a federal fugitive warrant out of Michigan, the newspaper reported.
About two dozen defendants named in the conspiracy charges have direct ties to Red Lake and White Earth reservations, where some were "known, located, recruited, and otherwise found."
