https://www.kron4.com/news/bay-area/oakland-couple-charged-in-money-laundering-scheme-collected-15k-pics-of-ca-drivers-licenses-doj/

The United States Attorney for the Northern District of California Department of Justice announced Friday that an Oakland man who operated a money wire transfer business has been sentenced for conspiracy to commit money laundering.

Jose Luis Garcia, 57, co-owner of Envios Express on the 3500 block of International Boulevard, was sentenced on Wednesday to 12 months in federal prison. Garcia was indicted in July 2023 and pleaded guilty in September 2024 to one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering, said the DOJ.

Garcia and his wife, Silvana Jorge de Oliveira aka “Dianne Johnson,” also charged in this case, operated the business under several names, according to court documents and Garcia’s plea agreement. The DOJ said Garcia had access to wire services that handled the transfer of funds from Oakland to other parts of the U.S., Mexico, Honduras, and other foreign countries.

The DOJ said Garcia admitted to “using fake sender names and IDs to process multiple structured wires to hide that a single sender was wiring amounts greater than $3,000, which he knew would have triggered mandatory federal reporting requirements.”

The DOJ said Garcia also accepted up to $9,000 “from unidentified customers, who asked that the cash be wired to well-known drug trafficking areas of Mexico or to persons in Honduras, without recording the true identity of the sender.” In order to dodge reporting requirements, the DOJ alleged that Garcia misused the names and IDs of real customers to wire money for fake customers.

According to the DOJ, Garcia also kept about 15,000 digital images of California driver’s licenses and Honduran, Mexican, and other national ID cards on cell phones, which he used to meet the wire companies’ ID standards.

The DOJ also alleges in August 2022 that Garcia “agreed to a request by an unknown source to wire $9,200 in cash to recipients in Mexico without providing an ID or using the sender’s real name, which is mandated by federal law.” Garcia distributed the $9,200 among four wires, using fake names as the sender on the receipts, and charged $50 under-the-table fee for each of the wires, said the Department of Justice.

In addition to the one-year prison sentence, Garcia was ordered to serve three years of supervised release, said the DOJ.