A luxury apartment building near the Long Island City waterfront was raided by Drug Enforcement Agents today after officials found that residents were making synthetic drugs there.
Brian Parker, 34, of Long Island City and Viktoria Koleski, 29, of Farmingdale, NJ, were arrested by New Jersey DEA officials on Aug. 29 who showed up to 45-45 Center Blvd. wearing hazmat suits to remove boxes of illegal substances and lab equipment.
Wild morning in #LIC #LongIslandCity #Queens. Like a scene from Breaking Bad. pic.twitter.com/fc2zp20Xzk
— 🌁 (@JeremyR1992) August 29, 2017
The DEA was able to link Parker to an overdose of a Madison, WI, man in 2016, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office. A 36-year-old man died after taking drugs he bought from Parker’s website.
The drugs sold on these sites, www.unbeatablechems.com and rcpowders.com, are synthetic opioids several times more potent than morphine. Koleski and other New Jersey residents would have raw materials shipped to their houses from as far away as China and would then send them to Parker’s Long Island City home.
The location at Center Boulevard acted as a drug den where Parker used lab equipment to make the drugs and ship them back to New Jersey. Koleski than filled the online orders. From June 30 through July 5, Koleski shipped approximately 218 parcels from a post office located in Farmingdale.
A court-authorized search found that 75 of those packages contained the drugs PCP and PHP. Undercover agents were able to purchase several chemicals from Parker and paid him through the money app Venmo, according to the criminal complaint. Using Reddit posts published by Parker on June 28, agents were able to track his address and “establish surveillance.”
After a number of undercover purchases of PCP and PHP, agents from the DEA of New Jersey conducted the raid. A neighbor told CBS 2 News that officials rammed Parker’s door down early on Tuesday.
According to officials, Parker was previously charged with two federal narcotics crimes. On Sept. 18, 2007, he pleaded guilty in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Georgia to conspiracy to distribute and possess with intent to distribute anabolic steroids.
Four years later, on June 20, 2011, Parker pleaded guilty in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania to 15 counts of introducing misbranded drugs into interstate commerce, conspiracy to commit the same, and failure to register a manufacturing facility.
Both defendants are charged with conspiring to distribute controlled substance analogues, and distributing and possessing with intent to distribute the controlled substance analogues U-47700, A-PHP, and 3-MEO-PCP. If convicted, they face a maximum of 20 years in prison and a $1 million fine.
