Texas Sheriff’s Deputy Sent to Prison for Staging Fake Drug Busts in Border County

A former Hidalgo County Sheriff’s Office deputy in South Texas will spend almost four years in prison for his role in staging fake drug busts as a way to steal drugs from drug cartel members.

This week, 39-year-old Baldemar Cardenas went before U.S. Chief District Judge Randy Crane at a federal courthouse in McAllen, Texas, where he received a sentence of three years and ten months in prison for cocaine possession and distribution conspiracy. According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Texas, Cardenas pleaded guilty to the charge in April 2022.

Breitbart Texas had initially reported on Cardenas in April 2022 when he pleaded guilty to the conspiracy charge for his role in helping a group of drug traffickers steal drug shipments.

According to prosecutors, in 2020, Cardenas would help smugglers who would receive kilogram shipments of cocaine from Mexico. The group would then repackage the drugs and, in the process, cut or dilute the drugs to a purity level of just 1.5 percent. Cardenas would then tip off law enforcement.

According to Dave Hendricks from the local CBS station, the case began in January 2020, when authorities discovered that a 73-pound seizure of cocaine was actually only 1.5 percent pure. Smugglers commonly use the tactic to rip off their organization by staging a fake drug bust and being able to provide cartel members with documents to show the load was seized. Federal authorities looked into the raid and found that it had been tipped off by Cardenas, who had Mission police officers seize the load during a raid. At the time, Cardenas was assigned to the patrol division at the sheriff’s office.

Ildefonso Ortiz is an award-winning journalist with Breitbart Texas. He co-founded Breitbart Texas’ Cartel Chronicles project with Brandon Darby and senior Breitbart management. You can follow him on Twitter and on Facebook. He can be contacted at [email protected].