Veterinarian Charged With Smuggling Heroin Inside Puppies

NEW YORK — Of the puppies rescued in 2005 from a farm in Medellín, Colombia, and saved from fates as international drug couriers, one, a Rottweiler, was adopted by the Colombian National Police and trained as a drug-detection dog, investigators said.

Another, a basset hound, went home with an officer as a family pet.

The eight other purebred puppies discovered in the makeshift veterinary clinic, where large packets of liquid heroin were surgically implanted into the folds of skin along their bellies, suffered grave consequences. Five ran away. Three died of infections from the incisions made to hide the opiates in their bodies during shipment to the United States.

Now, more than 12 years after what a former head of the New York office of the federal Drug Enforcement Administration called “one of the most outrageous methods of smuggling” he had ever encountered, the veterinarian accused of placing the packets of heroin inside the puppies for a Colombian drug cartel was arraigned in federal court in Brooklyn.

On Tuesday, a day after arriving in custody at Kennedy International Airport, Andres Lopez Elorez, 38, pleaded not guilty before Magistrate Judge Marilyn D. Go on federal charges of conspiring to import and distribute narcotics. He was ordered held without bail.

Elorez’s court-appointed lawyer, Mitchell Dinnerstein, said his client “doesn’t have any real connection” to the United States. The judge heard some discussion, through an interpreter, of Elorez’s deteriorating physical and mental health: He said he needs medicine, but lost it for a number of days during his transit from Spain, and he needs surgery for a urethra problem.

“I think a lot of this is, frankly, stress related,” Dinnerstein said.

The trail to justice for the puppies ran from Colombia, through Spain, to the United States. Law enforcement officials, who were originally tipped to the drug-trafficking operation in a call to a hotline, traced Elorez to Pontevedra, in northwestern Spain, where they arrested him at his residence on June 21, 2015.

For a decade before his arrest, Elorez had worked as a veterinarian — the only one, apparently, in the small town of Los Nogales, Spain, according to a law enforcement official. Since his arrest, he has been in jail in Spain fighting extradition, the official said.

That at least two of the dogs — the Rottweiler, named Heroina, and the basset hound, named Donna — grew into healthy, adult dogs was a stark contrast to their grim beginnings. When the authorities found them, several already had soft plastic pouches filled with drugs — about 3 kilograms of liquid heroin, or about 1 pound per dog — stitched inside them. Others were awaiting operations.

Officials believed that the cartel’s plan was to present the puppies as show dogs to get them past customs inspectors at the airports in the United States. It remains unknown how many puppies had been used to transport drugs before the ring was broken up.

The investigation, which started more than a decade ago, ultimately led in 2006 to the arrests of 21 people in six cities in Colombia, and another person North Carolina, officials said. The authorities confiscated 24 kilograms of heroin — or about $2 million worth on the street — at airports in Miami and New York, and in Medellín, Bogotá and Cartagena, Colombia, officials said.

But Elorez, a Venezuelan citizen who never received formal training as a vet, escaped the police raids and fled to Spain, where he started life over and avoided entanglements with the law, his lawyer said. He married and had two children. “He got his life together in the last 10 to 12 years,” Dinnerstein said.

The targeted drug organization also used human drug mules. In addition, heroin was concealed in body creams and aerosol cans, and pressed into bead shapes or sewn into the lining of purses and luggage.

For years, drug traffickers have paid people, including children, to smuggle drugs into the United States by swallowing drug-filled packages made from latex gloves, balloons or condoms.

Far fewer organizations have used pets as vessels for drug smuggling, investigators said. The puppies rescued in 2006 most likely would have been killed to extricate the narcotics, they said.

“Twelve years ago, our investigation unmasked drug traffickers’ inhumane callousness,” said James J. Hunt, the special agent in charge of the DEA’s New York Field Division, after the arraignment. “Over time, drug organizations’ unquenchable thirst for profit leads them to do unthinkable crimes like using innocent puppies for drug concealment. “

Richard P. Donoghue, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, summarized, “Dogs are man’s best friend and, as the defendant is about to learn, we are drug dealers’ worst enemy.”