Four flight attendants have pleaded guilty in a New York court to abusing their special TSA privileges to smuggle more than $8 million worth of drug money into the Dominican Republic for an international drug gang.
The flight attendants were arrested following a comprehensive investigation by the Department of Homeland Security, which found that they had abused their special security privileges to bypass normal TSA airport screening at New York’s JFK airport and smuggle bags full of money from the illegal fentanyl trade.
Charlie Hernandez (42), Sarah Valerio Puljols (42), Emmanuel Torres (34) and Jarol Fabio (35), who all worked for different international airlines based at New York’s JFK airport, each pleaded guilty to one count of operating an unlicensed money transfer business after reaching an agreement with prosecutors.
The four defendants each face a maximum prison sentence of five years for their support of the drug gang.
According to court documents, the flight attendants were bribed by a member of the gang, who persuaded them to smuggle money earned selling drugs in the New York area in exchange for a small percentage of the cash they transported.
The flight attendants were ideal money couriers because they had a special security privilege called “Known Crewmember,” or KCM for short. As holders of a KCM card, the flight attendants were allowed to bypass routine TSA security checks at airports.
Under the KCM program, flight attendants typically do not have to send their luggage through an x-ray machine, making it an ideal way to move large amounts of cash out of the United States undetected.
The drug smuggling operation involving these four flight attendants is believed to have lasted for more than eight years before they were finally arrested. During that time, Torres, Pujols and Fabio are believed to have smuggled approximately $1.5 million each, while Hernandez is alleged to have smuggled up to $2.5 million in illegal drug money.
Both Fabio and Torres began working for an unnamed international airline in 2015 and almost immediately began smuggling drug money on behalf of the drug gang. Hernandez and Pujols were more experienced flight attendants, but they too began smuggling drug money for the gang in 2014 and 2015.
The operation was only shut down when the Department of Homeland Security Investigations team caught a member of the drug gang who agreed to testify as a witness. This gang member then helped HSI conduct several undercover operations to catch the flight attendants in the act.
The plot renewed intense scrutiny of the KCM program after a series of high-profile abuse cases. In 2022, for example, a flight attendant pleaded guilty to attempting to smuggle fentanyl strapped to her abdomen through a KCM checkpoint at San Diego Airport.
And last September, an off-duty flight attendant on her way to work was stopped at a KCM checkpoint in Philadelphia for having a loaded handgun in her bag.
Both flight attendants were caught only as a result of random searches that were intensified by the TSA to stop abuse of the KCM program.
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