Date: March 8, 2024 Contact: newsroom@ci.irs.gov Tucson, AZ — Tony Cardenas of Phoenix, was sentenced last week by United States District Judge Jennifer G. Zipps to 48 months in prison, followed by three years of supervised release. Cardenas, the leader of a Phoenix-based human smuggling organization, pleaded guilty to Conspiracy to Transport and Harbor Illegal Aliens for Profit and Conspiracy to Commit Money Laundering on November 17, 2023. Cardenas and 18 co-conspirators were indicted in November 2021 following an investigation by the Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigation (CI) and Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) – Sells. In June 2018, HSI – Sells began investigating Cardenas and his human smuggling organization. Throughout the course of this investigation, agents discovered that undocumented noncitizens were being moved from Central America and Mexico to the Tohono O’odham Nation where they were directed to nearby stash houses or picked up and taken to stash houses in the Tucson and Phoenix areas. Using Phoenix as a distribution hub, the human smuggling organization held undocumented noncitizens in Phoenix until final payment was received. Once payments were made, the undocumented noncitizens were driven to their final destinations throughout the United States. A financial investigation conducted by CI identified numerous co-conspirators who were using their bank accounts and money service businesses to channel over $1 million back to the alien smuggling organization in Arizona. Seventeen co-conspirators with ties to the Cardenas human smuggling organization have been convicted of alien smuggling and/or money laundering. The final co-conspirator is scheduled to be sentenced on March 28, 2024. This effort is part of an Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces (OCDETF) operation. OCDETF identifies, disrupts, and dismantles the highest-level criminal organizations that threaten the United States using a prosecutor-led, intelligence-driven, multiagency approach. CI and HSI conducted the investigation in this case. Assistant U.S. Attorneys Craig Russell and Fred Cocio, District of Arizona, Tucson, handled the prosecution. CI is the criminal investigative arm of the IRS, responsible for conducting financial crime investigations, including tax fraud, narcotics trafficking, money-laundering, public corruption, healthcare fraud, identity theft and more. CI special agents are the only federal law enforcement agents with investigative jurisdiction over violations of the Internal Revenue Code, obtaining a more than a 90 percent federal conviction rate. The agency has 20 field offices located across the U.S. and 12 attaché posts abroad.
