Date: May 8, 2024 Contact: newsroom@ci.irs.gov Madison, WI — Timothy M. O’Shea, United States Attorney for the Western District of Wisconsin, announced that Alicia M. Allen of Windsor, Wisconsin, was sentenced today by Chief U.S. District Judge James D. Peterson to 4 years in federal prison for possessing more than 40 grams of fentanyl intended for distribution, and money laundering. The prison sentence will be followed by 5 years of supervised release. Allen pleaded guilty to these charges on January 24, 2024. Law enforcement began investigating Allen in the summer of 2022, after she was observed meeting with another individual under investigation for fentanyl trafficking. On November 28, 2022, officers met with Allen at her residence, and she admitted that she purchased fentanyl pills for distribution. She turned over 579 fentanyl pills and a firearm to the officers. A subsequent financial investigation showed that Allen made significant sums of money selling fentanyl. She used personal and business bank accounts to launder the drug proceeds, providing false explanations to the bank about the source of the funds. On March 9, 2023, officers seized over $42,000 from Allen’s business bank account. Allen was unemployed during the entirety of the investigation, had no legitimate business, and the source of the funds in her business bank account was determined to be drug proceeds. At sentencing, Judge Peterson noted that Allen was dealing large quantities of an extremely dangerous drug, fentanyl, over a long period of time. Judge Peterson also found Allen’s pattern of dishonesty and concealment of significant drug proceeds to be aggravating factors. The charges against Allen were the result of an investigation conducted by the Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigation (CI), United States Postal Inspection Service, Drug Enforcement Administration, Wisconsin Department of Justice Division of Criminal Investigation, and Dane County Narcotics Task Force. The investigation was conducted and funded by the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force (OCDETF), a multi-agency task force that coordinates long-term narcotics trafficking investigations. Assistant U.S. Attorney Steven P. Anderson prosecuted this case. 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.
