Date: November 17, 2023 Contact: newsroom@ci.irs.gov Sacramento, CA — Sacramento residents Viliami Mosese Fatukala, Quynhmy Quoc Yamamoto, Iris June Micu Mina, and John Phillip Hollis II were sentenced this week for conspiring to distribute or possessing with intent to distribute cocaine, U.S. Attorney Phillip A. Talbert announced. Fatukala was sentenced to five years in prison; Yamamoto was sentenced to 15 months in prison, and Hollis was sentenced to a year in prison. Mina received a time-served sentence. According to court documents, beginning in July 2019, Fatukala, Yamamoto, and Mina conspired to sell cocaine. Fatukala advertised the sale of cocaine on the dark web. Yamamoto and Mina assisted Fatukala by, among other things, packaging the cocaine and mailing it to customers. All told, the conspirators sold approximately 13.7 kilograms of cocaine over the dark web. Some of the conspirators' cocaine was supplied by Hollis, who was stopped by law enforcement on Dec. 19, 2019, and found with a kilogram of cocaine in his vehicle. This case was the product of an investigation by the Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigation (CI), the Northern California Illicit Digital Economy (NCIDE) Task Force, which includes agents from Homeland Security Investigations, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the United States Postal Inspection Service, the United States Postal Service Office of Inspector General, and the Drug Enforcement Administration. The NCIDE Task Force is a federal task force focused on targeting all forms of illicit dark web and cryptocurrency activity in the Eastern District of California and beyond. Assistant U.S. Attorney Aaron D. Pennekamp prosecuted the 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.
