Tipster gave cops ‘heads-up’ on 110-kilo stash of meth disguised as cabbage
That cabbage was worth some serious lettuce. Because it wasn’t just cabbage. It was cabbage-wrapped methamphetamine.
Late last year, 110 kilograms of meth believed to have been shipped from Mexico to Atlanta and then trucked to Athens were seized by federal agents.
The nearly 250-pound load, with an estimated street value of $275,000, appears to have skirted detection at the U.S. border, at least in part, because kickball-size orbs of it were cloaked in cabbage leaves and covered in cellophane.
Word of the seizure emerged this week when a Mexican man federal authorities described as being in the country illegally was arraigned in U.S. District Court in Macon.
Raul Perez-Mondragon, 30, who is from Queretaro, Mexico, about 100 miles northwest of Mexico City, was indicted Oct. 21 on allegations that include conspiracy to distribute meth and illegal possession of firearms. He made his first court appearance in Middle Georgia on Thursday.
Officials at a news conference Friday in Macon said Perez-Mondragon was part of a drug-trafficking cartel, one that they declined to specify. The case against him came to the attention of federal law enforcement officials last November.
According to court documents outlining the basis for Perez-Mondragon’s arrest, a confidential source had tipped off federal agents about an alleged drug-trafficking operation being run from a house on Deer Creek Court on the north side of Athens.
The residence there, a squat, three-decade-old brick duplex at the end of a cul-de-sac, sits a little more than a mile west of U.S. 441, the highway to Commerce.
Investigators received word that someone at the house was expecting to receive “a large quantity” of drugs from a location near Atlanta on Nov. 10, 2025, an agent noted in an affidavit.
Federal agents, in court documents, said they tracked the shipment to Clarke County from a warehouse in Forest Park. At some point, the agents noted that aerial surveillance afforded them a view of “what appeared to be produce boxes being unloaded” from a Penske rental truck.
They later determined the shipment was a “cover load,” a method of concealing illegal narcotics with legitimate goods. Or in this case, cabbage leaves.
William R. “Will” Keyes, U.S. attorney for the Middle District of Georgia, talked at Friday’s news conference about how drugs funneled into the country are sometimes masked by smugglers.
“Some of the drugs that we have seen, especially in some of the larger seizures, have been concealed in vegetables,” the prosecutor said. “These large-scale drug traffickers will get very creative, but fortunately our law enforcement partners are very good at identifying and finding the stuff.”
Such shipments are routinely smuggled aboard refrigerated trucks.
In 2024, officials charged a dozen people in a Monroe-area case involving some 3,200 kilos of meth that had been shipped to the U.S. in boxes of jalapeños.