Hogsett Announces 25-Year Sentence for Indianapolis Cocaine Kingpin

Federal-Local Collaboration Results in Dismantling of Organized Crime Ring

INDIANAPOLIS—Joseph H. Hogsett, United States Attorney, announced that Juan Carlos Adame-Hernandez, a/k/a Armando Maldonado-Bernave, age 41, of Indianapolis, has been sentenced to 25 years in federal prison by U.S. District Judge Sarah Evans Barker following his guilty plea to conspiracy to distribute cocaine.

“This investigation and prosecution is the direct result of collaboration between federal and local law enforcement,” Hogsett said. “Working together, we’ve dismantled a dangerous cocaine trafficking operation in Indianapolis. Mr. Adame-Hernandez has been given an appropriate prison sentence that fits the serious nature of such organized violent crime. He will not walk the streets of Indianapolis for a long, long time.”

The prosecution was the result of an investigation directed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Safe Streets Task Force and assisted by the Drug Enforcement Administration. Other law enforcement agencies that participated in the investigation included the Internal Revenue Service, Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department, Speedway Police Department, and other federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies.

Adame-Hernandez was the leader of a cocaine trafficking organization that operated throughout Indianapolis, distributing between four and five kilograms of cocaine per week from January 2007 through his arrest on December 15, 2009.

The Adame-Hernandez organization supplied Ramone Mockabee with powder cocaine. Mockabee then converted that powder cocaine into crack cocaine and distributed the crack cocaine to from a “crack house” located on West 25th Street. Adame-Hernandez, Mockabee, and eighteen other co-defendants were indicted by a federal grand jury in January 2010 on charges of conspiracy to distribute cocaine and related offenses.

According to Assistant U.S. Attorney Bradley A. Blackington, who prosecuted the case for the government, a number of defendants have received significant sentences as a result of this investigation, including Kenneth Jones (life imprisonment), Mockabee (360 months), Devon Young (360 months), Elisha Drake (240 months), Damon Luter (210 months), and Lonnie Belmar (200 months).