But while Rick’s alcohol-addled musings are the stuff of gag lines, the darknet drug trafficking organization bearing its name was no joke. The darknet, a part of the internet that can be reached only with special software, has become a hotbed for the buying and selling of illegal services and goods.
The Los Angeles-based “rickandmortyshop” distributed heroin, methamphetamine and cocaine packaged in stuffed animals. Ringleader Jerrell Eugene Anderson and his cohorts then took the packages to Los Angeles-area post offices for shipment to customers nationwide.
One in five inmates in America’s jails and prisons are there for drug-related crimes.
Promoting their “business” on darknet marketplaces “Dream” and “Wall Street Market,” Anderson and his co-conspirators delivered drugs to customers—including heroin to a victim in Knoxville, Tennessee, who died from it—between August 2018 and March 2019, at which point law enforcement caught up with them.
In June 2024, Anderson pled guilty to conspiracy to distribute methamphetamine, one count of possession of heroin with the intent to distribute and possession of a firearm in furtherance of a drug trafficking crime. On November 21, he was sentenced to 96 months in federal prison.
The other defendants, Christopher Canion Von Holton, Kenneth Lashawn Hadley, Adan Sepulveda and Jackie Walter Burns, each pled guilty to one count of conspiracy to distribute controlled substances and have been sentenced.
The investigation and arrests of the “rickandmortyshop” defendants involved the coordinated actions of the United States Postal Inspection Service, the FBI, the Los Angeles Police Department, the Fairfax County Police Department, the Knoxville Police Department and the Cleburne County Sheriff’s Office.
Drug trafficking is a huge black market industry in the United States, raking in between $200 and $750 billion a year. But the true price of drugs doesn’t stop there. Americans pay $181 billion a year in health care, lost workplace productivity, law enforcement and legal expenses, all due to illegal substance abuse. One in five inmates in America’s jails and prisons are there for drug-related crimes, an estimated one-third of a million on any given day.
In the face of those statistics, the arrest and conviction of one grimy drug trafficking cell may not seem like much, but any arrest, any conviction, makes society that much safer. With active and alert law enforcement at the ready, partnering with effective prevention initiatives like the Truth About Drugs, each arrest may be the arrest that starts the avalanche that sweeps away the scourge of substance abuse forever.
