Fentanyl Smuggling Ring Upended at Riverside County Jail Facility

Five people were indicted last week for attempting to smuggle fentanyl into the Suffolk County Correctional Facility, soaking the drug into paper and then smuggling it in via unsuspecting lawyers as legal documents.

Suffolk County District Attorney Ray Tierney and Sheriff Errol Toulon were on hand at the Arthur Cromarty Court Complex in Riverside on November 16 to announce the indictments.

“Here we go again,” said Tierney to a room crowded with reporters and law enforcement officials as he spelled out a plot whereby the deadly drug was sprayed onto legal papers and then given to a defense attorney to deliver to the jail, unaware of the plot.

The plan, said Tierney, was for the papers to be cut up into smaller credit-card size pieces by the inmates and sold in the jail.

The plot was upended before the drugs were delivered to their intended recipient, said Tierney, who described the attempt as the “latest iteration” of a fentanyl crisis on Long Island that has left 399 overdose deaths in its wake. The problem is “getting worse,” he said, calling on state and county leaders to step up with legislation to address the crisis.

The attempted smuggling wasn’t the first time fentanyl had been brought into the jail, but the utilization of seemingly legitimate legal papers to deliver the drug represented one of the “more audacious attempts,” said Toulon, who noted that the fentanyl is 20 times more valuable in jail than on the street.

“If these criminals were successful in their attempt to smuggle more than $20,000 of deadly fentanyl into the jail, there is no doubt that tragedy would have followed,” Toulon noted in a follow-up press release announcing the multiple indictments.

Here’s how the plot unfolded, according to Tierney:

Back in August, corrections officials at the Riverside jail were tipped off that Jyzir Hamilton, 35, an inmate in the jail, was planning to have his girlfriend, Janiah Williams, 24, deliver fentanyl-laced papers to him through his defense attorney, “who allegedly had no knowledge of the plan,” according to the press release.

Hamilton then made a call to Alyssa Brienza, 30, and asked her about obtaining fentanyl. She, in turn, is alleged to have contacted Arnold Foster, 33, who is serving time at the Green Haven Correctional Facility upstate following his conviction for dealing drugs. Foster is alleged to have “set the price for the fentanyl to be sold to Hamilton,” setting in motion the attempted smuggling gambit.

Brienza is alleged to have delivered four blank pieces of paper to Williams that were then sprayed with “a liquid laced with fentanyl” that also contained acetone. Williams then told Brienza to contact an attorney who was representing Eric Freeman, 48, who told his attorney that someone would be delivering legal papers to him and asked that he pass along those documents, which would be delivered by Williams to Hamilton at the jail, via the attorney.

On August 23, Williams contacted the attorney and said she was on her way to the jail. She was arrested as she entered the Cromarty Building, where county sheriff officers “allegedly found a manila enveloped containing four pages with legal terms printed on them” in her possession.

Indictments followed in November for the five defendants, all of whom hail from Long Island.

Hamilton was charged with four felonies and a misdemeanor; Brienza was indicted on six felony counts and two misdemeanors; Williams was indicted on five felony charges; Freeman was indicted on one felony count; and Foster was also charged with a single felony. The charges include conspiracy, promoting prison contraband, attempted sale of a controlled substance and others.

Toulon and Tierney encouraged vigilance among attorneys in light of the alleged smuggling plot and seemingly relentless attempts to distribute fentanyl in the jail.

Toulon said the jail was “getting mail from ‘makeshift’ law firms that all had to be analyzed, creating an ongoing safety hazard for jail officials who may come into contact with the lethal lab-created drug. There were “already fentanyl-laced papers” coming into the jail before this brazen plot was upended, the sheriff said, noting the difficulty in safely screening the mail without causing harm to staffers or canine units that might typically be deployed to sniff out contraband.