A Jacksonville woman has pleaded guilty to helping run a marijuana ring that used Airbnb and other rental homes where gun-carrying dealers inventoried different varieties of pot and handled face-to-face sales.
Yaquasia DelCarmen, 28, admitted Thursday to conspiring to distribute more than 50 kilograms (about 110 pounds) of pot and laundering revenue from the ring that court documents said moved pot on dozens of commercial airline flights between California and Florida.
DelCarmen “served as a manager and a supervisor of a drug-trafficking organization led by her boyfriend” and was responsible for somewhere between 100 and 400 kilograms (220 to 882 pounds) of pot between February 2023 and her arrest in April, said part of a plea agreement she signed and initialed to show she had read it.
The agreement described her and others flying to and from Sacramento or San Francisco with suitcases stuffed with pot from northern California growers, then moving their product to rented homes like an Airbnb on River Road in San Marco.
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“The defendant and her co-conspirators … possessed firearms at the residences for the purpose of protecting themselves, the marijuana they intended to distribute and their proceeds during drug sales,” the agreement said.
Airbnb didn’t respond Friday to an email seeking comment.
Homes were also rented by the ring’s leader to inventory different pot varieties and set prices, according to the complaint, which only lists the leader by his initials, N.H.
However, a notice in the court docket for a separate gun and drug conspiracy case involving Nathaniel Thomas Hatcher III lists DelCarmen’s prosecution as a related case, and state corporation records list the two of them as figures in a St. Augustine company, Seven-Seven-Seven Rentals LLC.
Hatcher was charged in February with conspiracy and four counts of aiding and abetting another person in making illegal “straw purchases” of guns to hide the real owner’s identity.
The same month, Jacksonville resident Desmond Maxwell signed a plea agreement that described him making straw purchases of guns for the pot ring. A prosecutor’s motion in May to delay Maxwell’s sentencing listed Hatcher as his co-defendant.
Hatcher is scheduled to stand trial in September under a revised indictment that includes drug conspiracy as well as gun and obstruction charges.
This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Jacksonville woman guilty in armed pot ring that used short-term rentals
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