BOSTON, Massachusetts — The detail that broke the case was on the floor. When investigators searched a third-floor apartment in Methuen that prosecutors say the La Culebra drug trafficking organisation used as a pill factory, they saw fresh footprints in powders believed to be controlled substances — and the prints led down an interior staircase to a second-floor apartment. Inside it, they found Jose Vasquez Lantigua and Manuel Santana-Soto wearing flip-flops whose soles matched the powdered footprints, according to the charging documents cited by the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Massachusetts. This week, Lantigua, 48, of Lawrence, pleaded guilty in federal court in Boston to one count of conspiracy to manufacture, distribute and possess with intent to distribute and manufacture controlled substances.

Source: U.S. Attorney's Office, District of Massachusetts (DOJ), Oct 30 2026

Upstairs, the search found the operation itself. In the third-floor apartment, investigators located an automated pill press, along with multiple kilograms of counterfeit Adderall and Percocet pills believed to contain fentanyl and methamphetamine, the Justice Department said. Around the press were the tools of the trade: cutting agents, blenders, scales, bowls and bags full of suspected fentanyl and methamphetamine powders and binding agents. The tenant listed for the second-floor apartment told law enforcement that Lantigua and Santana-Soto had no permission to be in her home and no key to it; prosecutors believe the two men had fled the third-floor unit and broken into the flat below before officers made entry.

How the La Culebra investigation unfolded

Lantigua was arrested and charged in August 2025 along with Santana-Soto, after a controlled purchase of drugs from Joshua Morales, described in the charging documents as a drug runner associated with La Culebra, at the Methuen manufacturing location. In the wider August 2025 searches described in the Justice Department's September 2025 charging announcement, investigators said they recovered more than 18 kilograms of suspected controlled substances and a pill press, and about 10,000 counterfeit Percocet pills believed to contain fentanyl from Morales's vehicle. One by one, the group's members have since admitted their roles: Morales pleaded guilty in March 2026, Santana-Soto pleaded guilty in May 2026, and Aris Arvelo Gonzalez — charged in November 2025 after a series of controlled purchases led investigators to another manufacturing location — pleaded guilty in September 2026. The New England Signal's account of Lantigua's plea, published October 30, carries the same footprint detail from the charging documents.

The plea was announced by U.S. Attorney Leah B. Foley, together with Ted E. Docks, Special Agent in Charge of the FBI's Boston Division; Jarod A. Forget, Special Agent in Charge of the Drug Enforcement Administration in New England; and Colonel Geoffrey D. Noble, Superintendent of the Massachusetts State Police. The Essex County District Attorney's Office provided assistance, and Assistant U.S. Attorney Philip A. Mallard of the Organized Crime & Gang Unit is prosecuting the case.

Why counterfeit pills alarm officials far beyond Methuen

Methuen and Lawrence sit side by side in Massachusetts's Merrimack Valley, along the Interstate 93 and Interstate 495 corridors north of Boston — commuter and trucking country, with a large and growing South Asian community across the valley's mill towns. A pill press in a residential apartment is dangerous in two directions at once. Inside the building, the powders investigators described — suspected fentanyl and methamphetamine, handled openly enough to take footprints — expose neighbours who never chose any part of it. Outside it, pills stamped to look like pharmacy Adderall and Percocet, but believed to be made from street fentanyl and meth, go to buyers who cannot know what is actually in a dose. That is why federal prosecutors treat a tabletop press as a manufacturing conspiracy carrying a decade-to-life range, rather than as a street dealing case.

For Punjabi and South Asian families in the Merrimack Valley and beyond, the practical warning from cases like this one is simple and worth repeating at home: a pill that did not come from a pharmacy — however real it looks, and whoever offers it, including pills circulating as study aids or painkillers — may be a counterfeit pressed in an apartment like this one, with fentanyl in it. Lantigua's plea does not end the La Culebra case; it completes the set of guilty pleas, and turns the remaining court dates into sentencing hearings.

A case that began with a controlled buy from a runner and a search warrant in Methuen in August 2025 now rests on four guilty pleas. The footprints in the powder — and the flip-flops that matched them — are the image prosecutors will be remembered by in this case; the pill press upstairs is the reason the sentences, when they come, will be measured in years and decades rather than months.