SEATTLE, Washington — A Seattle man who was heard on a federal wiretap discussing cocaine distribution and obtaining "samples" of fentanyl powder has been sentenced to two years in federal prison. Sang Su, 46, of Seattle, was sentenced late on Tuesday, November 4, 2026, in U.S. District Court in Seattle, Acting U.S. Attorney Charles Neil Floyd announced on November 5. Su pleaded guilty on July 2, 2026, to conspiracy to distribute a controlled substance, and U.S. District Judge Tana Lin added three years of supervised release to follow the prison term.
At the sentencing hearing, Judge Lin addressed directly who Su's customers were. "It is aggravating that you were selling significant amounts of cocaine and fentanyl to some of the most marginalized members of our community," she said, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office account of the hearing. Su has been in custody since his arrest on August 18, 2025 — an arrest that came almost three months after the raids that broke the organisation open, because he was not caught in them.
The investigation: violence beside Interstate 5
The case began in 2023, after a run of drug-trafficking-related violence in and around the homeless encampments in Seattle's Chinatown-International District and in the greenbelt beside Interstate 5 known as "the Jungle." The Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Seattle Police Department opened a narcotics investigation into the people distributing drugs in those areas, using court-authorized wiretaps — the same wiretaps on which, prosecutors say, Su was recorded discussing cocaine distribution and fentanyl powder samples.
On May 29, 2025, law enforcement executed 16 search warrants across ten communities — Federal Way, Vancouver, Everett, Pacific, Tukwila, Kent, Issaquah and Seattle in Washington, plus Woodlake, California, and Beaverton, Oregon. Investigators seized more than seven kilograms of cocaine, 18 kilograms of methamphetamine, more than 57,000 fentanyl pills and 17 firearms. Su was not arrested that day. Officers sought him for nearly three more months before taking him into custody on August 18, 2025.
The wider ring, in numbers
Su's sentence is one of the last in a much larger prosecution. In March 2025 alone, investigators working this organisation and a related ring seized 100 pounds of methamphetamine, 111 kilograms of cocaine, 19 kilograms of fentanyl powder, 250,000 fentanyl pills and four kilograms of heroin, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office. Co-defendants sentenced earlier in the same investigation include Daniel Ibarra Loera, 32, of Kent, who received eight years; organisation leader Octavio Salazar Palma, who received ten years; Giovanni Antonio Garduno Garcia, six years; Leonardo Rojas Cruz, 54, of Federal Way, three years — with deportation expected to follow his term; Oscar Omar Serrano Serrano, 30 months; Jose Garcia Corona, 15 months; and Juan Lopez Roblero, 12 months.
The investigation ran under the Homeland Security Task Force (HSTF) initiative established by Executive Order 14159, "Protecting the American People Against Invasion." It was led by the FBI, the Seattle Police Department and the DEA, with assistance from IRS Criminal Investigation, the HIDTA program, Homeland Security Investigations, the Washington National Guard Counterdrug Program, the Oregon State Police and the Clark County Sheriff's Office. Assistant U.S. Attorneys Casey Conzatti and Brian Wynne prosecuted Su's case. Acting U.S. Attorney Floyd said the task force's goal is to remove dangerous criminals from the community — "especially in neighborhoods that have been disproportionately victimized like the Chinatown International District."
Why an encampment case matters on the I-5 corridor
"The Jungle" is not an abstraction for the region's drivers: it is the wooded strip directly beside Interstate 5 as the freeway passes downtown Seattle, on the West Coast's main north-south freight artery — the same corridor Punjabi truckers from Washington, British Columbia and California drive daily, and beside which many stop, fuel and rest. A multi-year federal case that began with violence around that strip, and that moved more than a quarter of a million fentanyl pills in a single month of seizures, is part of the safety landscape of that corridor, as well as a Seattle neighbourhood story about a district — the Chinatown-International District — that prosecutors themselves describe as disproportionately victimized.
What happens next
For Su, the path is now fixed: he serves the two-year term — with credit for the custody he has already served since August 2025 — and then three years of federal supervised release. For the wider investigation, his sentencing closes one of the remaining named cases from the May 2025 warrants; the U.S. Attorney's Office has presented the string of sentences, from Loera's eight years and Salazar Palma's ten down to Su's two, as the dismantling of an organisation that deliberately sold where people were most vulnerable. What the court record does not claim is that the market itself has closed — only that this organisation, built over years beside I-5, has now been sentenced man by man.