Homestead heroin dealer caught laundering drug money while behind bars

A former Homestead man has been sentenced to an additional three years and five months in prison for scheming to launder drug money while behind bars on a prior heroin trafficking conviction, federal prosecutors said Friday.

Thomas Hopes, 29, already was serving a decades-long sentence when he was caught committing the money laundering crime as an inmate at the Elkton federal prison in Ohio, court records show.

Hopes was charged in 2013, convicted by a jury in October 2015 and sentenced in March 2016 for his role in helping lead a heroin distribution ring that distributed between 1 kilogram and 3 kilograms of heroin, or 2.2 pounds to 6.6 pounds.

Between 2017 and 2019, while serving his 24-year prison sentence, Hopes proceeded to conspire to launder drug money, U.S. Attorney Scott W. Brady said.

Hopes and more than a dozen other co-conspirators initially indicted in the heroin ring also were charged with conspiring to get minors — some as young as 14 years old — to sell the drug on the street.

The ring was linked to New Jersey sources that were supplying about 600 bricks — or 1⁄2 to 1 kilogram of heroin — every three weeks to the Pittsburgh area.

To show that Hopes was a leader, federal prosecutors showed that he lined up customers, had other people prepare stamp bags for sale, used runners to deliver heroin to customers and generally made strategic decisions about the ring’s operations, according to court documents.

Fifteen months of this week’s newly imposed, 41-month prison sentence for money laundering will be served consecutively with his prior federal sentence, according to U.S. District Judge J. Nicholas Ranjan.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Craig W. Haller prosecuted the case.

On the federal side, the investigation involved the Drug Enforcement Administration, Internal Revenue Service, Bureau of Prisons, Homeland Security, the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, Homeland Security and U.S. Marshals Service.

Local agencies that assisted include the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s Office, Beaver District Attorney’s Office, Erie County District Attorney’s Office, state troopers and police from Pittsburgh, Munhall, Robinson, McKees Rocks, Stowe and Etna.

The investigation was funded by the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force, which was established in 1982 to help local and state agencies collaborate on major drug and money laundering cases.

In a statement, Brady’s office called the longstanding task force “the keystone of the drug reduction strategy of the Department of Justice.”