Private investigator who provided smugglers with UPS shipping labels sentenced to 3 years in prison

McALLEN, TEXAS (ValleyCentral) — A private investigator who provided drug smugglers with UPS shipping labels was sentenced to more than three years in prison last week.

Smugglers paid Jose Felipe Lozano Salazar, 59, of Edinburg for shipping labels with fake return addresses.

The shipping labels allowed smugglers to mail cocaine from the Rio Grande Valley to drug dealers in Montana, Mississippi and other states. If police seized the packages, the person who mailed them would remain anonymous — protected by a fake return address.

“It was a mistake,” Lozano said on May 14, when he appeared before a judge for sentencing. “And I take full responsibility.”

Lozano graduated from Edinburg High School in 1982.

After working for a local jeweler, Lozano opened his own store near the Hidalgo County Courthouse. It failed less than two years later.

Lozano left the jewelry business and joined the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. During the next two decades, Lozano worked at prisons in Beeville and Edinburg.

The job apparently suited Lozano, who received positive evaluations from supervisors and earned a promotion to sergeant in 2010, according to documents the Department of Criminal Justice released under the Texas Public Information Act.

After he retired, Lozano became a private investigator and started a business called “Lozano Hier Finders & Investigations.”

The Texas Department of Public Safety approved the company’s application for a license in 2021, according to documents released under the Public Information Act.

Lozano, however, also had a side business: He provided a drug trafficking organization with UPS shipping labels.

“He would receive the information, either via text message or on a sheet of paper, and he would then get his colleague to make the label,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Laura Garcia said on May 14, when Lozano appeared in court for sentencing. “And he would just physically hand over the label to the drug trafficking organization.”

Lozano received $500 per shipping label and split the money with the person who actually created the labels.

“And that individual was kind of in charge of trying to figure out what a good address would be to be inconspicuous,” Garcia said. “So that law enforcement wouldn’t figure this out.”

Along with Lozano, the drug trafficking organization had two UPS employees on the payroll. They surreptitiously placed the packages in the UPS delivery system.

If police intercepted a package, tracking down the smugglers would be difficult.

Thanks to Lozano, the packages had fake return addresses, a dead-end for law enforcement. Attempts to use the UPS tracking system, meanwhile, would hit a dead-end in McAllen, where the UPS employees had placed them in the mail.

Agents with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration cracked the case in 2022, when they seized more than 125 pounds of cocaine from a stash house in Hidalgo.

Prosecutors brought charges against eight people, including Lozano and the UPS employees.

“I’ve been in law enforcement half of my life,” Lozano said on May 14, when he appeared in court for sentencing. “It was a mistake that I did. I take full responsibility.”

U.S. District Judge Micaela Alvarez, though, said Lozano’s experience with law enforcement troubled her.

“You should know, I think, better than many the consequences of engaging in criminal conduct,” Alvarez said.

While he never touched the cocaine or the packages, Lozano knew he was breaking the law.

“Sometimes people think that, well, if they’re not touching the drugs, if they’re not moving the drugs, that somehow they’re not as guilty as those that are,” Alvarez said.

That mindset, Alvarez said, is simply wrong.

“The conviction now on your record is ‘possession with intent to distribute.’ No different than the people that were supplying the drugs. No different than those that packaged them. No different than those that were receiving them and distributing them further,” Alvarez said. “You involve yourself in these operations, you’re making this happen.”

Alvarez sentenced Lozano to three years and one month in federal prison, followed by three years on supervised release.