California man sentenced for participation in tri-county drug ring
One of a dozen people indicted as part of a Western Pennsylvania drug ring last November has been sentenced to a decade in prison.
Nikia Perkins, 44, of Bloomington, Calif., was sentenced on charges he conspired to distribute just over a kilogram of fentanyl, U.S. Attorney Scott Brady said in Pittsburgh on Wednesday.
According to information presented in court, Perkins was heard in a wiretapped phone call talking about drug transactions. Prosecutors proved that Perkins was responsible for bringing more than a kilo of fentanyl, along with an undisclosed amount of carfentanil — a synthetic fentanyl derivative that is exponentially more powerful — into Western Pennsylvania from overseas.
Perkins asked that he be allowed to serve his sentence in California.
The prosecution was part of a year-long investigation by the FBI’s Greater Pittsburgh Safe Streets Task Force into what its members called a large-scale drug trafficking organization operating in Beaver, Butler and Allegheny counties.
Patrick Varine is a TribLive reporter covering Delmont, Export and Murrysville. He is a Western Pennsylvania native and joined the Trib in 2010 after working as a reporter and editor with the former Dover Post Co. in Delaware. He can be reached at pvarine@triblive.com.
Remove the ads from your TribLIVE reading experience but still support the journalists who create the content with TribLIVE Ad-Free.