MIAMI _ The Sweetwater, Fla., city commission candidate accused of brokering a series of cocaine deals repeatedly told an undercover informant that he was "needing money for his political campaign," according to a police report released Monday.
State prosecutors released the arrest report three days after Jose Mejia was jailed on three felony counts of cocaine trafficking. The document offers new details into how state and federal agents built a case against the 29-year-old candidate, whose campaign decried the longtime political corruption in Sweetwater, a city about 14 miles west of Downtown Miami.
Mejia, who lists himself as a student at St. Thomas University, is not on Tuesday's general-election ballot. He is running for a seat on the commission in 2019. Two years ago, Mejia ran for a commission seat and lost, placing last.
Two other men, Christopher Laboy, 24, and Angel Bedecia Campo, 63, were also arrested and charged with cocaine trafficking. Mejia remained jailed Monday. He did not have a listed defense lawyer.
The Florida Department of Law Enforcement targeted Mejia after a confidential informant came forward to say that the candidate had offered to sell marijuana or cocaine. Agents began working with the unnamed informant, handing over $1,800 in bills to buy an ounce of cocaine from Mejia, according to the report.
Agents recorded the serial numbers of the bills to be able to track them later. The first deal was set for Oct. 11.
The two were set to meet at a McDonald's in Little Havana. Mejia texted the informant to say he was "going to smoke a blunt" before heading to the deal, the report said. But Mejia changed the meet-up to a nearby gas station. Agents said he was wary of being set-up by cops.
He arrived in his Florida-registered silver Chevrolet Cruz, but with its license plate changed to one from New Jersey. Drug dealers "will usually replace their vehicle's license plates in attempt to conceal their place of residence and other personal identifiers," FDLE Agent Joseph Crystal wrote in his arrest report.
The informant was secretly audio recording the meeting on a cellphone. But Mejia said his cocaine source was nervous about the sale, so the candidate asked the informant to "follow him to another location to ensure he/she was not working with law enforcement," the report said.
The informant agreed, but had to leave the cellphone behind. About an hour later, the informant called agents to report that Mejia had picked up another man, and the deal had been completed at a house in Kendall.
The next cocaine deal began on Oct. 23 at a Sweetwater gas station. Mejia and Laboy met with the informant before driving to another home nearby _ this time, portions of the deal were captured on an undercover audio recording device, the report said.
The final deal detailed in the report happened Friday, at Mejia's mobile home at the Lil' Abner Mobile Home Park. The score: two ounces of cocaine, for $3,300, agents said.
Campo arrived at the home in a van with the drugs, and was later pulled over and arrested, police said. Inside the van, agents found some of the bills provided to the informant by police.
Mejia was arrested at his home. In his shorts, agents found $869 in bills that had been given to the informant for the deal, according to the report.
This isn't Mejia's first brush with the criminal-justice system. In 2017, Mejia was arrested in Collier County after a traffic stop revealed $6,000 worth of marijuana found inside his 2014 Chevrolet Cruz. He agreed to enter a one-year drug program that allowed for the charges to be dropped if he completed treatment.
It was the same car he used to broker the latest cocaine deals, according to the FDLE arrest report.
