BOSTON — A Rhode Island woman was sentenced in federal court in Boston for laundering hundreds of thousands of dollars in fentanyl trafficking proceeds through a Massachusetts marijuana dispensary, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Massachusetts.
Carolina Correa, 35, of Cranston, R.I., was sentenced Feb. 4, 2026, by U.S. District Court Judge Leo Sorokin to 42 months (i.e., three and a half years) in prison followed by five years of supervised release. She was also ordered to pay a $150,000 fine and forfeit $350,000. Correa pleaded guilty in July 2025 to one count of money laundering conspiracy.
Federal prosecutors say Correa — described as an entrepreneur, real estate owner, and fundraiser — led a multi-state scheme to launder about $450,000 in fentanyl trafficking proceeds generated by her then-boyfriend, Jasdrual Perez, through a friend who was in the process of opening a marijuana dispensary in Massachusetts. Perez was sentenced in December 2024 to 22½ years in prison for leading a large-scale fentanyl trafficking conspiracy that manufactured and distributed millions of counterfeit pills made to resemble oxycodone and Percocet.
According to court documents, Perez enlisted Correa in late 2021 and early 2022 to help conceal his drug proceeds. Correa then connected with a friend opening a marijuana dispensary in Massachusetts who was seeking investors. In exchange for helping secure funding, Correa obtained an ownership stake and the title of chief financial officer at the dispensary, prosecutors said.
In January 2022, Correa claimed to have located “investors” for the marijuana dispensary, including a North Carolina real estate investor with whom she had a long-standing personal — not professional — relationship, along with one of his associates.
Correa arranged for a friend to drive $350,000 of Perez’s drug proceeds from Rhode Island to the purported “investors” in North Carolina. Financial records show that the North Carolina “investors” then wired $350,000 in two separate transactions — $250,000 and $200,000 — from two different business accounts to a bank account belonging to an attorney for the marijuana dispensary. The money was then transferred from the attorney’s account into the marijuana dispensary’s business account.
To make the transactions appear legitimate, Correa used her work email to communicate with the investors and drafted sham loan agreements and promissory notes for herself, the dispensary’s CEO, and the investors, prosecutors said. The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Massachusetts also said Correa and Perez laundered an additional $100,000 through the business account of a real estate investment company owned by one of Perez’s Rhode Island-based friends.
Prosecutors say Correa used her professional reputation and public image to create the appearance that she was legitimately securing “investors” for the marijuana dispensary, while intercepted communications showed her repeatedly describing “the hustle to ‘clean’” Perez’s drug proceeds for her own financial gain through financial and real estate transactions.
“Money launderers protect and strengthen an industry — the drug trafficking industry — that directly harms millions of people,” U.S. Attorney Leah B. Foley said in a statement. Later adding, “This case should serve as a warning to others that our efforts to curb drug addiction doesn’t just involve prosecuting drug dealers, it also involves arresting their financial partners in the trafficking conspiracy.”
The case was investigated by the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigation, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, with assistance from the Rhode Island State Police, the Massachusetts State Police and the Cranston, Warwick and West Warwick, Rhode Island police departments.
Assistant U.S. Attorneys Lindsey Weinstein and Kunal Pasricha of the Criminal Division of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Massachusetts prosecuted the case.
