A Drone-Drugs-for-Votes Scheme in a Puerto Rican Prison Allegedly Helped a Trump-Aligned Governor Win. The DOJ Shut the Investigation Down.
The big picture: A new ProPublica report alleges that a prison gang in Puerto Rico ran a drugs-for-votes scheme to help Republican Jenniffer González-Colón win her party’s primary for governor. Drones dropped narcotics into the prison. Staff helped distribute them. The gang then sold the drugs to inmates, sometimes for cash and sometimes for votes for González-Colón. Federal prosecutors were building a case. Then Trump won the election, González-Colón won the governorship, and the voting-related charges were cut from the indictment. The investigation was shut down soon after.
Why it matters: Election integrity, drug trafficking, prison corruption, and political coercion all intersect in this story, and the federal response was to make the case go away. If the reporting holds up, this is a textbook example of the DOJ being used to protect political allies rather than prosecute crimes. It also raises a much harder question about what other investigations are being slow-walked or buried that the public just hasn’t heard about yet.
The scheme
A drone flew over a Puerto Rican prison and dropped a package of narcotics. Prison staff allegedly helped get the drugs inside and acted as lookouts. Leaders of a prison gang called Los Tiburones, “The Sharks,” then sold the drugs to other inmates. BUT they didn’t always sell for money. Sometimes they sold for votes.
Specifically, votes for now-Governor Jenniffer González-Colón, often called JGo. She has a long history in Republican politics. She served as the territory’s party chair, represented Puerto Rico in Congress, and worked extensively with Latinos for Trump. When she took office in January 2025, Trump congratulated her publicly. She has pushed to have a statue of Trump built at the Capitol building in San Juan.
What investigators found
The investigation didn’t stop at inmates and prison staff. According to ProPublica, sources said officials were working to determine whether González-Colón or her campaign was directly involved. Investigators found evidence she had spoken with a gang member. They found a Facebook post where a gang leader bragged about his connection to her, reportedly attaching a photo of himself talking to her on WhatsApp, taken during her primary.
While investigators kept digging, prosecutors started preparing an indictment for the people they’d already caught. Then November 2024 happened. Trump won. JGo won. And according to ProPublica, everything changed.
The pressure came down
ProPublica reports that higher-ups in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Puerto Rico told prosecutors to exclude the voting-related charges against the inmates. They also told them to drop all charges against the prison staff. When the indictment came down in December 2024, the drugs-for-votes scheme was described in the document, but nobody was charged for it. Soon after Trump took office, a supervisor reportedly told the lead prosecutor to stop the investigation altogether.
The DOJ’s defense is that the order to exclude election-related charges came before Trump took office. Technically true. BUT the U.S. Attorney for the district was appointed by Trump in his first term and reportedly has a friendly working relationship with Pam Bondi from their Florida days. So “this happened before Trump took office” assumes Trump appointees acting in line with Trump’s interests don’t count, which is a tough sell.
What the prosecutors are saying
The career prosecutors involved aren’t buying the timing argument. One told ProPublica: “Before the election, it was definitely full steam ahead. After the election, that all changed.” Another, describing the experience: “Like you’re watching a puppet show but you can’t see the strings. You know what you’re seeing isn’t telling the whole story. There was some kind of invisible hand.”
When career prosecutors are publicly using phrases like “invisible hand” to describe what happened to their case, that’s not bureaucratic frustration. That’s the language of a cover-up.
The investigation that doesn’t exist
It gets stranger. Last October, in a completely separate case, a magistrate judge mentioned in passing “an unrelated white-collar investigation involving the Governor of Puerto Rico.” The U.S. Attorney’s Office responded by denying that any such investigation even exists. Either a federal judge made up an investigation in open court, or the U.S. Attorney’s Office is denying the existence of an active probe. Both options raise serious questions.
What was happening to the inmates
The really brutal part of this story isn’t the political corruption. It’s what was reportedly being done to the inmates who didn’t want to participate. According to the indictment, inmates who refused to vote for González-Colón faced withheld food and were forced to sit with their arms folded while they were beaten and kicked. Many were addicted to the drugs being trafficked through the scheme. So for some, the only way to avoid going into withdrawal was to vote for JGo.
That’s the allegation. Prisoners physically coerced and chemically dependent, with their votes effectively extorted in exchange for what they needed to function. Meanwhile, Tulsi Gabbard’s office is seizing Puerto Rico’s voting machines to investigate “election integrity.” The selective focus is hard to miss.
By the numbers
1 - drone allegedly used to drop narcotics into the prison
Los Tiburones - the gang accused of running the scheme
December 2024 - when the indictment came down, with the voting scheme described but no one charged for it
0 - prison staff charged, despite allegedly helping distribute drugs and act as lookouts
January 2025 - when González-Colón took office and Trump publicly congratulated her
1 - active investigation involving the governor that the DOJ says doesn’t exist, despite a judge referencing it in court
The bottom line
Puerto Rican residents are U.S. citizens, and they deserve to know whether their last gubernatorial election was actually clean. Right now, the federal government is going out of its way to make sure they can’t find out.
Thanks for reading! Comment your thoughts & reactions | Share to spread the word | Follow to stay in the loop