A prominent drug gang has been connected to an Indiana beauty pageant winner who was indicted in Chicago.
In 2011, Glenis Zapata, now 34, won the title of Miss Indiana Latina. She is currently being prosecuted for trafficking after being implicated in an indictment by a federal grand jury in Chicago. She is charged with smuggling cocaine money worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Zapata had recently started working as a flight attendant, but federal police have discovered that she was also handling the transfer of drug gang money into Mexico on board aircraft, including a private jet.
With multiple suitcases containing twenty pounds of cocaine, the plane from Mexico touched down at the airport in Gary, Indiana.
Agents of the cartel apprehended aboard the private aircraft have already faced legal proceedings and imprisonment.
Glenis Zapata is charged in the current indictment along with her sister, Ilenis, 33, who works as an Indiana bank employee and is also from Lafayette.
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Ilenis is accused of helping launder drug proceeds by exchanging lower-denomination bills for higher-denomination ones. Georgian Banuelos, a 39-year-old bank employee, is the other person charged.
Authorities claim that Oswaldo Espinosa, also known as “Scrambler,” a 41-year-old wanted man, is the organization’s mastermind.
Espinosa is accused of transferring cocaine from Mexico to Chicago and other locations between 2018 and 2023, inventorying the drugs and money in garages, stash homes, and warehouses.
For Glenis Zapata, her arrest is a step back from the heights of her 2011 beauty pageant success, when she was hailed as the first Latina winner from Indiana to place in the top 10 of the US pageant.
The Zapata sisters are currently in detention, as evidenced by the posting of bail reports in Chicago federal court for both of them. For the recently charged narcotics dealers, a court date has not yet been announced.
