Photo illustration by Dana Smith. Photo courtesy of the Rhode Island State Police.
Josh Perez sees himself as a thinking-man’s drug dealer, according to federal wiretap transcripts.
He doesn’t sell drugs to users — he supplies other dealers, say law enforcement officers, who claim the deliveries are worth six figures a pop. He keeps his ten-man crew well-paid and brags he never touches the stuff, according to wiretap transcripts. No guns, no tattoos, no amateur Instagram videos of him and his crew flashing gang signs. No, Jasdrual “Josh” Perez reads Business Insider and likes to watch inspirational TED talks online.
He just handles the money.
And he’s smart with all that money. Several properties are held in the names of family members, but federal agents contend Josh paid for them. There is a handsome Federal-style home in Alpine Estates in Cranston with a brick face, four bedrooms, four baths and a sweet in-ground pool out back. It’s worth close to $1 million, and in his mother’s name. A few years ago, he pumped $350,000 cash into a new marijuana dispensary in Massachusetts, according to wiretap conversations, and became a silent partner in the legit side of the business.
He could walk away from the game anytime, he says. Only in his early thirties, he says he’s proud of himself, and blessed.
Several years ago, he was caught saying all of this on a federal wiretap, while laying it all out for a colleague:
“Dude, I sell drugs because I like this shit, dude,” he said. “The business part of it is all worked out, all worked out … ’cause I made my capital, thanks to my God, understand man? I’m not out on the streets grinding no more.
“I’m badass.”
On the street, he boasted about trips to Colombia, and implied he benefited from family ties to the Providence Police Department, according to federal wiretaps and a police source. He rocked khakis and sport coats. He’s a gym rat with a chiseled physique who meditates every morning, says a source close to the family. He cultivated an air of calm, quiet self-assurance. He came across as connected, hooked-up and untouchable.
His uncle, Oscar Perez, on the other hand, is a rare and particular type of cop. At fifty-four, he’s the Providence chief of police and a champion of community policing’s core principles: empathy, compassion, knowing what your communities need from police.
Oscar, a Colombian immigrant, is from Medellín, Colombia. He came to Elma Street in South Providence with his dad, Oscar Sr., in 1982. He was thirteen, didn’t speak English and the poor, tough neighborhood around him was being torn apart by gangs and the emerging crack epidemic.
The Medellín he and his father left was an even bigger nightmare. Exploding in population, slums had sprouted like mushrooms around the city, just as Pablo Escobar’s Medellín Cartel was turning it into the cocaine and murder capital of the world.
Today, Oscar Perez has degrees from Roger Williams University and Boston University and is a graduate of a certificate program from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. He’s sought after at law enforcement conferences all over the country and has traded ideas with cops from as far away as his hometown of Medellín at the FBI Academy at Quantico, Virginia.
He’s soft-spoken, a listener. He isn’t quick to anger, say those who know him. He was a standout soccer player at Central High School and boxed as a kid. Like a lot of fighters, he still radiates the easy-going confidence of a guy with nothing to prove.
He joined the Providence Police in 1994 and worked his way up. He’s had just about every post he could have in more than thirty years with the department: street cop, sergeant, patrol commander, internal affairs, gang unit, community outreach, parole board, captain, major, deputy chief. Finally, chief.
He’s a thinking-man’s cop.
Providence Police Chief Oscar Perez, right, and his brother Andres Perez, now a sergeant in the department, pictured in front of their childhood home on Elma Street in Providence in 2014. Photograph by Kris Craig/USA Today Network.
Younger guys look up to him, especially Colombian and other Spanish-speaking immigrants. Those admirers include his younger brother Andres, forty-five, who, along with their mom and three sisters, followed Oscar and his dad to Providence, once they got a toehold in America.
Andres also followed him into the Providence Police. He made detective and is now a sergeant in the intelligence and organized crime unit. That group does much of the dirty, dangerous police work that is the stuff of movies and TV dramas: keeping tabs on mobsters and gangbangers, cultivating informants, going undercover. Andres and his unit are tasked with knowing what people like his nephew Josh are doing.
Oscar Perez is the first Hispanic police chief in Providence, and when he was sworn in last year, his appointment was applauded by the City Council, the state legislature, community groups and the local chapter of Black Lives Matter. The news even made the papers in Medellín.
For over a decade, Josh’s alleged drug dealing has been the root of tension and heartbreak in the Perez family, according to a source close to the family, causing a rift between Oscar and his now-elderly father, who once crammed into a South Providence attic bedroom with him and scrambled for odd jobs, two against the world. There have been years of silence between Oscar and his sister, Judith, Josh’s mother. Both Oscar Sr. and Judith would go to live with Josh in that handsome Cranston house.
All family estrangements are painful, of course. But for a Catholic Colombian immigrant family, the separations — allegedly over drugs, no less — seem particularly tragic.
But Josh’s world was also a ticking timebomb. Before the feds arrested him in February 2022, charging him with heading up a multimillion-dollar, multistate fentanyl distribution organization, only a few people outside his family knew about him: a handful of law enforcement agents, and of course, the players in the drug game who picked up on Josh’s family connections.
Perez’s 2017 mug shot. Courtesy of David Delpoio/the Providence Journal/USA Today Network.
Providence Mayor Brett Smiley has said then-Major Perez told him about Josh’s arrest in late 2023, when Oscar Perez emerged as a finalist for chief. Smiley told reporters the upfront admission only further solidified his trust in Perez, and he moved on with his appointment. (Smiley declined to speak with Rhode Island Monthly about the investigation, as did the City Council and Oscar Perez through their spokespeople. Andres Perez has hired attorney Michael Colucci, who also declined to comment.)
But when Josh’s world exploded, the damage would engulf his entire family, his uncles, the police department and another family of Medellín natives with a rising star.
Warwick, 2017
The police report for his first big arrest paints Josh Perez as an up-and-coming coke dealer whose game wasn’t very polished.
Around 8:30 p.m. on July 1, 2017, Perez was driving his black Toyota on New London Avenue in Cranston: not signaling lane changes and crossing the median with window tint that was too dark. A state trooper started following him.
He got pulled over on Bald Hill Road in Warwick and as the trooper walked up to his car, Josh tossed a baggie with three ounces of cocaine out the passenger window. Inside the car, the trooper found twenty-nine-year-old Josh with another three-ounce bag of coke, $10,000 or so in cash and four cellphones.
He was arrested and held at the Adult Correctional Institutions for two months before he was granted bail. The case dragged until 2021.
Ultimately, he pled no contest, got 100 hours of community service, a $971.25 fine and five years in prison, deferred. That means he didn’t have to serve any more time if he stayed out of trouble. Court records indicate he still has not paid the $971.25 and it’s unclear what, if anything, he’s done in three years to satisfy the community service.
There’s no mention of Perez’s family in the court filings.
(A background check by prosecutors during the case, though, shows Josh was already on the feds’ radar. A national criminal information search shows the El Dorado Task Force, a long-standing unit based in New York City that specializes in tracking and busting international money laundering by drug dealers and others, had arrested Josh in October 2014 on a cocaine charge that was later dropped.)
But the year of that Cranston arrest, 2017, was also another milestone for Josh. After a succession of Providence and Cranston addresses Perez considered home, that stately Alpine Estates home was purchased for just over $500,000 and titled to his mother.
Josh and his mother, Judith, were now happily running LoVera VIP, a nightclub on Broad Street in South Providence. The club is not the height of glamour; it is the elbow of an L-shaped strip mall, sandwiched between a Dollar General and Quisqueya Liquors.
But there’s food and bottle service. And there’s dancing and deejays from around town, some of whom show up as residents of Josh’s alleged stash houses. City records once again show the club is in Judith Perez’s name, but federal investigators have testified in court that Josh is the true owner.
The club is less than a half-mile from the house Josh’s grandfather, Oscar Sr., and the chief lived in on Elma Street when they
arrived.
The neighborhood is still rough around the edges, but it, like Providence in general, has changed dramatically.
Last year after being sworn in, Chief Oscar Perez spoke to a news crew about arriving on Elma Street with his dad in 1982. The neighborhood was mostly Black then, and drugs and fights were widespread. Street dealers posted up on the front steps where Oscar and his dad lived. As a teen, he was stopped and harassed by officers who assumed the Latino kid must be involved in the crime there.
But he was also around to see cops crack down and lock up the neighborhood’s biggest troublemakers. They cleaned it up, he remembered.
“I feel privileged to have been exposed to those things,” he told WPRI 12’s Stephanie Machado in that 2023 interview. “Good police officers are the ones who have life experiences, empathy … it’s about being able to mentor a young person and understand what they need.”
Oscar and his father came to Providence when the city was only 5 percent Spanish- speaking, mostly Puerto Ricans and Dominicans (the U.S. Census Bureau pegs it at 23 percent in 2020). But Medellín was Latin America’s textile capital before Escobar. And since the 1960s, Colombians from Medellín had been moving to Central Falls, Pawtucket and Providence. The textile industry here was taking a beating, but mills still churned out fabric and clothes, as well as industrial textiles — like seatbelts, dog leashes and all manner of webbing for the military — in later years.
And they needed Colombians who knew the looms and how to fix the machines in their aging mills.
By the 1980s, Central Falls had the largest Colombian community in the U.S. after New York City. Pablo Escobar followed them.
As the kingpin grew his cocaine empire, he picked communities with established Colombian populations to serve as hubs for distribution. He sent Medellín men all over America to set up shop, Baskin-Robbins-style. In Central Falls, his man, Hector Garcia, opened the Sportsman’s Lounge. Before he was arrested, jailed and deported, Garcia brought in Colombian bands to play there, some of them smuggling kilos of cocaine in their equipment. The little club was the place to go for big area drug dealers brokering deals with the Medellín Cartel. Off-duty cops worked as doormen on busy nights.
For a few years in the 1980s, Central Falls, the smallest community in the country’s smallest state, was the cocaine capital of the entire Northeast.
Today, Josh Perez is in the Wyatt Detention Facility, also in Central Falls, facing federal charges of dealing huge amounts of the deadly opiate fentanyl. The charges could send him to prison for life and strip him of everything he owns. If he’s being held on the west side of the jail, he might be able to peek out his slit window and see the spot just across the railroad tracks where the Sportsman’s Lounge used to stand on Sheridan Street.
Wyatt Detention Center in Central Falls, where he is currently placed. Photo by Dana Laverty.
Providence, 2020
Of all the casualties of Josh’s life exploding — his bewildered grandfather, his mother, the repercussions felt by his uncles — the saddest may be Carolina Correa.
Carolina was born in Medellín in 1990, just a couple of years after Josh was born in Providence.
Medellín was still in the throes of the violence and terror unleashed by Escobar, who had declared war on the state and done everything from coordinating an attack on Colombia’s Supreme Court to bombing an airliner. Medellín was Escobar’s home base and a place so dangerous the Colombian Army was loathe to operate there. Escobar himself once described Medellin as “an inferno of garbage.” He was killed in December 1993.
Amid the violence, Carolina Correa’s
father, Gustavo, was stabbed two dozen times outside their home (but lived). Two grandparents were killed.
When Carolina was twelve, her mother got her and her brother out. They ended up in Pawtucket in 2002 and joined the firmly rooted Colombian community there and next door in Central Falls.
She learned English and got involved in the Boys & Girls Club. She thrived there and became a polished public speaker in both Spanish and English. She testified to the value of education in her talks with young people, and the ability to overcome tough circumstances.
By the time she was eighteen, she had been named the Boys & Girls Club Youth of the Year. Google her, and one of the first photos that comes up is Carolina nervously smiling at the camera in the Oval Office, with President Barack Obama beaming, his arm around her.
She also became an accomplished swimmer, competing at Shea High School and winning a scholarship to Assumption College in Worcester. She graduated in 2013 and a few years later started working for the United Way of Rhode Island as a major gifts officer.
Along the way, she was named one of CNN’s “Top 20 Young People Who Rock,” and Hispanic Magazine’s 15 Young Hispanic Icons of America, and founded Splash, a Pawtucket nonprofit that teaches city kids about swimming.
She met Josh in 2020, a setup arranged by a mutual friend. They wouldn’t have seemed a natural match: He presented as a nightclub owner who never went to college; she was the scholarship athlete who disliked loud music and didn’t drink.
But she was taken. He was quiet, mostly, and disciplined. He was ambitious, dreaming of following the advice of his favorite book, Rich Dad, Poor Dad, which preaches the gospel of financial freedom and the wisdom of investing in real estate.
And they bonded over tough childhoods, hers in Medellín and Pawtucket. Sources who know them say he described a childhood without a father; it was unclear to Carolina whether he knew his dad. Josh, the oldest of six children, took on the role of helping to raise his siblings while raising himself.
By 2021, Carolina was living at the Alpine Estates house with Josh, his grandfather, Oscar Sr., his mom, Judith, and Josh’s teenage brother. They were both busy, but home life was a comfortable routine: church every Sunday and regular mealtimes, with the fastidious Josh counting carbs. At home, they favored songs by Frank Sinatra and old-school Colombian cumbia music. Josh kept a little meditation room for his morning routine and a gratitude jar everyone was supposed to drop a note in daily.
In their time together, they traveled at least twice to Medellín — a quickly improving city and a born-again tourist destination.
The feds came knocking that February, in 2022. Court records show she told agents that yes, she knew he was growing pot in the
garage, but that marijuana was legal. She said there was no way he was involved in fentanyl.
“I work with organizations that are against drug use, I cannot believe that,” she told agents. “I’ve been with this man for over a year; I sleep next to him. I can’t believe he would be involved with fentanyl.”
They didn’t believe her.
They let Josh stew in Wyatt for about eighteen months, as he balked at taking a deal or cooperating.
The feds came back to Alpine Estates on Halloween of last year and put Carolina in cuffs. They took her to the federal courthouse in Boston and charged her with federal money laundering crimes that could send her to prison for a decade or more.
The feds aren’t saying Carolina distributed drugs. They’re alleging she conspired to move hundreds of thousands of dollars in what she knew were drug proceeds (marijuana is still illegal under federal law).
Court records in her case include excerpts from wiretaps. In one, she and Josh debate the merits of investing in that marijuana dispensary first or going with some rental properties in Pennsylvania.
A July 2022 conversation included this exchange:
“…CORREA: I think … priority, I think it should be the dispensary.
PEREZ: Yeah and I’m going to mention [voices overlap] …
CORREA: Priority.
PEREZ: Uh-hm.
CORREA: And then anything that you could get from that, what I would do if I was you, your first properties, like, I would get rental property in Pennsylvania. And then I would do a flip, because your flip is what’s gonna give you clean money. That should be your strategy…”
Other intercepts have her arranging to rent a car from a man Josh describes as his “uncle’s best friend” for an associate ferrying $300,000 to North Carolina as part of the dispensary deal.
Carolina spent a few days in custody before posting a $50,000 bail. They held her, too, at Wyatt, where somewhere in the dingy, noisy maze, Josh had been locked up for almost two years.
She left the United Way after her arrest, and now has a real estate company aiming to flip houses in Rhode Island and Massachusetts.
She’s still living at Alpine Estates, but she and Josh are reportedly no longer a couple.
Providence, 2022
On the night before Josh Perez’s life exploded, he was busting his ass.
He allegedly had orders for 30,000 oxycodone pills, and his crew was way behind.
According to the federal investigation reports, Josh showed up at 21 Imera St. at the edge of Providence’s Mount Pleasant neighborhood around 11 a.m. that day. It’s a neat, small home with cheery red shutters and flower planters on the front step. Inside, next to the kitchen, is a room gutted but for a couple of folding tables and two industrial-style pill presses. They look like sinister espresso machines and can bang out 500 pills an hour if going full tilt.
It was Feb. 6, 2022, and Josh, then thirty-four, owned the place. The guy inside, Manny, lived there and allegedly worked for him. They got going; setting the little press heads with the official markings of prescription oxycodone’s coveted thirty milligram pills: a capital “M” inside a square. They filled up the funnels of the machines with the mix: a dark blue coloring powder to give the pills that distinctive oxy “M” look; another powder that acts as a binding agent; and of course, fentanyl.
Fentanyl pills were allegedly processed in Perez’s Providence home. Courtesy of the Drug Enforcement Administration.
There was no oxycodone in the M’s, just like there was none in the green fifteen milligram A’s, or the E’s, and no Percocet in his percs.
It was all fetty. Josh allegedly gave his dealer-clients pills in the tens of thousands, custom-pressed and colored to look like whatever they wanted. But these days, it’s always fentanyl.
We know this because the feds were all over him. The Organized Crime Drug
Enforcement Task Force (OCDETF, or what cops call “OC-def”) used its Boston Strike Force to tap Josh’s phones, turn associates to informants, put GPS on his cars, hide cameras around his alleged stash houses and watch him in undercover cars. They had a tiny closed-circuit TV camera, with audio, in his big Dodge Ram. They used their IRS
investigators to document his money transfers. The FBI, DEA, Massachusetts and Rhode Island State Police were all involved. Providence Police were left out and unaware.
The strike force had been on Josh for three years, and members were coming with warrants the next morning.
At around 6:30, Carolina called. What kind of takeout did they want to eat tonight? When was he coming home? But Josh was stressed, allegedly pressing, counting, bagging, refilling.
“I am working,” he snapped. “Bye. Don’t bother me so much. Let me finish, OK?”
In the background of the call, the feds claim they could hear the distinct whoosh-and-pop of the pill presses.
He stayed until 10:30 that night. An exhausting twelve-hour shift. The feds came knocking the next morning around 8 a.m. The presses, fourteen kilograms of powdered fentanyl, nine kilos of pills, twenty marijuana plants in the garage grow room — they got it all.
Word of the raid reached Josh by phone. He was predictably freaked. By 11 a.m. he was allegedly scrambling to get one last pill delivery done, and then go on the run to New York. He called Carolina and told her he was “screwed” and going on the run. He told her to grab “la cartera” (the wallet, or purse, in Spanish). The feds watched her leave Alpine Estates with a package and drive to Josh’s sister Joslyn’s house in Johnston.
The feds heard him directing another associate on the phone to deliver an order of pills to a dealer at a Providence restaurant. Cops stopped the associate’s car and seized 19,000 pills. The agents raided Imera Avenue, another alleged stash house used by Josh — held in Joslyn’s name, at 139 Indiana Ave. — and Alpine Estates, where they seized $90,000 in cash.
Evidence from the 2017 arrest of Jasdrual “Josh” Perez. Courtesy of Leff & Associates.
At all three houses, they found sophisticated marijuana grows: power meters jerry-rigged to suck more electricity and mask it from the power company (excessive electrical use is a telltale sign of grows), automatic grow lights and watering systems, and walls that come down to conceal it when the bay door is opened.
“I’m looking at twenty (years),” Josh moaned in one call that day.
As he drove to New York and met up with a woman there, the government CCTV in his truck was still running, as was the GPS tracker. They were listening as he and the woman tried to suss out how the feds got on to him: Was there a rat? Who was it?
Josh stayed in New York for a few days. He was pulled over by State Police soon after the strike force’s GPS tracked him crossing into Rhode Island on Feb. 13. They took him to Wyatt, where he’s been ever since.
The feds had something else they wanted to know, though. They came to talk to then-Providence Police Chief Hugh Clements and then Providence Public Safety Commissioner Steven Paré shortly after Josh’s arrest. They’d heard something along the way about Oscar, then still a major, or his brother Andres, according to a law enforcement source. More than just the family connection.
Clements and Paré talked to the brothers, and the brothers both spoke with the federal investigators, the source says, adding that there was more than one meeting between the Perez brothers and the feds.
Paré, who left Providence as public safety commissioner in 2023, also served in the Rhode Island State Police for twenty-seven years, retiring as superintendent in 2007.
Drug dealers work hard to make their peers fear and respect them, Paré told Rhode Island Monthly. There’s a mystique in, say, being Colombian, he says, and having a connection to that Escobar tradition of connections and violence.
There’s also a mystique to having connections to police, he says. Maybe you know what the cops are going to do before they do it, maybe you’re protected. Paré came away from looking into Josh and his uncles convinced that Josh was dropping his uncles’ names for effect.
“It was all bullshit,” says Paré.
Clements did not respond to multiple requests for an interview.
About a year later, just two months after being sworn in as police chief, WPRI reported the feds were looking at Oscar Perez and his brother. The Providence Journal and The Boston Globe followed with similar stories within days.
Since then, silence.
As a matter of policy, the Department of Justice and its agencies do not confirm the existence of an investigation and do not confirm if and when one was completed.
Instead of an interview with Rhode Island Monthly, Chief Oscar Perez’s office offered this statement:
“As I have previously stated related to inquiries of this nature, the actions and choices made by my nephew Jasdrual are not an accurate reflection of myself or my career as a law enforcement officer. The path that Josh chose to take in life was his own and I have cooperated with federal investigators and will continue to do so should they ever need additional assistance.”
Providence, 2024
Most families, even high-profile ones, have a mix of people. Straight-arrows, black sheep and everything in between.
You don’t have to look far to find examples in Providence. In 2007, attorney John M. Cicilline was charged with trying to shake down a husband and wife facing drug charges for several hundred thousand dollars by setting up a drug deal the couple could leak to feds to get a lighter sentence. He was the son of John F. “Jack” Cicilline,” the longtime lawyer for Raymond Patriarca and members of the Patriarca Mafia family based on Federal Hill.
The younger John also happened to be the brother of David Cicilline, then the reform-minded mayor of Providence. Mayor Cicilline, too, had been a local attorney before entering politics.
The younger John Cicilline was later convicted and served eighteen months in prison, while voters seemed not to blame David for his brother’s actions. He was elected to Congress in 2011 and served six terms. In 2014, the state Supreme Court ruled John M. Cicilline could practice law once again.
These days, Providence is a different town. The Mafia has long stopped being the biggest organized crime problem here, as drug gangs — many Spanish-speaking — now dominate.
Still, Rhode Island is small and experience counts.
After two years of battling the U.S. Attorney’s Office over a plea deal, time is running out for Josh. The judge in his case has set a drop-dead trial date for September. A trial would be risky: 97 percent of federal criminal cases end in a guilty plea, according to the Department of Justice. The weight of all that evidence is too great, and saving the government the hassle and expense of a trial is one of the few ways a defendant can get his sentence reduced.
Josh is facing between thirty years and life, according to federal prosecutors.
In late April, he ditched his original lawyers. He hired Jack Cicilline, who according to his file of appearance in the case was representing Josh for “the limited purpose” of hammering out a plea deal.
Josh did not respond to a letter from Rhode Island Monthly requesting an interview, and his attorneys declined to set one up.
Sources close to Josh say he is steeling himself for years in federal prison. While he works out the deal, he is taking no visitors. He doesn’t want his grandfather, or little brother or anyone to see him locked up.
Word is, the only people he’ll see now are his new lawyer, and his mom.