Vendor will get 10 years for demise of Michael Okay. Williams

Irvin Cartagena, 40, of Aibonito, Puerto Rico, was sentenced by U.S. District Choose Ronnie Abrams. Cartagena had pleaded guilty in April to conspiring to distribute medicine.

Williams overdosed in his Brooklyn penthouse apartment in September 2021. He died hours after authorities stated he purchased the heroin from Cartagena on a sidewalk in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood in a deal recorded by a safety digital camera.

Williams famously portrayed Omar Little, the rogue robber of drug sellers, in HBO’s “The Wire,” which ran from 2002 to 2008. Along with his work on the critically acclaimed drama, Williams additionally starred in movies and different TV sequence equivalent to “Boardwalk Empire.”

Cartagena confronted a compulsory minimal of 5 years in jail and will have confronted as much as 40 years behind bars.

“I’m very sorry for my actions,” he stated earlier than the sentence was introduced. “After we offered the medicine, we by no means supposed for anybody to lose their life.”

Abrams famous that those that knew Cartagena stated that he was “useful and humble and exhausting working” when he was not utilizing medicine himself.

“I’m hopeful that with remedy, … it can aid you transfer ahead on a extra productive and law-abiding path,” the decide stated.

In an announcement, U.S. Lawyer Damian Williams famous that those that participated within the sale of medicine to Williams already knew that another person had died from medicine they had been peddling.

Prosecutors stated Cartagena and others continued to promote fentanyl-laced heroin in Manhattan and Brooklyn even after Williams died, though Cartagena finally fled to Puerto Rico, the place he was arrested in February 2022.

In a protection submission previous to sentencing, Cartagena’s lawyer, Sean Maher, stated his consumer was paid for his road gross sales in heroin to help his personal use.

“In a tragic prompt, Mr. Cartagena was the one who handed the small packet of medicine to Mr. Williams — it simply might have been any of the opposite males who had been there or within the neighborhood promoting the identical medicine,” Maher wrote. “Sentencing Mr. Cartagena to double digits of jail time won’t carry again the gorgeous life that was misplaced.”

Prosecutors in a presentence submission had requested a sentence of at the very least 12 years whereas the court docket’s Probation Division had beneficial a 20-year time period after citing Cartagena’s 14 prior convictions for drug-related crimes, together with housebreaking, theft and jail escape.

Abrams, although, stated the suggestions had been “just too excessive.”

“This sentence, whereas extreme, is adequate however not larger than obligatory,” she stated.