This time, feds say, life should mean life for Moon kingpin who flooded U.S. prisons and Pittsburgh streets with drugs

Prolific drug dealer Noah Landfried of Moon received life in prison back in 2010 for shipping more than 2 tons of pot from Mexico to Arizona and Nevada and finally into Pittsburgh.

But life doesn’t always mean life in the criminal justice system.

He got out early — and went right back to dealing on an even more massive scale.

In fact, prosecutors said, he was already planning deals before his early release in 2017, despite his sister’s claim that he was excited about the occupations — supposedly legitimate — he would enter into when he got out.

Next week he’s headed to federal prison for orchestrating the shipment of drug-soaked paper into the U.S. prison system and directly causing chaos inside prisons as inmates overdosed and tussled with each other. Landfried, 38, also oversaw an operation on the outside that dealt fentanyl, cocaine, heroin and oxycodone with a cadre of criminal associates, including his brother Ross and a Sewickley real estate agent.

Federal prosecutors are again asking for life when U.S. District Judge J. Nicholas Ranjan sentences Landfried on Wednesday, as well as a substantial fine backed by the six houses he owns in the Ambridge area, all bought with drug money.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Craig Haller said Landfried deserves no consideration.

“There is not a single reason that would even come close to justifying any of Mr. Landfried’s crimes in 2017 and 2018,” he said in sentencing papers. “He was early-released to a situation where he had family support and an opportunity for legitimate income.

“He had a rough childhood which may very well have influenced his decisions as a juvenile and as a young adult, but his rough childhood is no excuse whatsoever for what he did in 2017 and 2018 in his thirties as a grown man. He did what he did in 2017 and 2018 because that is what he wanted to do — and he did it with full knowledge of the consequences if he got caught, particularly after previously being sentenced to a life sentence for international drug dealing.”

Landfried’s lawyer, Martin Dietz, said life in prison is “far greater than necessary” to achieve the goals of sentencing and asked the judge for 15 years.

Landfried was indicted in 2019 with more than two dozen associates and inmates at prisons across the country, including several noteworthy criminals who participated in the K2 smuggling operation. Among them was Robert Korbe of Indiana Township, an inmate at FCI Loretto who was sent there as a result of a drug investigation in 2008 during which his wife, Christina, shot and killed FBI Agent Sam Hicks.

Beyond prison walls, the ring included the Landfried brothers’ friends and cohorts, many of them felons linked by family and drug dealing in the Moon area and throughout Beaver County.

A key player was Michel Cercone, a Coldwell Banker real estate agent who lived quietly in Sewickley until she was exposed on wiretaps and a hidden vehicle recorder as having a leadership role in the ring.

Landfried’s gang sneaked drugs into the nation’s federal prisons by saturating bogus legal papers and fake greeting cards with synthetic cannabinoids for inmates to smoke or chew. Inmates paid for it with money from their prison accounts. Funds were then transferred from the customers to the accounts of inmate dealers and then to people on the outside.

The ring generated hundreds of thousands of dollars with that scheme and millions more on the outside by dealing in other drugs.

Landfried, who was living in the Penn-Rose building in the Strip District during the conspiracy, has no excuse for what he did, Haller said.

He can’t claim he was supporting his family or an addiction.

“He was instead trying to support his greed, his partying, and his image,” Haller said.

He said Landfried continued his K2 smuggling even after his mother needed emergency treatment when she inadvertently accessed some of his supply in January 2018. Her house was also burglarized following one of her son’s bad drug deals.

Instead of deciding to stop dealing to protect his mom, he assaulted the dealer with whom he made the bad deal.

Haller said Landfried re-established his contact with his Mexican source after getting out of prison and received “tractor-trailer shipments of kilos of cocaine” hauled across the U.S.-Mexican border. In 2018, his Mexican source was having trouble getting his drugs across the border, so Landfried started dealing oxycodone, fentanyl, heroin and the K2 paper.

Landfried laundered the drug money through associates in New York and sent payments to his Mexican source. In one instance, Haller said, a launderer was burdened with so much cash — $585,000 — that the person had trouble carrying it.

After that, Landfried divided the cash into separate bags containing up to $200,000.

Landfried’s history includes several convictions in Pennsylvania and Kansas for which he received light sentences. He and his brother were then indicted in Illinois in the Mexican pot case. In that investigation, the DEA said the Landfrieds and a group of associates mostly from Ambridge and Aliquippa trafficked in hundreds of pounds at a time from Mexico.

State police in Illinois said Ross Landfried traveled to Mexico to buy cocaine and pot. The brothers then used couriers driving rental cars to ship the pot to Tucson and Las Vegas. From there, they drove it to Pittsburgh.

The ring came undone when couriers got caught in Texas, Wyoming and Nebraska.

A federal judge in Illinois gave Landfried a life term in 2010, but he took advantage of changes in sentencing rules meant to reduce time for drug dealers.

He ended up serving less than eight years.