Dominican cocaine ring that used DR waterfront resort as base pleads guilty in Miami
Each time, hundreds of kilos of cocaine were loaded onto a small boat at a quaint Dominican Republic resort named “Fricolandia.”
From a thatch-roofed pier, the boat hauled the packages of white powder to larger sport-fishing vessels waiting off the northern shore of the DR’s major tourist city, Puerto Plata.
One vessel, “Day Dreamer,” made three journeys without incident to a marina in Dania Beach, but a second vessel, “Triple A,” was seized by U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agents in June 2019 when it docked at a waterfront residence in North Miami, according to federal court records.
Nearly six years later, five members of the cocaine-trafficking ring have pleaded guilty to conspiracy charges involving drug distribution or money laundering — including two defendants in Miami federal court this week. That pair of defendants, Francisco Alberto Gomez-Gomez and Alexander Iglesias-Ventura, face up to 10 years in prison at their sentencing in June before U.S. District Judge Roy Altman.
For decades, the Dominican Republic — along with neighboring Haiti — has been a regular transshipment point for traffickers moving cocaine from Colombia and others parts of South America. The Fricolandia-linked case is one of the latest prosecutions brought by the DEA and U.S. Attorney’s Office in South Florida.
In court papers, Gomez-Gomez is described as having “controlled” the Fricolandia resort near Puerto Plata that was used to ship the Dominican ring’s 1,281 kilos of cocaine on four occasions to South Florida in 2018 and 2019, according to Assistant U.S. Attorney Kevin Gerarde. But there’s no explanation as to how he controlled the resort for the drug-trafficking scheme. According to people familiar with him, Gomez-Gomez claims to own the resort and named it after himself — his nickname is “Frico.”
“As a member of the [drug-trafficking organization], the defendant provided [it] with a dispatch site in the Dominican Republic in exchange for a fee,” according to a factual statement filed with his plea agreement.
“Each of the four shipments ... sent from the Dominican Republic to the United States aboard the ‘Day Dreamer’ and ‘Triple A’ was dispatched from the waterfront resort that the defendant controlled named Fricolandania,” says the statement, which was signed by Gomez-Gomez, his defense attorney, Ana Davide, and the prosecutor, Gerarde.
Other members who have pleaded guilty to the cocaine-distribution conspiracy are Elias Valdez, Alberto Luis Gonzalez-Tejada and Nelson Garcia-Mera. They admitted to their roles in transporting the cocaine loads to South Florida, and also to shipping millions of dollars in drug proceeds back to the Dominican Republic.
Some of group’s drug profits also ended up in the local real estate market, including renting the waterfront home in North Miami where the DEA seized their “Triple A” vessel and cocaine load nearly six years ago.
This story was originally published March 7, 2025 at 2:23 PM.
