A supplied current report says Leonardo de Jesus Zuluaga Duque was sentenced in the Southern District of New York to 160 months in prison, followed by five years of supervised release, and ordered to forfeit $14,751,846. The same report says the case involved roughly $14.5 million in USDT tied to drug trafficking between May and November 2023, as well as a cross-border laundering route involving shell companies and Colombian firms.

Reported Sentence and Forfeiture Terms

The supplied report says Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil imposed a 160-month prison sentence, five years of supervised release, and a $14,751,846 forfeiture order. It also says the case involved approximately $14.5 million in Tether transactions linked to drug trafficking. These two monetary figures should not be understood as the same total.

The distinction matters because the report describes the USDT figure as the scale of the alleged laundering activity, while the forfeiture amount is a separate court-ordered financial consequence. The report does not explain how the forfeiture figure was calculated, so the most cautious reading is that the two amounts measure different things.

How the Reported USDT Laundering Route Worked

The supplied report describes a multi-step process: criminal proceeds were first converted into USDT, then moved through an allegedly unlicensed money-transmission business, exchanged for U.S. dollars, and sent through U.S. shell companies to Colombian companies. The funds were then reportedly converted into Colombian pesos for distribution.

This makes the reported scheme notable as a hybrid laundering route, rather than a purely on-chain transfer story. In this account, cryptocurrency was one stage in a wider cross-border process that also relied on corporate entities and fiat-currency conversions to move value from drug proceeds into local currency.

An official FBI New York post dated October 21, 2026 linked to a matching Southern District of New York Department of Justice case title concerning a Colombian national sentenced to more than thirteen years for an international cryptocurrency money-laundering scheme involving drug-trafficking proceeds. However, the full DOJ release and court judgment were not reviewed here. The sentence terms and operational details therefore remain attributed to the supplied current report, rather than being presented as directly confirmed by the court record.