A 41-year-old man from the Californian city of Martinez was charged with possession of equipment for producing counterfeit drugs. At the time of his arrest, Jeremy Donagal – an old school dark web vendor previously known as ‘Xanax King’ – was on supervised release from a 2015 conviction for manufacturing and selling counterfeit drugs.
According to a federal complaint, Donagal leased a warehouse in the city of Concord as soon as his supervised release began. Inside the building, law enforcement encountered professional medical equipment such as pill presses, plastic trays with punches and dies in them, and materials for packaging and shipping. Furthermore, the building also housed thousands of counterfeit pills, containing markings of Sandoz, a legitimate pharmaceutical company.
Moreover, Donagal was building a dark web vendor site to sell the pills nationwide.
Before his 2014 indictment, Xanax King was one of the largest distributors of counterfeit drugs on the dark web. He was arrested along with eight others for manufacturing and distributing counterfeit drugs, (international) money laundering, and structuring. As soon as Donagal was detained, his moniker ‘Xanax King’ was hijacked by other dark web vendors, hoping to profit from its reputation.
At its height, Xanax King’s operation manufactured and distributed over one million Xanax tablets in a single week, selling them for up to one dollar per pill, depending on the quantity of the order.
In 2015, it appeared Donagal got off lightly, as he was caught making significant cash transfers to China, both for money laundering and promotion purposes. If convicted, that charge could have landed him in federal prison for up to fifty years. However, at that time the judge seemed to show leniency.
If Donagal is convicted again, he could at least spend the next seven years in prison.