SAN JOSE — A former executive director of the San Jose Police Officers’ Association admitted in federal court Tuesday to illegally importing thousands of opioid painkiller pills, resolving a criminal case that surfaced last year after authorities raided the union’s office on the suspicion she was using it as a drug-trafficking hub.
Joanne Segovia’s guilty felony plea in front of Judge Eumi Lee follows through on her attorney’s statement at an Aug. 15 hearing that she was planning to accept culpability for the crime, which occurred after the U.S. Attorney’s Office reduced the severity of her charges.
Segovia’s words in court Tuesday were only to say “Yes” when asked by Lee to confirm and demonstrate her understanding of her guilty plea.
A revelation revealed by Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Tartakovsky at the plea hearing was a drastically expanded scope of the crime, highlighted by the finding that Segovia imported 17,400 of the opioid Tapentadol in a 17-month period between 2021 and 2022. Previously, the number of pills publicly acknowledged by federal authorities had been in the hundreds.
Lee scheduled a sentencing hearing for Jan. 21 and allowed Segovia to remain free while federal probation agents produce a sentencing report. Segovia faces a punishment that could be as severe as 20 years in prison, though that maximum sentence is unlikely.
After Tuesday’s hearing, Segovia’s attorney Adam Gasner sought to position his client as a first-time offender driven by an opioid addiction from which she is currently recovering.
“We’re prepared to go to sentencing and show that she’s a mother, a grandmother, a wife and a person who herself is in recovery and deserves some compassion at this point,” Gasner said. “She was in the trouble with the law now as a result of her own addiction, and note because she’s a profiteer or because she had a grand scheme to enrich or better herself.”
Segovia was a civilian administrator for the police union for two decades before she was fired after the criminal accusations surfaced in March 2023. She was originally charged with conspiracy to import valeryl fentanyl; on Auig. 15, she was arraigned on a new charge of unlawfully importing a controlled substance — with no conspiracy allegation — and the listed drug was changed to Tapentadol, another powerful and highly addictive opioid painkiller.
At that arraignment, Tartakovsky said further testing of an intercepted 2023 shipment meant for Segovia revealed that the package did not contain fentanyl, disproving a claim by federal agents that fueled the original charge.
Gasner said previously that any distribution of drugs was spurred by unnamed actors who exploited her. Tartakovsky offered more detail on that dimension Tuesday, saying Segovia initially procured the pills from a supplier in India for personal use, but then acquiesced to her supplier’s request that she move Ambien and other narcotics “to other people in the United States.”
Tartakovsky added that Segovia was compensated with 360 Tapentadol pills in one instance, and that she used the police union office to orchestrate more drug distribution. In at least one instance, investigators say she used the union’s UPS account to send an illicit package to a supplier in North Carolina.
On March 24, 2023, agents from Homeland Security Investigations reported seizing 73 Tapentadol pills from Segovia’s home and 283 Tapentadol pills from the police union’s headquarters in San Jose.
Segovia was charged four days later, and has been out of custody since. Her arrest was part of an ongoing HSI probe into a network that was shipping controlled substances to the Bay Area from abroad, and found that at least 61 packages were delivered to Segovia’s home in San Jose between October 2015 and January 2023.
Manifests for the packages indicated senders from countries including India, China and Canada, and listed the contents as wedding party favors, clothes, makeup, candy and health supplements. Authorities reported opening five of the packages between July 2019 and January 2023 and discovering thousands of dollars’ worth of controlled substances, including the synthetic opioids Tramadol and Tapentadol.
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Agents also examined Segovia’s WhatsApp account and reported finding communications implicating her, including hundreds of messages exchanged with a phone number registered in India between January 2020 and March 2023; those messages discussed shipping and payment details as well as photos of tablets, shipping labels, packaging, receipts and payment confirmations.
Segovia initially pleaded ignorance when she was interviewed in February 2023 by agents who told her that her name was on the shipments of the narcotics, claiming she had only ordered supplements. During a March 2023 interview, she reportedly changed her story and blamed the shipments on an unnamed woman who she said worked as her housekeeper, saying the woman had been impersonating her on WhatsApp.
Investigators would later learn that Segovia had received two letters from U.S. Customs and Border Protection in 2019 and 2020 stating shipments intended for her had been seized, with one shipment containing 1,160 grams of Tramadol, and the other 1,418 grams of Tramadol. She reportedly gave the agency a signed response stating she did not want to claim the shipments.
This is a developing report. Check back later for updates.
