NEWARK, New Jersey -- A postal service worker has been convicted of intercepting packages of marijuana and delivering them to a drug dealer in return for cash payments.
Federal prosecutors say Fred Rivers was convicted Tuesday on a conspiracy count but acquitted of taking bribes. The 47-year-old Newark man faces up to five years in prison when he's sentenced Oct. 29.
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Rivers was a mail carrier based at the Springfield postal station in Newark.
Prosecutors said he accepted about $100 cash each time he delivered a package to the dealer between October 2016 and September 2017.
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The package labels contained false names but real addresses in Newark, and Rivers delivered the packages to the dealer in the station's employee parking lot. Rivers used a scanner to falsely indicate that the packages had been delivered to the addresses on the labels.
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USPS mail truck (image source Wikimedia Commons public domain)