-We're at Big Springs, Texas.
It's a low-security prison.
It's prison, but it could be worse.
I could be dead.
My name is Sidney Caleb Lanier.
I sold fentanyl from 2013 until 2016.
My parents were great parents who, you know,
did everything they could to help me the best they could.
It wasn't a matter of me not having loved ones around me
or growing up in a rough neighborhood
or anything like that that led to the path
that I'm at now, you know?
It was not until after an accident that I had.
I got ran over by a pick-up truck in 2001.
I started taking opiates.
I was being prescribed 40 milligrams of Oxycontin
with the 2-milligram Xanax from day one.
I started out on such a high dose that by the time
I did start having injuries, I didn't deal with the pain.
So, as the injuries got worse,
there was nothing to deal with the pain anymore, you know?
So, that was from 2001 until 2016.
It just constantly increased.
-You know, at first I felt sorry for him.
I wanted to help him.
I thought that I could save him, fix him, change him.
And it took a lot of years to realize that I couldn't.
Any day I was waiting for him to die, to overdose.
-It gets to the point where the pain medications
don't work anymore.
You're so tired of this roller coaster,
you'd rather just put a needle in your arm
and make the pain go away
so that you can raise your daughter,
so you can support your family, you know,
so you don't have to leave them behind, you know?
And so you make hard choices.
I've gotten to the point where I could use
a normal amount of heroin that would kill most people
and it wouldn't even do anything to me.
And so the next logical solution was fentanyl,
and so I looked into how to obtain it.
That led to me finding it on the Internet.
-The first thing that we saw -- there was a shipment of fentanyl
that was destined to Lubbock that was seized by Customs
and Border Protection in San Francisco.
When we started talking to Lubbock Police Department,
their narcotics units,
the Sheriff's Office narcotics units,
and we discovered that they were also
seeing an uptick in fentanyl.
They were buying it in street-level sales.
The community that it was going towards --
it wasn't a normal opioid community.
We had Texas Tech students at the college overdosing.
-We're learning new information
about the long-lasting effects of fentanyl.
Medical professionals tell KMAC's Wes Rapaport
multiple people have died from overdoses in Lubbock.
-We knew that if we didn't get a handle on it really quick,
it was gonna be a bigger and bigger problem.
-He never left the couch, and we didn't have people coming
and going, either.
I never even saw a package get delivered here.
So, whatever he was doing, he was really quiet about it,
or he did it when we weren't home, I guess.
Of course there was more money in the house,
but his dad had died the year before,
and he told me that he inherited a bunch of money from his dad.
And that's just what I believed.
-I didn't sell drugs a lot of the ways that most people did.
I never stood on a street corner.
I never had people come to my house to buy drugs.
My kids -- I had people that were friends of mine
that knew that I used drugs,
that showed up at jail to visit me and --
excuse me language when I say this -- but they're like,
"What the [bleep] You sold drugs?
You're a drug dealer?"
Because that's not the life I lived, you know?
Did I do some of those acts? Of course.
But look back at Walter White in "Breaking Bad."
Did he stand on a corner and sell drugs?
No.
Did he go and push them on kids? No.
Did he have drug addicts knocking on his door
constantly to buy more drugs?
No.
How did he sell his drugs?
I don't know.
And I don't know how much I'd ever go into
how much I sold mine.
I wasn't your normal, average drug dealer.
-He started using the dark web to bring fentanyl in,
and he realized at some point in time
there was an extreme market for it here
and he could be very profitable doing it.
It's amazing, what you can do with synthetic drugs.
He had a basic level of chemistry,
basic knowledge of chemistry.
And with searching different techniques on the Internet,
he was able to basically develop a process
where he could use the drugs himself,
distribute them, and make a big profit.
He could import 200 grams,
as an example, of fentanyl from China for around $3,500.
And with 200 grams of fentanyl, through his process,
he was making over $300,000 in profit.
From there, he started recruiting other people
in his organization
to help him launder money to sell fentanyl in the street,
to gather money from other people that weren't paying.
He became the leader of a drug-trafficking organization,
in the classical sense.
The first shipment that we detected
was being sent to Jamie Robertson.
And Jamie Robertson lived with Jessica Holl.
Jessica Holl had been --
she was known to Lubbock PD narcotics
as a heroin dealer for many years,
and they'd also made purchases from her
and several of her associates.
From that point on,
we started focusing on Jessica Holl and Jamie Robertson
as the distribution cell for the fentanyl.
In the middle of the investigation,
we had several people that walked into our door
that were fentanyl users that had gone to drug rehab,
and as soon as they got out,
they were contacted by Jessica Holl
trying to bring them back into the circle of use
so they could sell more fentanyl to them.
We took the intelligence from those individuals,
and we started looking at an individual named Caleb Lanier.
Caleb Lanier was purported as the importer of the fentanyl,
and he was the, I guess,
organizational head at that point in time.
-What I understood of fentanyl at that time period --
Caleb had been prescribed fentanyl years before.
They were a patch, and they didn't work for him.
So, to me, fentanyl was just another medication
that he had tried that failed.
I didn't know that fentanyl was a problem in our country.
I don't even know that I realized opioids
were a problem in our country.
-There was times I was so high, right,
that I would fall asleep while I'm counting $100 bills.
And I couldn't count them.
And as embarrassed that I am to say it,
I would have to get my children to help me count the money.
As much drugs as I was on,
I'm surprised I didn't get caught sooner.
-It took us till October 25th of 2016
to basically develop the case and arrest Caleb Lanier.
-There was a truck with lights just turned on,
and I heard them hit the door at the same time, saying, "DEA."
And I don't know why, but I panicked.
I reached down, and I had this lockbox I had the drugs in.
And I grabbed it and I run out the back door and I throw them.
I just sit back down and put my hands in the air,
and I watch as they come in with hazmat suits.
And I can still to this day hear my wife screaming
and my children screaming, terrified.
-And they were asking questions that none of us knew
the answers to,
you know, like what Caleb's been up to, things like that,
and, you know, where did this come from or that,
you know, items in our house,
where did they come from, things like that we didn't know.
They took me into the garage,
and that's when they started saying, like,
"Oh, we know about all of the drugs and the drug dealing."
I had no idea what they were talking about.
And then about 4:00 that day, they arrested me for conspiracy.
They arrested me, my husband,
and the two girls that he had been,
I guess, dealing drugs with.
That whole day was just mind-blowing
because, I mean, it's something you see in a movie.
It's not something you expect to happen,
especially, you know -- I mean, I'm a good mom.
I was, you know, a senior in college.
I, you know, was just taking care of my kids
and trying to graduate so that I could get away from him
because I couldn't fix him.
-More on the powerful drug fentanyl
found inside this southwest Lubbock home,
where a man was arrested yesterday,
his wife now also behind bars.
-I spent eight nights in jail, wasn't allowed to see my kids.
They weren't allowed to come visit me.
I got one phone call with them while I was in jail.
Found out that they were in the children's home.
They spent four weeks in foster care.
-So, when I go to get sentenced, it wasn't a matter of,
"Oh, I'm terrified, I'm scared, I'm worried."
Whatever they gave me, it was fair
because the truth is I deserved it.
-Lanier, who pleaded guilty in February
to conspiracy to distribute and possess
with intent to distribute fentanyl,
sentenced to a little more than 11 years in federal prison.
-You'll read more headlines like the one from Lubbock, Texas,
where a defendant received 11 years in federal prison
for conspiring to distribute fentanyl.
We need to do everything within our collective power
to stop people who distribute this poison.
-I still wake up and go, "How did we get here?"
because we were normal people.
I mean, yeah, I had a husband who had back problems
and an addiction problem.
You know, I worked or went to school
and, you know, took care of the household.
Our house was clean. Our kids were clean and fed.
And I still wake up some days and go, "How did we get here?"
-We spend a lot of time
with established criminal organizations,
gang members, cartel figures.
That's pretty much the bulk of our work,
and it has been for my whole time in DEA.
What's unique about him is he was able to --
He kind of bypassed the system.
He went out on his own.
He found a source and supply for drugs.
He didn't have to really do much more than communicate
via the Internet or telephone.
He just found a lab in China
that was willing to guarantee their product
and he was able to import it
and he started his own criminal organization
with very few people and very little,
you know, aptitude in the beginning to do this.
-You know, now that he's clean, I see --
I see so much of the person he was.
And I know that he can be good again.
So I look forward to the future and him being healthy and clean
and having grandkids
and, you know, just growing old together hopefully.