Obama gave him clemency, now 74-year-old man gets 5 years in prison for selling fentanyl-laced oxycodone

A 74-year-old man whose decades-long cocaine-trafficking sentence was commuted by then-President Barack Obama in 2015 got a 62-month prison term Tuesday for transporting thousands of opioid pills.

Joseph Burgos is a lifelong drug-trafficker whose convictions date to 1967, court records show.

He grew up fishing with his father in Puerto Rico — visiting Caribbean islands and learning French along the way — before moving to Chicago with his mother when he was 13, after his father died, according to his attorney William Hardwicke.

Left to grow up on his own, Burgos got involved in drugs and dropped out of high school, Hardwicke wrote in a sentencing memo.

On April 13, 2019, Burgos was on probation for the drug sentence that Obama commuted when U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agents caught him arriving at Chicago’s downtown Greyhound bus station from Texas with a backpack containing almost 2,000 oxycodone pills laced with fentanyl — a drug blamed for thousands of fatal overdoses in Chicago.

Burgos lied to the agents, saying he was returning from a funeral in Cincinnati. He also told the DEA he thought the pills contained only oxycodone. His lawyer said Burgos was recorded on wiretaps “repeatedly expressing his abhorrence for fentanyl.”

After Obama commuted Burgos’ 30-year prison term in 2015, Burgos, an aspiring novelist, got a job as a home health worker and drove an Uber but wasn’t able to keep driving for the ride-share company because he couldn’t get a city chauffeur’s license, Hardwicke said.

“While these financial difficulties do not excuse Mr. Burgos’ participation in the offense, they do provide some context for understanding Mr. Burgos’ time” on probation, Hardwicke said.

Burgos pleaded guilty on Sept. 5 to his latest drug charge.

Prosecutors had urged U.S. District Judge Thomas Durkin to send Burgos to prison for six years, citing the severity of Chicago’s fentanyl overdose crisis, while Hardwicke asked for a five-year prison sentence.