California Department of Health Care Services assisted with investigation

“There isn’t much that isn’t tracked these days, yet still these drug dealers and some unscrupulous pharmaceutical professionals continue to partake in illegal acts that result in more opioid pills being illegally sold and used in our communities.  We commend the law enforcement investigations that target these crimes.”

CSLEA President Alan Barcelona

On July 28, 2025, Kelo White, 44, of Fresno, was sentenced to seven years and six months in prison for illegally distributing oxycodone and hydrocodone pills.

According to court records, from 2014 through 2018, White and Donald Ray Pierre, 56, of Fresno, obtained more than 450,000 oxycodone and hydrocodone pills based on fraudulent prescriptions that were filled by their co-conspirator, Ifeanyi Vincent Ntukogu, 49, of Fresno, who was a pharmacist in Madera. White was responsible for more than 250,000 of those pills. The fraudulent prescriptions were purportedly from more than 10 different doctors whose signatures had been forged.

White and Pierre had Ntukogu review each prescription before he filled it to make sure that government regulators would not deem it suspicious. For example, Ntukogu reviewed and rejected prescriptions that were supposedly written by certain doctors or that were written for individuals who were having prescriptions filled at other pharmacies because he believed those prescriptions may raise red flags. White and Pierre paid Ntukogu in cash, and then they sold the pills for a significant profit.

Ntukogu was sentenced on Nov. 25, 2024, to seven years and three months in prison. Pierre was sentenced on July 21, 2020, to nine years and four months in prison.

This case was the product of an investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and the California Department of Health Care Services.