Feds investigate ‘Sparkles’ and ‘The Guatemalan,’ alleged members of KCK meth ring

Recently filed court documents reveal how law enforcement in the Kansas City area broke up a major methamphetamine trafficking organization.

It started with a 2017 traffic crash in Clinton County, Mo.

An Audi A4 driven by 28-year-old James Patrick Pardee II sped away from an attempted traffic stop by police in Plattsburg. The pursuit lasted nine miles and reached speeds of more than 100 mph before the car wrecked into a guardrail.

Pardee and a female passenger ran away. Pardee was arrested. The female passenger got away.

A backpack left in the wrecked Audi was full of baggies of meth, totaling about two kilograms, or more than four pounds.

When questioned by police, Pardee said he had been selling three kilograms of meth every other day for about three months.

His source of supply, he said, was a Kansas City, Kan., man known as “Flaco” and identified in court documents as Juan Guzman.

Over the next several months, Guzman would become a target of federal investigators who found him at the center of yet another meth trafficking investigation.

Three months after Pardee was arrested, a detective with the Jackson County Drug Task Force got a tip that Chanthachone Senthavy and Megan L. Eubanks, also known as “Sparkles,” were taking large amounts of meth to Iowa.

Officers began following them, stopped them driving together a couple of times, and confiscated guns and a digital scale with white powder on it.

After the second traffic stop in February, investigators found text messages on Senthavy’s phone about drug transactions with Juan Guzman, the man known as “Flaco.”

Senthavy told police the rifle he had in his truck was for protection, and said: “If someone rolled up on him on the streets, he was going to dump on them,” according to court documents.

Senthavy also told them that he got his drugs from from a source in Kansas City, Kan., whom he knew as “The Guatemalan.” He said he was buying as much as five kilograms at a time for $40,000.

He currently owed The Guatemalan $75,000 after one of his customers was arrested in Iowa with drugs he had obtained on credit.

When conducting drug transactions, Senthavy said he would typically hand over the money to a “runner” at the 7th Street Casino in Kansas City, Kan.

The runner would then make a phone call and arrange where Senthavy would go to pick up the drugs.

Senthavy told investigators that murder contracts had been put out on him when he failed to pay for drugs. But the contracts had not been carried out because he was such a loyal customer.

Senthavy also said it was known that if anyone came after him, he would shoot it out.

With two investigations now pointing toward Guzman as an important source of meth in the Kansas City area, detectives began watching him. By June, they were conducting surveillance on him at a house in the 6200 block of East 95th Terrace in south Kansas City.

And in early October, Guzman was implicated in an armed robbery at the Hollywood Casino in Kansas City, Kan.

Investigators got a court order to track his cellphone, and on October 18 they served a search warrant at his house on 95th Terrace.

Guzman and Senthavy were in the house, along with Luis Ramos-Caraveo and Maria Nava.

During the search, investigators found two military-style rifles, three handguns and a little more than a pound of methamphetamine.

As a result of the investigation by the Jackson County task force and the federal Drug Enforcement Administration, Guzman and Senthavy are charged in U.S. District Court with conspiracy to distribute methamphetamine.

Ramos-Caraveo, 23, and Nava, 22, are charged in a separate case with conspiring to distribute the drug.

Eubanks, 36, is charged along with three others in a separate drug distribution case, stemming from a different investigation that led to a search of her house on Crisp Avenue.

Pardee is facing a distribution charge stemming from his 2017 arrest after the police chase and wreck.

The identity of the person called “The Guatemalan” is unclear from the available court documents.