Adriana Isabel Camberos, a businesswoman from El Cajon, caught a major break in January 2021 when she was among the 76 people granted clemency by President Donald Trump on his final day in office.
Known then as Adriana Shayota, the last name of her husband at the time, Camberos was serving a 26-month federal prison term for helping to run a fraud scheme with her husband and others involving counterfeit 5-hour Energy drinks.
With Trump’s commutation, she walked free from prison after serving roughly half her sentence. It was a remarkable benefit for a mostly unknown federal prisoner on the same day that Trump pardoned the likes of Steven Bannon, his former strategist, the rapper Lil Wayne and former San Diego-area congressman Randall “Duke” Cunningham.
The South Bay businesswoman who got clemency from TrumpBut prosecutors now allege that within weeks of regaining her freedom, Camberos began another fraud scheme almost identical to the first one that sent her to prison. She allegedly even used the same Otay Mesa business, Baja Exporting, to carry out the criminal plot.
Last week, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in San Diego unsealed an 11-count indictment against Camberos, 52, and her brother Andres Enrique Camberos, 44, a Chula Vista resident who helped lead the campaign to secure his sister’s commuted sentence.
Both were arrested last week and made initial appearances in U.S. District Court, where they pleaded not guilty to charges of wire fraud, mail fraud and conspiracy to commit wire and mail fraud. Both were released on $50,000 bond.
Reached by phone Monday, Adriana Camberos hung up after telling a reporter “I’m not making any comments. Goodbye. Thank you.”
Her attorney, Joseph McMullen, wrote in an email, “We vehemently deny any wrongdoing and look forward to defending against the government’s allegations at trial.”
Andres Camberos, who’s also the founder and CEO of Grasshopper Dispensary, Chula Vista’s first legal cannabis shop, could not be reached Monday. His attorney did not respond to a request for comment.
The indictment accuses the siblings of conspiring to “unduly enrich themselves” by purchasing consumer goods — such as grocery items, beverages, snacks and household goods — from U.S. companies at a deep discount with the promise to sell those goods in Mexico. Instead, the indictment alleges, they resold them to other wholesalers and distributors in the more lucrative U.S. market.
McMullen called into question the prosecution of “two small-business owners” who he said were being accused of product diversion. He said that practice, while cutting into the profits of “big consumer product corporations,” helps American consumers who are charged higher prices than Mexican consumers for the same products.
“It is disappointing and perplexing that the Department of Justice is defending the unequal pricing schemes of big corporations overcharging Americans, and discouraging the free market forces that protect Americans from unfair price gouging,” McMullen wrote.
According to the indictment, among the items that prosecutors would seek to obtain through forfeiture if the siblings are convicted include a Ferrari F12 sports car; three Range Rover SUVs; a five-bedroom, 7,300-square-foot home in El Cajon that matches an address for Adriana Camberos and is worth an estimated $2.7 million, according to Zillow; a four-bedroom, 4,000-square-foot home near Eastlake that matches an address for Andres Camberos and Zillow estimates to be worth $1.76 million; a home in Chula Vista and condos in San Diego and Coronado; their business property in Otay Mesa; a cryptocurrency ; and several bank s, saving s and life insurance policies.
The indictment does not identify the companies they allegedly defrauded but accuses the siblings of trying to cover their tracks in multiple ways, such as cycling through email addresses and business names to deceive the companies. They also used strategic pickup locations and made purchases through a Tijuana-based company owned by Andres Camberos to “lend legitimacy to their claim to be an international distributor,” the indictment says.
The indictment does not list the exact starting point of the scheme, but cites a wire transfer from March 2, 2021 — six weeks after the commutation — as being part of the allegedly criminal plot.
The siblings allegedly told the U.S. companies that the products they were purchasing would be sold in Baja California, which the indictment describes as “a special free trade zone that does not require Spanish language labeling.” When items did arrive with Spanish labels, they changed the labeling back to English so they could sell them in the U.S, according to the indictment.
That detail echoed one from the 5-hour Energy drink scheme.
According to documents in that case, which was prosecuted in the Northern District of California, Baja Exporting, the company operated by Adriana Camberos and her then-husband, Joseph Shayota, had been left with 350,000 bottles of Spanish-label 5-hour Energy drinks after sales of the drink in Mexico did not go as well as expected.
Two convicted in elaborate scheme to counterfeit 5-Hour Energy drinkProsecutors said Shayota led efforts to relabel the drinks with counterfeit English packaging and resell them back into the more lucrative U.S. market. When all of the drinks sold, Shayota and others came up with a new plan to make use of the high-quality counterfeit labels by concocting their own beverage that they packaged and sold as 5-hour Energy. Prosecutors said they sold 3.7 million bottles of the fake drink in 2012, much of which made it into stores in Northern California.
5-hour Energy hired a law firm and investigators and eventually traced the scheme back to Baja Exporting. In 2015, prosecutors indicted Shayota, his wife and nine others, billing it as the first criminal prosecution of counterfeited food or beverage in the U.S.
Couple sentenced in scheme to counterfeit 5-Hour Energy shotsThe couple went to trial and were both convicted, while their co-defendants all pleaded guilty. Shayota, 71, remains in federal prison. Camberos, after years of appeals, entered prison in December 2019. Thirteen months later, Trump set her free.
“Ms. Shayota is a mother and a deeply religious woman who had no prior convictions,” read a short statement from the White House. “During her time in prison, Ms. Shayota mentored those who wanted to improve their lives and demonstrated an extraordinary commitment to rehabilitation.”
Geoffrey Potter, a lawyer who sued Baja Exporting and those involved with the counterfeiting scheme on behalf of 5-hour Energy’s parent company, said at the time that Camberos’ commutation made “no sense.”
Potter called Camberos a “grifter” who benefited from the presidential power for commutations and pardons that should be used “when there is an injustice that needs to be corrected. But here, there was no injustice that needs to be corrected. It’s the exact opposite. This is the sort of person who needs to be punished.”
In the statement announcing clemency for Camberos, the White House mentioned just one public official by name who offered for the commutation: Chula Vista Mayor John McCann, who at the time was a member of the City Council.
McCann told the Union-Tribune in 2021 that he knew Andres Camberos from high school, and that it was he who asked McCann to the commutation request. McCann said that after researching the case, he concluded he could.
“I ed a reduction of the sentence for Adriana Shayota because I believed at the time that she had been manipulated by her now ex-husband and had, later, behaved in an exemplary fashion while incarcerated,” McCann wrote in an email Monday. “I have no knowledge of any of her subsequent actions, thus I cannot comment on them.”
