OAKLAND — A 31-year-old man who prosecutors say supplied local fentanyl dealers was sentenced to six years in prison, court records show.

Elvin Melendez Cruz was busted in August 2023 at the the Bay Breeze Inn, where authorities say they seized six pounds of fentanyl, more than $12,000, and a firearm. The case against him was brought about by a wiretap investigation against another suspected fentanyl dealer, Jair Ramirez Castillo, who was allegedly being supplied by Melendez Cruz, according to court records.

Melendez Cruz pleaded guilty to possessing fentanyl for distribution and illegal use of a cellphone, and was sentenced on July 18, court records show. In his separate case, Ramirez Castillo was sentenced to 33 months in prison last January, records show.

Both men attempted to explain their drug dealing by similar means, as explained by Melendez Cruz in his apology letter to the court.

“Sometimes we come from low-income families, and in wanting to be someone in life, we make mistakes without thinking about the consequences,” he wrote, while also acknowledging, “I’m sorry for what I did.”

“Before I got caught, I was using fentanyl, and I feel that that drug makes you go crazy. I almost lost my wife and son because of it. The loss of my father affected me and I took refuge in drugs. I wasn’t even thinking what I was doing or who I was hurting,” Melendez Cruz’s letter says.

Ramirez Castillo’s lawyer compared his client’s fentanyl dealing to “men in South Africa who go a mile below the ground to illegally mine for gold, displaced farmers in Brazil who clear pieces of the Amazon rain forest.” Both defendants grew up under impoverished conditions in Honduras, with Melendez Cruz even presenting a judge with a picture of the mud adobe home he grew up in, court records show.

Prosecutors countered that the men endangered people in the Bay Area by profiting off of the fentanyl epidemic.

“Across three controlled purchases, Mr. Ramirez Castillo sold enough narcotics to kill over 500,000 people,” a prosecution sentencing memo says. “He had access to large quantities of drugs, and he opted to sell these drugs frequently on the streets of the Bay Area.”