Former NYPD Officer Grace Rosa Baez Sold Fentanyl From a Desk Assignment, and the Man Without a Badge Got Twice the Time
The officer who still had a badge got five years. The man who did not have a badge got twelve and a half. That split, more than the Mentos tin or the kilogram press, is the part of the Grace Rosa Baez case that still does not sit evenly.
Baez joined the New York Police Department in 2012. By 2020 she was on modified desk duty and under a departmental misconduct investigation, assigned to Police Service Area 4 in the East Village, where her job included watching video feeds from New York City Housing Authority buildings. She kept the uniform, the precinct, and the cover those things provide. In October 2023, while that status was still in place, federal investigators say she sold wholesale narcotics to a confidential source. The Southern District of New York later put the total at more than one kilogram of heroin, more than 400 grams of fentanyl, and more than 100 grams of para-fluorofentanyl, a fentanyl analogue.
The deals were not a corner hand-to-hand. Prosecutors said Baez negotiated price and weight while she was on duty, then delivered outside homes she used in the Bronx and in Yonkers. She handed the source a sample of what she called « top quality » fentanyl tucked inside a Mentos container. At one point she offered two kilograms of fentanyl at $30,000 a kilogram and a kilogram of heroin at $25,000. That is warehouse pricing, the kind of conversation that assumes a buyer who will cut the product and push it further down a chain. The Drug Enforcement Administration has spent years telling the public that a few milligrams of fentanyl can kill. A former officer discussing kilos of it from a desk assignment is a different category of betrayal than a street sale.
She was not working alone. Cesar Martinez, of Yonkers, was her boyfriend and shared the apartment where several of the exchanges were arranged. On October 19, 2023, agents moved in as a final delivery was closing. A package of suspected narcotics went out a window. Inside, investigators found more suspected drugs and a kilogram press, the machine used to squeeze powder into bricks that look like they came from a lab rather than a kitchen table. Baez resigned from the department after the arrest. She was released on a $100,000 bond with home detention. Martinez stayed in custody.
A plea that removed the mandatory decade
Both were charged in Manhattan federal court. The conspiracy count they eventually admitted carries a maximum of 20 years. For this weight of fentanyl, a 10-year mandatory minimum would ordinarily have applied. Baez’s plea agreement, reached before U.S. District Judge Denise L. Cote, took that minimum off the table. The parties contemplated a sentence in a range of about 57 to 71 months. On April 16, 2024, she pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to distribute and possess with intent to distribute heroin, fentanyl, and para-fluorofentanyl. Counts two through four were later dismissed on the government’s motion.
Damian Williams, then the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, did not soften the press statement. « Fentanyl and heroin are driving this nation’s deadly opioid crisis and are responsible for thousands of tragic deaths in this city and around the nation, » he said. « Rather than protect and serve the people of New York City, former NYPD officer Grace Rosa Baez peddled deadly poison for personal gain. Today, Baez is held accountable for her selfish and reckless betrayal. » The FBI and the NYPD itself were credited with the investigation, which matters. This was not an outside agency catching a department that refused to look. It was a department helping to case one of its own.
The badge was abused too
Sentencing was July 18, 2024, in courtroom 18B. Prosecutors asked for 71 months, the top of the bargained range, and reminded the judge that the plea had already erased a decade-long floor. The defense asked for home confinement. Baez told the court she had been abused in the relationship, that she sometimes arrived at work with a bruised face, and that the situation was « insane. » Judge Cote accepted the abuse as fact. She did not accept it as a reason to skip prison. The badge, she said, was abused too. The sentence was 60 months, five years, with a surrender deadline of 2 p.m. on September 6, 2024. Bail continued until that morning.
The written judgment, signed the next day, fills in the rest. Three years of supervised release. A $100 special assessment. A $20,000 fine. A recommendation that the Bureau of Prisons place her as close to New York City as possible and let her into the Residential Drug Abuse Program if the designated prison offered it. Set the fine next to the prices she had quoted. Twenty thousand dollars is less than one kilogram of the fentanyl she offered at thirty thousand a kilo. Federal fines are not meant to match street value, but the comparison shows how little of the commercial scale of the conduct is captured by the money line on a judgment.
A 60-month term that starts in September 2024 does not mean a release date in September 2029. Federal good-conduct credit can take up to 54 days a year off a sentence if the prisoner earns it, which is why many five-year terms resolve closer to four years and a few months. The public docket, last updated in the summer of 2025, does not show an appeal that wiped the conviction out. The Bureau of Prisons inmate locator is the only place a projected date would be authoritative, and it is not something a newsroom should guess.
Twelve and a half years for the man without the plea discount
Martinez did not get the same number. He pleaded guilty to the same conspiracy count. His sentencing, imposed November 22, 2024, and entered in a judgment signed November 25, was 151 months. That is twelve years and seven months, plus five years of supervised release. He was remanded that day. Judge Cote again recommended a facility near the city and RDAP if available. The government had asked for 151 months. Martinez had earlier asked the court, in a submission that described his health, for something just above the 120-month minimum his weight exposure still carried. The judge stayed with the government’s number.
Read the two judgments together and the modified-duty officer is the one who left with the mandatory minimum stripped away, a mid-range plea, and a sentence eleven months under what prosecutors requested. The boyfriend, held since the arrest, drew a term more than twice as long. Domestic violence in the relationship is part of the record because the judge said so. It does not explain why a person with a badge, a precinct assignment, and three on-duty sales was the lighter sentence in a two-defendant case. It does explain why Cote refused to pretend the uniform was irrelevant.
Cases like this sit inside a larger argument about what « modified duty » actually restrains. Baez had been under investigation since 2020 and was still inside an NYPD facility, still able to arrange deliveries between shifts spent watching housing-project cameras. The department did not invent that arrangement for her. Modified assignment is a routine holding pattern for officers accused of misconduct who have not yet been fired. When the misconduct that follows is a fentanyl wholesale operation, the holding pattern looks like access.
The AEGIS Alliance has tracked that pattern across the country, from an Arkansas officer filmed beating a man in a patrol car to an Atlanta verdict that put a $21 million price on a paralyzing use of force. Baez’s file is not a brutality case. It is the other failure: an officer prosecuted for the trade her job exists to interrupt. The docket is United States v. Baez, 1:24-cr-00164. More reporting on officers who break the law they carry sits in the Police Accountability section and the Crime News desk.
