U.S. Postal Service manager who seized cocaine from the mail to sell it himself is sentenced to prison

One package from Puerto Rico, which Herron had told a supervisor at the post office that he suspected had a “brick of cocaine” in it, according to a postal inspector affidavit, had 271 grams of cocaine in it which Herron sold to a drug dealer for $4,000.

A former Massachusetts post office manager who grew up in Quincy was sentenced to a year and a half in prison for intercepting a “brick of cocaine” and other drugs from the mail and selling them himself.

“I’m disgraced at my decision to be coerced into doing this and truly am sorry,” Shawn Herron, who was the manager of customer service at the Fall River Post Office, hand wrote in a statement to the U.S. Postal Service Office of Inspector General in February 2020. “I’ve been trying to get out of the Fall River Post Office in order to get out of this nonsense and to get a fresh start.”

Herron, 47, of Whitman, was sentenced Monday by Chief Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV in U.S. District Court in Boston to 18 months in prison and three years of supervised release and to forfeit $4,000. On Oct. 22, 2021, Herron pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to possess cocaine with intent to distribute and one count of theft of mail by a postal employee.

In Herron’s handwritten statement, he admitted to intercepting packages from Puerto Rico and the U.S. west coast states suspected of containing drugs about 15 times over a year and a half. He wrote that he did this because he wanted to help his brother out of some bad debt.

Prosecutors called the scheme one of “greed” in a sentencing memo. They said he had texted that he “had big plans for [the] money” like renovating his “back room and new windows and a tile floor.”

Prosecutors say that Herron seized packages either by himself or by using his position to direct subordinates to take the packages out of circulation on his behalf. He had told employees he was seizing the packages for postal inspectors to investigate but not actually alerting inspectors.

Herron would tell customers that their packages had been returned to sender, according to court documents, but would really “take the pilfered parcels to his government-provided office space, open them, and steal their contents if they contained controlled substances.”

“Herron not only conspired to distribute dangerous drugs, but he abused his position with the U.S. Postal Service to do it,” prosecutors wrote in a sentencing memo.

Herron seized one package from Puerto Rico that he told a supervisor he thought had a “brick of cocaine” in it and sold the 271 grams of the drug for $4,000 to an area drug dealer, according to a postal inspector affidavit.

In another case, Herron had seized packages from Oregon with a strong odor of marijuana and attempted to sell what he thought was about 80 pounds of the stuff on three different times to no avail and only stopped when his brother told him it was legal hemp and not marijuana.

Herron grew up in Quincy, according to a letter submitted to the court by his wife last week. He has three daughters, the youngest of which is 17 years old. His wife wrote positively of him and said he had taken a new trade job in insulation.