Crime in the City
A Concord man was sentenced to 18 years in federal prison Friday for running a drug manufacturing operation out of a Richmond warehouse, as well as carrying out a yearslong extortion campaign and shooting at federal agents during his arrest.
The Richmond warehouse made news in January 2024 when a cleanup at the Pennsylvania Avenue site set off a chemical reaction. The city sent out a Nixle alert warning of smoke, telling residents within a six-block radius to stay indoors and avoid the area.
Suspected drug lab cleanup triggers fire alert
A chemical reaction during the cleanup of a suspected drug lab led to reports of a structure fire on Pennsylvania Avenue Saturday afternoon. Neighbors were told to avoid the area and smoke from the fire in a Nixle alert from the city at 3:37 p.m. Residents within a
Soren Hemmila
Richmond Police Department Lt. Donald Patchin later said an outside agency had executed a search warrant at the same property earlier that week.
“There was a chemical reaction that occurred during a clean-up operation that they feared was going to cause a fire, but it did not,” Patchin said. “Fire personnel responded and deemed the situation safe.”
The property, described as a small industrial park in the Iron Triangle that was divided into six small warehouse units, is named as 1201 Pennsylvania Avenue, Suite F, in court filings. Federal agents searched it on January 17, 2024, the same day Joel Dowen, 46, was arrested at his Concord home.
His co-defendant, Micah-Luc Almeida, 47, of San Francisco, was sentenced to three years for his role in the drug operation. The U.S. Attorney’s Office described the Richmond site in a press release as “a drug manufacturing laboratory in Richmond, California, from where law enforcement seized hundreds of kilograms of waste material from attempted drug manufacturing.”
Dowen and Almeida began manufacturing MDA and psilocin pills at the Pennsylvania Avenue site in January 2020, according to court documents. MDA is chemically related to MDMA, or ecstasy, and is a federally controlled substance. Psilocin is the active compound in psilocybin mushrooms.
Text messages cited in the case show the scale of the operation prosecutors said the men were planning. At one point, Almeida sent Dowen instructions for making 50,000 MDA pills. The pair later discussed obtaining 200 pounds of mushrooms and moving the product in batches of tens of thousands of tablets.
When agents searched the warehouse, they found hundreds of kilograms of waste material from attempted MDA production. A separate search of Almeida’s San Francisco home turned up thousands of additional tablets and hundreds of grams of mushrooms containing psilocin.
Almeida’s attorneys argued in a sentencing memo that the manufacturing operation itself had largely failed.
“After close to a year of trying, the warehouse yielded primarily waste material from the attempted manufacture,” the filing states, adding that no usable MDA was ever produced there.
Prosecutors offered a much different assessment of the operation’s scale. In their sentencing memo, they said the amounts both men agreed to for sentencing purposes “likely vastly underestimate” what they actually made and sold over the life of the conspiracy.
Most of Dowen’s sentence stems from conduct unrelated to the Richmond drug operation.
Prosecutors said Dowen spent more than three years threatening and extorting a victim, demanding millions of dollars. The campaign escalated when Dowen arranged an assault on the victim’s 80-year-old father that left him hospitalized and later set the victim’s home on fire.
When federal agents arrived to arrest Dowen in January 2024, he fired two shots through his front door, striking a DEA agent’s protective shield.
“This case presents a truly horrific set of crimes with consequences that are difficult to understate,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Lina Peng wrote in the government’s sentencing memo. “Dowen is dangerous. Through his actions, Dowen has demonstrated that he has no regard for human life or basic decency.”
KTVU FOX 2 covered the raid live as it unfolded Jan. 17, 2024, reporting that dozens of unmarked cars lined Quiet Circle and that agents spent the day removing evidence bags.
Dozens of federal agents investigating inside Bay Area home
It was anything but quiet on Quiet Circle in Concord on Wednesday.
Joey Horta
It was not until court filings surfaced years later that the public learned Dowen had fired shots at agents as they breached his front door that morning.
Dowen pleaded guilty to extortion, assault on a federal officer, conspiracy to manufacture and distribute MDA, and a separate bank fraud charge tied to a fraudulently obtained $725,000 mortgage on his Concord property. That property, at 1259 Quiet Circle, is being forfeited to the government as part of the case. Prosecutors also sought $2.2 million in restitution.
Almeida pleaded guilty to conspiracy to manufacture MDA and possession with intent to distribute.
Both men were also sentenced to three years of supervised release following their prison terms.
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