Sinaloa Cartel Gunman Arrested for 2022 Miami Hotel Murder Allegedly Ordered by Former DEA Informant

“What can I tell you?” she said in Spanish. “I thought I was going to die that day… I kept calling him and he wouldn’t answer. I knew in my heart something wasn’t good.”

Gonzalez was a valet at Casino Miami who neighbors say often offered to help protect their packages from porch pirates.

“He was an excellent son,” his mother said. “With me, he was good, loving, special.”

But investigators say they found another reason Gonzalez would gather packages from neighbors: to help the Sinaloa cartel ship kilos of methamphetamine into the Miami market.

And, based on evidence laid out in that arrest affidavit, that’s what got him killed.

According to investigators, Julio Gonzalez was expecting 11 pounds of methamphetamine to be delivered on Nov. 16, 2022, to his apartment complex in Hialeah, but to a next-door neighbor’s apartment, not his.

The DEA detected the UPS parcel, intercepted it, and surveilled Gonzalez searching for the package he never received, Sanchez’s arrest affidavit states, and then [the DEA/Hialeah Police] questioned Gonzalez and neighbors but made no arrests.

Jimmy Sanchez, Julio Gonzalez, Tsvia Kol

On November 24, Gonzalez also posted a photo of “Sapir Kol’ – later determined to be Tsvia Kol” and her Facebook page on his account with the caption, “If something happens to me, it’s her,” according to the arrest affidavit, which also states he told a former girlfriend Kol threatened to kill him.

5 days later, he was dead.

“My son, no one is going to bring him back to life – no one other than the creator,” Gonzalez’s mother said.

The duo entered the lobby through the back door at about 10:45 p.m., the warrant says. 15 minutes later, Kol made a brief 30-second call to Sanchez.

Cameras caught Sanchez entering the lobby and heading toward room 304 by 11:20 p.m.

Final 911 Call

The call dropped and when 911 called back, the affidavit says, Gonzalez was heard pleading for his life – “no, no, no” — and then a gunshot.

Miami Springs Police responded to the 911 call that night but found nothing until the next morning when a hotel manager found Gonzalez’s body in the room, with two bullets in his head.

Kol, now 35, was arrested the next day by the DEA on the federal drug trafficking charges from 2020. Her indictment was filed on Nov. 8, 2022, but remained sealed until her arrest more than 3 weeks later, the same day as the discovery of the body of Julio Gonzalez. 

She pleaded guilty on Aug. 30, 2023, to conspiring and distributing the nearly two kilos of methamphetamine she had in her possession in 2020. 

In her detention hearing on Dec. 2, 2022, the federal agent mentioned COVID and changes in prosecutors were two factors in the delay, but Kol’s defense attorney noted the government had charged and detained many other suspects during that period.

A judge ordered her held without bond, saying she was a possible flight risk because, as a legal permanent resident, she could flee to her homeland, Israel, which does not always extradite drug suspects to the United States.

But conspiracy with whom?

Kol pleaded guilty to conspiracy to possess with intent to distribute, and possession with intent to distribute, methamphetamine. She faces a minimum sentence of 10 years in prison and up to life at her sentencing, now set for May 2. Her relatives and attorneys declined to comment to NBC6.

Neither the U.S. Attorney nor the Miami-Dade State Attorney have provided an answer as to why Kol has not been charged in connection with Gonzalez’s death, leaving his mother bewildered.

“That justice is done is very important,” she said, “because one must have confidence in the authorities that we have.”

That’s when federal agents say they detained her in possession of three pounds of meth from an overnight mail shipment and found another half-kilo of the drug and dozens of fentanyl pills in her Broward County apartment.

Instead, Kol was offered a deal, according to a transcript of a court hearing: avoid arrest, at least for the time being, and become an “informal cooperator,” providing information on shipments and coconspirators.

There was one caveat, an assistant U.S. Attorney said at that hearing: “She was told specifically to stop engaging in illegal activity outside of her cooperation with law enforcement.”

But 8 months after cutting that deal, a federal agent would later testify in court, she resumed receiving methamphetamine, distributing 15 pounds of it to her coconspirators.

That was July 2021, and at that point, the agent said they were done with Kol – noting she had provided “bad intel” anyway and violated her agreement by breaking the law.

“Ultimately, she did the deal on her own. She lied to us, and we were out of it,” he testified.

But she was not arrested then, either.

“We decided not to charge that,” assistant U.S. Attorney Alexandra Comolli told U.S. District Magistrate Judge Chris McAliley at that hearing in December 2022, after Kol was finally arrested on federal drug trafficking charges related to the November 2020 shipment and seizures.