DEA Agent Sentenced for Soliciting Assault on Wife

EL CENTRO —  A veteran agent with the Drug Enforcement Administration has been sentenced to a year in jail for attempting to hire one of his informants to run over his wife with a car.

As part of a plea agreement, Jonas Raymond Montalvo, 44, was also sentenced Thursday in Imperial County Superior Court to six months of electronic monitoring and five years’ probation.

Montalvo pleaded guilty Dec. 18 to solicitation to commit assault with a deadly weapon, said Joe Beard, an assistant district attorney in Imperial County, a rural area along the U.S.-Mexico border in Southern California.

“Given the odd nature of the case, I think it was an appropriate sentence,” Beard said.

Montalvo, who suspected his wife of infidelity, was taped by federal investigators hiring one of his informants from previous cases to run over his wife. In exchange, the agent agreed to buy the informant a $20,000 Ducati motorcycle, Beard said.

But the prosecutor said it would have been difficult to establish for a jury that Montalvo wanted to kill his wife and hadn’t been influenced by the confidential informant, who cooperated with federal investigators and taped his conversations with the agent.

Montalvo, who had been on administrative leave without pay from the DEA, will resign from the agency within a few days, said his lawyer, Chris Yturralde. The agent is expected to be released from jail in April with credit for time served since his arrest in September.

“He’s going to try and rebuild his life,” Yturralde said.

The agent had worked for the DEA since 1988, investigating the activities of drug cartels based nearby in Baja California state. He held a supervisory position in the agency’s El Centro office.