East Bay man gets 3 years in federal prison for robbing ATF’s confidential informant

The ATF was using a confidential informant to investigate suspected gun traffickers, but things took an unexpected turn when they met up for a pre-arranged gun sale.

OAKLAND — An East Bay man was sentenced to three years in federal prison and a three-year supervised release term for robbing a federal informant who was investigating him for suspected gun trafficking.

Jose Garcia-Lopez, 22, of Oakland, was sentenced last month by U.S. District Judge Jon Tigar, after pleading guilty to a robbery charge. According to prosecutors, the robbery occurred on March 15, 2023, when the informant arranged to buy guns from Garcia-Lopez and his co-defendant, Samuel Valencia-Gonzalez, for $950.

Valencia-Gonzalez put a gun to the informant’s head and took $950 plus an additional $500 in money that had been provided to the informant by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, court records show. Charges against Valencia-Gonzalez are still pending.

One of the guns that the informant had arranged to buy had been reported stolen from a car in Newark, prosecutors said.

Garcia-Lopez’s lawyer, Assistant Federal Public Defender Samantha Jaffe, wrote in court papers that he “fled” to the United States from Mexico at age 18, and that his family fears he’ll be kidnapped — as has happened to other relatives — and murdered if he’s deported. Jaffe added that Garcia-Lopez got involved with the “wrong people” as he was struggling to get by in Oakland.

“He made unbelievably poor decisions, but those decisions were not made in a vacuum: they were on par with the incredibly poor decisions being made around him,” Jaffe wrote in court filings.