FBI Kansas City Provides Final Update on 2025 Successes
December 30, 2025 - The FBI on December 30 is releasing information on its efforts to combat crime in the 2025 calendar year. FBI Kansas City Special Agent in Charge Stephen Cyrus is providing the following statement for attribution:
“As we bring 2025 to a close, I would like to take a few minutes to talk about what your FBI office here in Kansas City accomplished this year to make our communities throughout Missouri and Kansas safer.
Reducing violent crime and drug-related violence was a top priority at our offices around Kansas and western Missouri. This year, our office conducted 55 large-scale drug seizures. Each of these operations allowed us to remove a wide variety of illicit drugs out of our communities, including the seizure of tens of thousands of deadly fentanyl pills in just one operation. We also took hundreds of firearms, including fully automatic weapons, from subjects who possessed them illegally.
This summer, FBI Kansas City, along with our partners in Homeland Security Investigations, stood up Homeland Security Task Forces (HSTFs) in both Kansas and Missouri. The mission of the HSTFs is to combat international drug cartels operating in the U.S. and around the world. The HSTFs will accomplish this mission the same way our Joint Terrorism Task Forces have countered terrorist threats for over three decades, by creating a whole of government approach that allows each participating federal, state and local law enforcement partner to bring their own unique authorities and capabilities to our common mission of reducing illegal drugs in our communities and the drug-related violence they bring. The HSTF has already had a positive impact on our community, and I will post links to several of our offices’ operational successes at the end of this article.
We also remained dedicated to protecting the most vulnerable among us through our multi-agency Child Exploitation and Human Trafficking Task Force (CEHTTF). Unfortunately, the CEHTTF is one of the most operationally active squads here in K.C. Nearly every day, this squad is either conducting searches or arrests of subjects suspected of sexually abusing children here in our area, around the U.S., or around the world. When I speak about this threat with those outside of law enforcement, it always shocks them when they hear about the scale of this problem. I ask if you or anyone you know suspects that a child is being exploited or sexually abused, please contact your local police or our office.
While I am very proud to speak about our accomplishments countering our traditional criminal threats, I also want to acknowledge the quiet work our personnel did behind the scenes to uphold our national security mandate. Our professionals upheld our national security responsibilities by protecting the region from terrorist attacks, as well as, from our adversaries attempting to steal the technology driving our economy or attack the infrastructure critical to maintaining our way of life.
Protecting the United States from terrorism is the FBI’s number one priority. Here in Kansas City, our counterterrorism efforts resulted in the arrests and prosecution of U.S. citizens and foreign nationals executing or planning attacks here in the U.S. or abroad. These counterterrorism efforts will continue next year as Kansas City hosts the 2026 World Cup. The FBI’s agents, intelligence professionals, and special capability teams will continue working with all our local, state, and federal partners to protect the hundreds of thousands of visitors to the area throughout the World Cup and all of 2026.
Lastly, I’d like to mention the importance of our relationships with our law enforcement partners. While statistics are important, I prefer not to focus on numbers in this type of commentary because, without context, numbers usually mean little to the people reading them. Instead, our preferred metric for our work is the relationships we have with other law enforcement professionals and agencies that we work with every day on our common mission. In 2025, the FBI office in Kansas City endeavored to be an indispensable partner to our local, state, and federal partners tasked with making our communities safer. I hope next time you have the opportunity to speak with one of the dozens of police chiefs or sheriffs throughout our region, you will ask about their agency’s relationship with the FBI and the value we provide.
As we head into 2026, I will continue our office’s dedication to strengthening the relationships we have and forging new ones across both states to further reduce violent crime, get illegal drugs out of our communities, defend the most vulnerable, and protect our national security.”
Stephen Cyrus
Special Agent in Charge
2025 FBI Kansas City Fact Sheet
- More than 620 arrests
- 55 drug seizures
- More than 200 firearms seized
- 1,300 evidentiary items processed
- More than 70 SWAT operations
- 30 Evidence Response Team responses for evidence processing
- 70 special agent bomb technician responses to include range days, disposals of explosive materials, special-event coverage, and bomb-call responses with state or local partners
- The FBI’s Regional Computer Forensic Laboratory—a digital forensics lab that partnered on cases with more than 50 local, state and federal agencies throughout Kansas and Missouri—processed more than 1,550 devices for a total of almost 35,000 terabytes of data
Cases of Note:
- This spring, FBI St. Louis, FBI Kansas City, and the Drug Enforcement Administration executed a search warrant in Kansas City and discovered approximately 102 pounds of finished crystal methamphetamine, more than 406 pounds of liquids containing methamphetamine in various states, three firearms in the main bedroom, and more than $48,000 in cash.
- Tiger Dean Draggoo was sentenced to 40 years in prison in August for distributing fentanyl, which resulted in three overdose deaths in Belton, Missouri, and Raymore, Missouri. Draggoo admitted that the investigation established he was responsible for distributing or possessing at least 22,000 pills that contained a total of 2,460 grams of fentanyl; and, during a search of Draggoo’s apartment, investigators found 17 firearms, two machine guns, $246,000 in cash, and a ballistic vest.
- Ten Mexican nationals, one Guatemalan national, and two U.S. citizens were indicted by a federal grand jury for a conspiracy to distribute methamphetamine and cocaine, and on numerous firearms charges. The case yielded more than 40 kilograms of methamphetamine, and 11 firearms were seized. When investigators conducted an operation that resulted in nine arrests in the case, they seized nine additional firearms.
- Francis Chenyi Sr. and Lah Nestor Langmi were found guilty of a conspiracy to provide funds and equipment to separatist fighters in Cameroon to allow them to construct and use improvised explosive devices against various targets in the northwest region of Cameroon. A third defendant, Claude Ngenevu Chi, pled guilty to a count of conspiring to provide material support and resources to use a weapon of mass destruction abroad in November.
- In September, Oleg Chistyakov pled guilty for his role in a yearslong conspiracy to circumvent U.S. export laws by filing false export forms with the U.S. government and to procure and sell sophisticated avionics equipment to customers in Russia.
- The FBI conducted a number of operations, such as our Operation Restore Justice and Operation Summer Heat, where we arrested 24 individuals and 15 in one month on charges involving the exploitation of children this fall.
- Brian Aalbers, a former pediatric physician, was sentenced to 25 years in federal prison and a lifetime of supervised release for producing and possessing child sexual abuse material. Aalbers pled guilty to using a concealed video camera to secretly record 13 victims for the purpose of producing child sexual abuse material over a three-year period.
- Jeremy Weber of Topeka, Kansas, was sentenced to 25 years in prison for transportation and possession of child sexual abuse material. Court documents outline Weber’s conduct of using artificial intelligence to take images of women and children he knew and merge them with hundreds of images of child sexual abuse material.
- After the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children received a tip on August 18 and shared it with us on August 19, our personnel executed a federal search warrant on the morning of August 20 and executed the arrest of Dennis Hernandez, an elementary school teacher in the Kansas City area.
- Owen McIntire was arrested on charges related to an arson at a Telsa business in south Kansas City.
- In February, Margaret Shafe was found guilty of the murder of her husband at their home on the Fort Riley military installation. She was sentenced in September to more than 24 years in prison.
- In August, six former leaders of the United Nation of Islam were sentenced for their roles in a yearslong forced-labor conspiracy to compel the unpaid labor of over a dozen victims, including minors as young as eight years old through beatings, threats, punishment, isolation, and coercion.
- Two former Wyandotte County District Court bookkeepers, Julia Roberts and Vicki Robinson, were indicted in a $900,000 wire fraud scheme.
- In the Jefferson City office, Lawrence Lawhorn was sentenced to 21 years in federal prison after he ran a scheme to defraud insurance companies through staged accidents and fraudulently applied for COVID-19 relief funds.
- Jonathan O’Dell and Bryan Perry were sentenced in August for their roles in a conspiracy to murder U.S. Border Patrol agents and a conspiracy to attempt to murder federal agents during the execution of an FBI search warrant in 2022.
FBI Kansas City
Public Affairs Specialist Dixon Land
(816) 512-8200
Source: Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)
