Skip to main content
Law enforcement officers in Portland have long complained that no matter how many times they arrest fentanyl dealers downtown, those same dealers are soon right back on the corners.
One example is Luis Funez. In January, Funez was caught dealing near the open-air drug market on the corner of Southwest 4th Avenue. Three weeks later, he was caught with $3,000 and over 100 fentanyl pills during a traffic stop on Southeast Powell Boulevard.
Funez was booked on 10 felonies, but with a minimal criminal history, he was released to await a court date. After being indicted on most of the charges in April, he didn’t show up in court.
Finally, over the past few month, detectives built a case and identified Funez as a ringleader of a major drug trafficking organization operating across the Portland area. They raided his Northeast Portland Airbnb rental Dec. 7 and found, they said, 52 pounds of fentanyl—or 11 million doses.
But even that wasn’t enough to keep Funez behind bars. He was booked into Multnomah County Detention Center and walked free hours later, instructed to appear in court the following morning. He didn’t show.
That day, Dec. 8, a Multnomah County circuit judge issued another warrant for his arrest, but Funez remains at large.
Over the past five days, WW has tried to piece together what happened and why. Here’s what we know:
Who is Luiz Funez?
Funez, who says he’s a former member of the Honduran military, arrived in Portland by way of Sacramento sometime last year.
Shortly thereafter, he set up shop downtown selling fentanyl, according to an affidavit filed by prosecutors in January. Sometime since then, he became a distributor, using a 21-year-old Oregon City “runner” to deliver drugs for him, according to an affidavit prosecutors filed last Friday.
The center of the operation was a quaint blue house in Northeast Portland’s Cully Neighborhood. The house was an Airbnb rental leased by Funez’s girlfriend, 37-year-old Dezirae Ann Torset, two months earlier. The homeowners tell WW Torset was living there with her child.
Last Thursday, the Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office Special Investigations Unit raided the house and discovered the stash of drugs, along with Torset and Funez. Funez was arrested after attempting to flee out the back. The runner was arrested fleeing an Oregon City house with $25,000 in cash and “two disassembled rifles, an AR-15 and an AK-47,” which the prosecutors say were “hidden throughout a care package destined for Honduras.”
Torset and Funez were booked at the Detention Center at 10:30 am. The runner, Gerson Isaac Hernandez Betancurt, was booked that afternoon.
Why isn’t Funez still in jail?
Because of an apparent communication breakdown and a court policy on who stays in jail pending trial.
Funez had an outstanding warrant; after all, he’d missed a court appearance related to his April arrest for dealing. So, county officials say, cops booked him on charges related to that warrant. They didn’t include any new charges related to the raid—or the 52 pounds of fentanyl.
It’s not completely clear why. Chris Liedle, a Sheriff’s Office spokesman, says investigators were “exploring” charging Funez in federal court, which could land much stiffer penalties, given “the amount of fentanyl, guns and cash.”
But that exploration led to delays. “The processes of coordinating with our federal partners and identifying the appropriate and correct charge(s) can take more time than desired,” Liedle noted. (A spokesman for the the U.S. Attorney for Oregon declined to comment on pending investigations.)
The result: When officials at the Multnomah County Department of Community Justice determined what to do with Funez, he wasn’t treated like a drug kingpin. He was treated like every other street dealer. And in Portland, drug offenses are almost never enough to hold someone in jail while they await their day in court.
The court, at the behest of the state legislature, which passed a series of reforms in 2021 designed to make the system more fair, has strict guidelines: Dealing will get you held only if it’s a “super super substantial quantity” of drugs. Funez certainly did appear to possess a “super super substantial quantity,” defined in state law as 100 grams of a substance containing fentanyl.
But it didn’t matter. Because he wasn’t booked on that charge, the county only looked at his prior charges, which involved much smaller amounts of the drug.
So Funez walked free. He was told to return to court the following morning, at which point a judge could have ordered Funez returned to jail. But Funez didn’t show and, as of press time, was still on the lam.
“We are committed to bringing Mr. Funez to justice,” Liedle says.
Is something going to change?
One focus of scrutiny will be cops’ booking practices. “The crux of the issue is what he was booked on,” court spokeswoman Rachel McCarthy says.
A county official familiar with what happened expressed frustration over the booking decision, saying it wasn’t typical procedure. (Another said it wasn’t uncommon for cops to hold off filing charges while they furthered their investigation.)
But the case is also sure to amplify calls to reform Multnomah County’s pretrial detention policies, which have been under heavy scrutiny since they were introduced last year (“License to Deal,” WW, June 28, 2023). City Commissioner Rene Gonzalez, who’s running for mayor, pledges a change. If he is elected, “drug dealers are going to go to jail,” he said. “They’re not going to get released within 24 hours.”
But it’s not clear if he’ll have the power to change detention policies, which lies with state judges and policymakers. This summer, judges tweaked the rules to make them stricter for people accused of bias crimes and repeat property crimes. But there have been no changes for alleged drug dealers, and the appetite to make any changes remains unclear.
“Changes to the [policy] are possible,” says McCarthy, “but it is a process that requires input from many sources.”