THERE’S AN APP FOR THAT –
Mar. 28 – She replied with a menu offering acid ($40), ecstasy ($20), mushrooms ($120) and half a dozen other drugs. They cut a deal: a gram of cocaine and two oxycodone pills for $160, plus a $30 delivery fee. Mimi, whose full name is Mirela Todorova, dispatched an aspiring television actor, Kather Sei, to drop off the drugs, authorities say. The next morning, a maintenance worker walked into Mascolo’s house on North Beverly Drive. The Chihuahua led him to Mascolo’s body on the kitchen floor. The drugs had been laced with fentanyl.
With a business model resembling a food delivery app, Mirela Todorova (aka Mimi Snowie), 33, used Venmo, PayPal and other platforms to collect more than $733,000 from customers in her last year of dealing.
Mascolo’s November 2020 death set in motion a federal investigation that uncovered a booming drug delivery service Todorova is accused of running from her apartment on Hollywood Boulevard. On Thursday, a federal grand jury indicted Todorova and Sei on charges of distributing the fentanyl that caused Mascolo’s death and conspiring to sell drugs. The night Mascolo died, Kessel said, Todorova was in a beach town on Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, where she was raising her pet jaguar, Princess. In the weeks before Mascolo’s death, three customers told Todorova that they believed her “Oxy blue” oxycodone pills were contaminated with fentanyl; she reassured them the pills were “real and safe,” according to text messages cited by prosecutors in court papers.
“Yo mimi the oxys are dirty,” one customer texted her in October 2020. The growing prevalence of fentanyl in cocaine and fake oxycodone pills has driven the rapid rise in deaths.
In California, the pills are often manufactured in cartel-run chemical labs in Mexico, the DEA says. The blue tablets are commonly stamped “M” on one side and “30” on the other to look like pharmaceutical oxycodone. Anyone who takes one and unwittingly ingests fentanyl, a synthetic opioid, can be killed.
On the phone seized from her car, agents found all the texts Mascolo got from “Mimi Snowie,” the DEA reported in court papers. They also saw that drug menus like the ones he received had been sent to many other presumed customers.
But it was Todorova’s iPhones that exposed the vast scope of her operation. Some were told what kind of car a drug courier would be driving when it arrived at the client’s home. Others were invited to come pick up their orders on the street behind Todorova’s building. Todorova, the texts showed, did some of the driving herself.
