In yet another strike against the Sinaloa drug cartel’s infrastructure propping up this country’s opioid crisis, the feds are sending the coordinator of the Massachusetts fentanyl supply to prison.

Fermin Castillo, 43, may have lived in Mexico, but a multi-year investigation originated by the State Police and continued through a state-federal task force found that he was the man in charge of the Sinaloa cartel’s Massachusetts operation — and even came up here at times to oversee that things were working smoothly.

Castillo’s job officially came to an end on Tuesday, when U.S. Senior District Court Judge William G. Young handed down a 25-year sentence to the cartel middle manager in federal court in Boston.

“The flow of deadly fentanyl from Mexico to Massachusetts is directly tied to the devastation this drug has had on our communities,” acting Massachusetts U.S. Attorney Joshua Levy said in a statement. “(The Sinaloa Cartel in Mexico) pumped cheap, deadly fentanyl onto the streets of dozens of Massachusetts cities and towns.”

According to the prosecution’s sentencing memo, Castillo rented out a place on Hyde Park Avenue in Hyde Park as the home base for his Massachusetts fentanyl trafficking operations.

Castillo wasn’t just a desk jockey, as his criminal history shows he’s been involved with trafficking, including as a front-lines buyer and mover, back to 2004, according to the sentencing memo. That includes a 2012 conviction for conspiracy to distribute a large quantity of cocaine. He got off supervised release for that offense four years later, and he spent the next two years clean until New Jersey authorities busted him transporting nearly $69,000 in drug money in a hidden compartment in his Jeep.

The sentence comes soon after the Biden administration slapped sanctions on a baker’s dozen of the cartel’s chiefs and four Sonora, Mexico-based companies accused of trafficking deadly fentanyl and other powerful opioids into the United States. The AP reported on Nov. 7 that the sanctions cut the people and organizations off from the U.S. banking system, as well as their ability to work with Americans or access their assets in this country.

Fentanyl, a synthetic opioid which has been described by various federal agencies as between 50 and 100 times as powerful as the natural opioid morphine, has destroyed countless lives and contributed to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said synthetic opioids like fentanyl “are currently the main driver of drug overdose deaths,” with 88% of such deaths attributable to the drug class in 2021.

While deaths nationwide decreased by 2% in 2022, that still left more than 105,000 Americans killed from opioid overdoses in that year alone, according to the CDC. That’s roughly 10 times as many killed from opiates and opioids in the year 1999, a period that saw more than 1 million overdose deaths.

And Massachusetts has been no exception to the national opioid problem, with prosecutors noting in this case that it “has been one of the states hardest hit by the opioid crisis and was among the top five states with the most fentanyl reports in 2019.” Indeed, state data shows that deaths here increased by 2.5% in 2022, killing more than 2,300 residents last year.