By Associated Press - Tuesday, January 28, 2020

NEWARK, N.J. (AP) - A former postal service worker convicted of intercepting packages of marijuana and delivering them to a drug dealer in return for cash payments has been sentenced to three years of probation.

Fred Rivers, 48, of Newark, will also have to serve one year of home confinement under the sentence handed down late last week. Rivers was convicted last July on a conspiracy count but acquitted of taking bribes.

Rivers was a mail carrier, based at the Springfield postal station in Newark, and had worked for the postal service for nearly 30 years. Prosecutors have said he accepted about $100 cash each time he delivered a package to the dealer between October 2016 and September 2017.

The package labels contained false names but real addresses in Newark, and Rivers delivered the packages to the dealer in the station’s employee parking lot. Rivers used a scanner to falsely indicate that the packages had been delivered to the addresses on the labels.

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