Good riddance to another scumbag that fucked up kids around the world with drugs.
Colombian cocaine kingpin goes on trial amid tight security
Judgment Day has come for Colombian cocaine prince Fabio Ochoa Vasquez, co-founder of the Medellin cartel, once the world's richest and deadliest drug-trafficking organization.
The narco-riches and their trappings, the prancing thoroughbred racehorses and Portuguese bullfighting lessons Ochoa enjoyed in the cartel's 1980s heyday are but a memory. For two years, he has been locked away in solitary confinement, awaiting trial in Miami for crimes allegedly committed after he professed to leave his cocaine cowboy days behind.
Ochoa was among 41 suspected drug traffickers caught in the net of Operation Millennium and indicted in 1999 by a federal grand jury sitting in Fort Lauderdale. By the time their trial begins this week, Ochoa will be one of only two remaining defendants.
He's the highest-profile accused international cocaine trafficker to stand trial on U.S. soil since Colombia resumed extraditions in 1997. His indictment, arrest and extradition were considered a major victory for prosecutors and agents waging the government's war on drugs.
Colombia's turmoil
Ochoa had sought for years to stay out of a U.S. courtroom, hiding in the Colombian jungle, cutting a deal with Colombian authorities for a relatively light sentence, and finally, conducting a public relations campaign in Colombia's court of public opinion.
Now, if he's convicted of the more serious charges, he could spend the rest of his life in federal prison.
As Ochoa's trial begins this week in Miami, no one is forgetting the Medellin cartel's history, which includes wholesale bribery and the assassinations of Colombian judges, prosecutors, presidential candidates and journalists. The case will be tried under a remarkably high level of security.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Edward R. Ryan asked for and received an anonymous jury whose members will undergo background checks by the Drug Enforcement Administration. No one at the prosecution or defense tables will know the jurors' names or other personal details. They'll be ferried to court in vans with tinted windows.
Attorneys and investigators have been asked to sign "need to know" oaths giving them access to sensitive or classified government material only if they promise not to disclose it outside the courtroom.
And then there's the secrecy:
As he investigated the backgrounds of witnesses and co-defendants, Roy Black, Ochoa's high-profile defense attorney, ran into roadblocks at every turn.
"Literally dozens of pleadings and court proceedings have been sealed in both the instant case and several related cases," Black wrote in court papers. He charged the clerk's office in the federal courthouse in Miami "maintained an ultra-secret, completely nonpublic docketing system for certain matters, including matters taking place in the case of Fabio Ochoa."
On the eve of the trial before U.S. District Judge K. Michael Moore, all but about a dozen of the documents have been unsealed. From those records, a general picture of the issues and evidence emerges.
Return to drug trade?
Ochoa wasn't the original target when the DEA and federal prosecutors sought help from Colombian police during the Operation Millennium investigation.
The target was Ochoa family protégé Alejandro Bernal Madrigal, also known by the moniker "Juvenal." Colombian police agreed to bug Bernal's office in Bogotá and share any evidence they gathered with U.S. authorities.
Under the extradition treaty with Colombia, the United States can't prosecute Ochoa for cartel activities in the 1980s, when he and his two brothers combined middle-class business standards with Pablo Escobar's ruthless street smarts to create a $7 billion-a-year cocaine trade. During the mid-to-late 1980s, the cartel families controlled 80 percent of the cocaine entering the United States.
The Medellin cartel was smashed when the Ochoa brothers turned themselves in to Colombian authorities, hoping to avoid extradition to the United States, and Escobar was killed by police.
Ochoa, like his older brothers, claimed to have retired from the drug business after spending nearly six years behind bars. U.S. prosecutors dispute that. They say he teamed up with Bernal as adviser to a ring that smuggled 30 tons of cocaine a month between 1997 and 1999.
The government's evidence includes more than 70 audiotapes, as well as interceptions of fax transmissions, e-mails and cellular phone conversations. Prosecutors also intend to introduce Ochoa's damaging statements to Colombian authorities following his 1990 surrender, as well as a videotape of his Colombian home and its luxurious trappings at the time of his 1999 arrest.
Bernal, who pleaded guilty last month to running a continuing criminal enterprise, is now expected to be a key witness against his former mentor. About a dozen other co-defendants have pleaded guilty to lesser charges and struck cooperation deals with the government. Several are expected to testify.
Language key to case
Recently, prosecutors revealed Bernal has been cooperating for more than a year. He has provided context and new translations of the slangy Colombian Spanish caught by the police microphones planted in his office.
The most crucial conversation occurred during a three-hour, face-to-face meeting between Bernal and Ochoa on June 16, 1999. But prosecutors acknowledge not all the conversations, as recounted by witnesses, are audible to the government's translators.
Papers filed by Black reveal that a key part of the defense strategy likely will involve competing translations in which guilt or innocence could depend on subtle linguistic nuances.
Ochoa, who turns 46 as the trial begins this week, claims he already has paid his debt to society. "Yesterday I made a mistake. Today I am innocent," he insisted on billboards and on his Web site two years ago.
He charges in court papers he is the victim of a corrupt U.S. government operative, Baruch Vega, a Miami Beach fashion photographer Ochoa says offered to help him buy his way out of his legal troubles for a mere $30 million. Ochoa says that when he refused, he was indicted.
U.S. Magistrate William Turnoff recently declined to dismiss the indictment against Ochoa. But he found evidence of misconduct by Vega, who pocketed as much as $100 million by selling bogus sweetheart deals promising light sentences to drug traffickers if they surrendered.
Two DEA agents who sponsored Vega and gave him an unusually long leash have been reassigned to desk jobs pending an internal investigation.
But, while the Vega affair raised eyebrows, Turnoff said he found no evidence linking Vega's double-dealing to the Operation Millennium investigation that snagged Ochoa.
The trial is expected to last two months.