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Just David Rody defending venezuelan cartel/narco drug traffickers in court
The conviction of Venezuela's 'narco nephews' may bring more heat on a 'global hub of cocaine trafficking'
Christopher Woody
Franqui Francisco Flores de Freitas sits in federal court in Manhattan, New York, December 17, 2015, in this courtroom sketch. REUTERS/Jane Rosenberg
Franqui Francisco Flores de Freitas sits in federal court in Manhattan, New York, December 17, 2015, in this courtroom sketch. Thomson Reuters
Late on Friday, after several hours of deliberation, jurors filed back into a New York courtroom and handed down a guilty verdict against two nephews of the Venezuelan first lady.
Their decision, the culmination of an often sordid trial that began on November 7, may not lead to more scrutiny on officials in Venezuela, one of the Western Hemisphere's most dysfunctional countries where high-level officials are suspected of running a wide-ranging drug-trafficking enterprise.
Franqui Francisco Flores de Freitas, 31, and Efrain Antonio Campo Flores, 30, were arrested in Haiti almost a year ago and immediately extradited to the US, where this week they were convicted of conspiracy to import nearly 1,800 pounds of cocaine to the US via Honduras in a multimillion-dollar drug deal.
Over the last several months, however, the prospects of their case became more uncertain, as a steady stream of details made the government's key witnesses, themselves drug traffickers, look ever more unreliable.
The US government paid about $1.2 million to Jose Santos-Pena, 55, and his son, Jose Santos-Hernandez, 34, for information about drug deals over the last few years. The pair also traveled internationally at the behest of the US Drug Enforcement Administration, meeting with suspected traffickers and making secret recordings for US investigators.
This spring, however, US prosecutors learned that Santos-Pena and Santos-Hernandez were themselves smuggling drugs while working for US agents. At the end of this summer, the two of them pleaded guilty to drug charges, admitting that they had dealt drugs for at least four years.
Efrain Antonio Campo Flores (2nd from L) and Franqui Francisco Flores de Freitas stand with law enforcement officers in this November 12, 2015 photo after their arrest in Port Au Prince, Haiti. Courtesy of U.S. Attorney's Office Manhattan/Handout via REUTERS
Efrain Antonio Campo Flores, second from left, and Franqui Francisco Flores de Freitas stand with law-enforcement officers in this November 12, 2015, photo after their arrest in Port Au Prince, Haiti. Thomson Reuters
Santos-Hernandez did not testify, but Santos-Pena did, and more details about his misdeeds soon emerged.
At a hearing in September, he confessed to prosecutors that he had used a prostitute twice during a trip to Caracas and that he had allowed a friend of his son to be present at DEA-arranged meetings with the two Venezuelans being investigated. He also confessed to using cocaine while working for the US.
During the trial, the defense tried to paint the prosecution's case as deeply flawed.
Amid the proceedings, defense counsel Randall Jackson revealed jailhouse recordings showing that Santos-Pena had kept communicating about drug deals in the weeks before the trial.
Prosecutors decided to disregard the cooperation agreement they had reached with Santos-Pena, doing away with potential leniency for his role in the case and meaning he could face 10 years to life in prison.
>Just David Rody defending venezuelan cartel/narco drug traffickers in court
"He lied in your face!"defense attorney David Rody told the jurors."You saw a rare thing, a government cooperator get ripped up in court."
"He was slime," juror Robert Lewis, a 69-year-old architect from Westchester, New York, said of Santos-Pena. Despite that distaste, Lewis said that other evidence in the case, like recordings, transcripts of conversations, and texts messages, were enough to convict the nephews. "We had to rely on those things," he told the Associated Press.
Some of those recordings were of poor quality, but at least one showed the nephews handling a brick of cocaine, and in another recording, Campo is heard to say, "I'm 30 years old. I've been doing this work since I was 18."
The recordings were central to the prosecutors' case, which argued the pair were not minor players, but driving figures behind a plan to pull of a multimillion-dollar drug scheme and funnel money into their aunt's political campaign.
"It's the nature of the business to have cooperators with really unseemly pasts," Daniel C. Richman, a law professor at Columbia Law School, told the AP after the trial. Santos-Pena, the elder of the two witnesses, had admitted to being part of Mexico's powerful Sinaloa cartel prior to working for US authorities.
"A lot of them come from a criminal background," Mike Vigil, a former chief of international operations for the US Drug Enforcement Administration, told Business Insider before the case went to trial. "And we in the government use them to get in-depth information that we would not normally get, and as a result of that a lot of times they come under attack by defense attorneys."
The two nephews will likely be sentenced in early March next year, and while the face a minimum of 10 years, they could get up to life in prison.
"A conviction for conspiracy can bring a life sentence, but if this is the first time the two nephews have been convicted, I don’t think the judge will give them life sentences, but 10 or 20 years," Vigil, author of of "Metal Coffins: The Blood Alliance Cartel," told CNN after the verdict was announced. "Everything depends on the judge."
'Venezuela now is a principal point for the transit of cocaine'
Throughout the case, details emerged that suggested high-level Venezuelan officials had involvement in the drug trade.
Flores de Freitas and Campo Flores are nephews of the country's first lady, Cilia Flores, who is married to embattled President Nicolas Maduro, who is grappling with a deteriorating economy and fractious political situation. Maduro's approval rating slipped to 19.5% in October, down from about 22% the month prior. The poll, which was not pubic, found about 78.5% of Venezuelans disapproved of Maduro, according to Reuters.
https://www.businessinsider.com/narco-nephews-convicted-in-us-ties-to-venezuelan-government-2016-11?op=1
>It's getting HOTTER!!!
>Focus on the power of POTUS as it relates to the Marines.
>How can MI be applied to prosecute bad actors and avoid corrupt agencies and judges?
>Biggest drop on Pol.
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