News Information

• NEWS_POSTED_BY: Haiti Place
• NEWS_POSTED_ON: Aug 05, 2015
• Views : 696
• Category : General News
• Description : Miami Herald
  BY JAY WEAVER
  jweaver@MiamiHerald.com
  
  August 3, 2015
• Location : Miami, FL, United States
• Website : http://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/crime/article29894515.html

Overview

• When Haiti flourished as a “narco-state,” Colombian cocaine smugglers would pay off local cops to protect their precious loads flown in on planes that landed at night on dirt roads illuminated with the headlights of police cruisers, according to U.S. authorities.
  
  On Monday, a federal prosecutor accused a veteran Haitian National Police officer of providing security for thousands of kilos of Colombian cocaine transported to the island that would eventually be smuggled into the United States.
  
  Claude Thelemaque, a onetime police commander who was whisked away to Miami last November after his arrest at the U.S. Embassy in Port-au-Prince, is standing trial on a drug-trafficking conspiracy charge — the latest Haitian law enforcement officer to be taken down in a saga dating back more than a decade.
  
  Assistant U.S. Attorney Monique Botero said that Colombian and Haitian drug traffickers routinely hired the “best security” on the island. “And who is the best security in Haiti? The Haitian National Police,” she told a Miami federal jury during opening statements.
  
  Botero said the traffickers knew Thelemaque by his alias, “Teleco,” and that some of them would be testifying against him. She singled out a 420-kilo load of cocaine that landed on a dirt road near the coast south of Port-au-Prince on Feb. 20, 2012, accusing Thelemaque of playing a key role on the security team.
  
  But Thelemaque’s defense attorney, Albert Levin, countered in opening statements that his client was not even in Haiti on that date and that he has his client’s stamped passport to prove it. Levin said Thelemaque was in Fort Lauderdale when the big cocaine load landed in Haiti, and that he stayed in South Florida from Feb. 19 to 21 before returning to his country.
  
  “I can show you that he wasn’t even there,” Levin told the federal jurors.
  
  Read more here >>