The Jailed Spymaster Still Plots

The former spy with a penchant for Dior shirts was once the demented genie of Peruvian politics.

He could make you vanish if he didn’t like you. He could think up phrases and they would become, as if by magic, the headlines of the next day’s newspapers. He could make envelopes stuffed with untraceable cash appear on his desk.

You wouldn’t think it to see Vladimiro Montesinos now, as he faces charges in 64 trials. He is a frumpy, balding man with bad posture, sitting behind bulletproof glass in a special “anti-corruption” courtroom paid for with a small chunk of the millions he is said to have stolen from the public trough, and which was recovered from his overseas bank account.

But no one can say with certainty that the genie Montesinos is back in the bottle.

As Peru’s spy chief and the right-hand man of Alberto Fujimori, a president with near-dictatorial powers, Montesinos created a vast network of corruption that reached into all sectors of Peru’s public life. Months after the pair came to power in 1990, a U.S. military intelligence cable from Lima informed Washington of “an extraordinary situation [in which] the intelligence service is in effect running the state.”

The pair was brought down in 2000 when a videotape of Montesinos bribing a congressman was broadcast. By then, Peruvians had grown weary of their decade-long reign, in which they temporarily suspended the constitution, created secret tribunals to fight a violent insurgency and used their power to enrich themselves.

Fujimori escaped to Japan. Montesinos, now 59, was brought to justice by a small band of democratic warriors. But some of these attorneys, jurists and journalists fear that the prosecution of Montesinos and more than 1,300 co-defendants -- the largest corruption case in Latin American history -- might soon come to a grinding halt.

The proceedings are a test of a judicial system utterly corrupted under Montesinos. Too slow and antiquated to tackle his octopus-like criminal organization, Peru’s judicial code underwent the most sweeping reform in a century to bring him to trial.

With the proceedings of “Anti-Corruption Court A” and three other judicial benches entering their third year, the extent of Montesinos’ control over all branches of government has been revealed in excruciating detail. All involved in the process believe that the future of Peruvian democracy is at stake.

“The fate of the kleptocratic oligarchy is at play,” said Gustavo Gorriti, an investigative reporter who was among the first to write about Montesinos’ backroom dealings. “They are doing everything they can to bring down the current government ... and to open up avenues of impunity.”

Montesinos has been held under tight security since his 2001 arrest in Venezuela, in part because authorities fear he has millions of dollars at his disposal to buy influence.

In February, he scribbled a note in court to a co-defendant, Moises Wolfenson, a newspaper editor charged with accepting bribes in exchange for favorable stories: “Play up the drug story tomorrow ...”

A television news crew reviewing videotape of the courtroom session discovered that it had filmed Montesinos writing the note and broadcast the footage. But by then, Wolfenson, who is free on bail, had published an article rehashing old allegations linking the current president, Alejandro Toledo, to cocaine use.

Toledo, a longtime democracy activist, was elected president in 2001 thanks to popular outrage at Montesinos and Fujimori. Now Toledo is vastly unpopular. Most Peruvians consider him an incompetent leader, and his approval rating is significantly lower in recent polls than Fujimori’s.

Gorriti, the investigative reporter, says there is evidence that former Montesinos intelligence operatives may be working with Lima’s scandal-sheet newspapers and tabloid-style television programs to undermine the Toledo government. Their stories -- which often involve embarrassing gaffes and acts of petty favoritism -- have been based on illegally recorded telephone conversations and e-mails probably retrieved by hacking into the computer server at the presidential palace.

“Has the government done anything to investigate these incidents?” Gorriti asked. “No. They are completely inert.” The besieged Toledo administration, which presides over an impoverished, conflict-ridden society, simply does not have the resources to fight back, he said.

If Toledo falls, many Peruvians wonder, will the prosecution of Montesinos and his allies fall by the wayside? Will the dozens of lawmakers, television producers, military officers, mayors and judges who engaged in bribery go unpunished? Peru’s democracy, they argue, will be weakened further if it proves to be incapable of cleansing its institutions.

“Our transition to democracy is not yet complete and depends a great deal on the anti-corruption trials,” said Abraham Siles, a Lima law professor. “You can’t have a democracy if these corrupt practices are kept hidden, away from public scrutiny.”

From Japan, where he is plotting an unlikely comeback, Fujimori paints his old ally Montesinos as a sinister Rasputin and says he knew nothing of his spymaster’s secret dealings.

Montesinos has said through his attorney that he always acted on Fujimori’s behalf. “Neither my client nor the other defendants in this case are guilty of any grave crimes,” Montesinos’ attorney, Estela Valdivia, said last month. “They were simply following orders.”

More than three years after his arrest, the judicial proceedings against Montesinos continue to advance with agonizing slowness, thanks in large measure to Peru’s antiquated justice system and to the vast and complex nature of the charges.

He has been convicted in seven trials so far, mostly of lesser charges such as bribery and influence peddling. Only in one -- corruption charges involving the mayor of Callao -- has he been acquitted.

Many of the most important charges are coming to trial this year, including arms trafficking to Colombian rebels and the 1992 killing of nine students and a professor abducted from their university.

Four mornings a week, Montesinos is taken to an austere concrete and steel courtroom built on a naval base in this port city just outside of the capital, Lima. The court is like a theater simultaneously running four plays that star the same actor, with a different set of judges and co-defendants shuffled before Montesinos each day.

When the arms trafficking case is tried on Thursdays, the cast includes generals and a Russian arms dealer. On Fridays, an assortment of corporate executives, local political candidates and a former soccer star are in the courtroom on bribery charges.

Despite the high-profile defendants, the distinct tedium of Peruvian justice usually prevails. One recent day, the entire courtroom was forced to listen for hours as a clerk read from the trial transcript, a defense tactic to slow the proceedings.

“We’re working with a lot of rules that are redundant and obsolete,” said Jose Carlos Ugaz, a Lima law professor who played a key role in establishing the special courts in which Montesinos is being tried. “Our legal procedures are very ritualistic and not very effective.”

If the Montesinos trials are ever completed, the videos and the transcripts of testimony from hundreds of witnesses will pass to a new “Library of Corruption.”

“Our history is being written in the case files of these trials,” Gorriti said.

For the time being, however, the government is so cash-strapped that it hasn’t been able to make microfilm copies of the more than 35,000 files produced in just one of the trials, the arms-trafficking case. Only a single paper copy exists of much of the court record.

“If there is ever a fire, three years of work would vanish in an instant,” said Siles, the law professor.

Just getting Montesinos and his co-defendants into court required a reinvention of much of Peru’s criminal justice system, Ugaz said. That process began days after the fall of Fujimori when Ugaz was appointed by the interim president to be Peru’s first “anti-corruption attorney general.”

Ugaz faced a seemingly insurmountable problem: finding judges and attorneys who hadn’t been caught in Montesinos’ web of corruption. New judges were appointed. Ugaz assembled a team of young attorneys, many not long out of law school, as government lawyers and investigators.

“It was clear to us then that the entire criminal justice system had collapsed,” he said. “Events proved us correct. We discovered Montesinos controlled the chief justice of the Supreme Court, who is now in prison. He controlled the federal prosecutor, who is now in prison. And he controlled the head of the National Police, who is now in prison also.”

Ugaz and other jurists also wrote a series of reforms of Peru’s criminal justice procedures. Essentially unchanged since 1914, the old procedures required prosecutors to wait as long as three months before detaining suspects or obtaining search warrants. Congress quickly passed reforms, significantly speeding the process.

Another new law gave Peruvian prosecutors a tool that is a staple of U.S. criminal proceedings but almost unheard of in South America: the plea bargain. “At first, people didn’t understand why we would want to negotiate with criminals,” Ugaz said. “But it was the only way to penetrate this criminal organization.”

Soon after the law came into effect in late 2000, the “Montesinos mafia” began to implode. “All of a sudden, we had long lines of people wanting plea bargains,” Ugaz said. As suspects turned on one another, countless leads opened up.

But the best evidence against Montesinos came from the spymaster himself. In 1998, he had a hidden camera installed in his office to record his meetings. No one can say for certain why Montesinos had himself taped: Perhaps it was the same obsession with collecting useful “information” that led to his rise through the ranks of Peru’s military intelligence and that he later placed at the service of candidate Fujimori’s first presidential campaign. After his arrest, investigators recovered about 1,500 videocassettes.

The tapes reveal a kind of euphoria of corruption. Powerful people joke and laugh as they conspire to break the law and crush their enemies. Curse words flow freely. Sometimes, Montesinos grins in the direction of the hidden camera.

In video after video, Montesinos moves forward in his intractable struggle against honesty in government.

“All of the plans of the corrupt dealt with how to defeat officials of integrity,” wrote Antonio Zapata, an editor of “In the Sitting Room of Corruption,” a multi-volume “greatest hits” collection of transcripts from the videos.

In a video recorded May 3, 1998, Montesinos talks with three members of the Supreme Court about his decision to force the director of the Executive Judiciary Commission, Jose Dellepiane, to resign.

“You know Dellepiane doesn’t like my character,” Montesinos tells the judges. “He does whatever he pleases, however the [expletive] he wants. Everyone thinks he runs the judiciary, that the judiciary is autonomous.

“That idiot!” Montesinos says, before rolling off a string of vulgar insults. “He’s a traitor.”

Two days later, another video records Montesinos giving Dellepiane the bad news, saying “the boss” -- Fujimori -- had ordered it. He offers Dellepiane a number of jobs abroad but laments that none pay much.

“And since I’m not a thief, even worse,” Dellepiane interrupts.

“Exactly,” Montesinos says.

These days, Montesinos is confined to a small cell on the Callao naval base, in a high-security prison that he personally designed for members of the Marxist guerrilla movement that terrorized Peru until he and Fujimori helped defeat them.

His attorney, Valdivia, says he is clinically depressed because he’s been kept in virtual solitary confinement for three years. “They are slowly killing him,” she said.

She has asked for one thing that she says would improve Montesinos’ state of mind: to be allowed to speak to his attorney and his family in private, with the recording equipment turned off.