Durazo Flown Back to Mexico City After Final Plea Is Denied

Former Mexico City Police Chief Arturo Durazo was hurriedly flown back to Mexico Tuesday evening after his emergency petition to stay in this country was denied without comment by two U.S. Supreme Court justices.

The 68-year-old Durazo, who faces extortion charges in Mexico, was turned over by U.S. marshals in San Diego to agents of the Mexican Federal Judicial Police. Within minutes he was aboard a Mexican government plane that took off from Lindbergh Field at 6:10 p.m.

Federal authorities in Los Angeles began preparing to return Durazo to Mexico shortly after U.S. Supreme Court Justice William H. Rehnquist rejected Durazo’s appeal Tuesday morning in Washington.

Later in the day, Durazo’s attorneys filed a reapplication for an emergency stay with a second Supreme Court justice, John Paul Stevens, but that also was denied.

With his last legal appeal exhausted, an extradition warrant was issued by the State Department in Washington, officially concluding U.S. proceedings against Durazo and ordering his extradition to Mexico.

Prior to Durazo’s departure, authorities here were not talking about when Durazo--the reported target of death threats--might leave.

“We are in consultation with Mexican authorities about his safe and speedy return to Mexico,” said Assistant U.S. Atty. J. Stephen Czuleger, who prosecuted the extradition case on behalf of the Mexican government.

Czuleger and other U.S. officials had refused to comment on where Durazo was being kept during the lengthy extradition hearings, which began last year in federal court.

After the plane was airborne, however, Czuleger said that Durazo was quietly transferred to the federal Metropolitan Correctional Center in San Diego several months ago after Assistant U.S. Atty. Russell Hayman disclosed in court that the former Mexico City police chief was a neighbor in San Pedro’s Terminal Island Federal Prison of Richard W. Miller, the first FBI agent ever charged with espionage.

Mexican authorities were equally tight-lipped about Durazo’s return. “We want him back; that’s all we can say,” an aide to Mexican Atty. Gen. Sergio Garcia Ramirez said in a telephone interview from his Mexico City office.

Durazo, a childhood friend of former Mexican President Jose Lopez Portillo, is accused by Mexican authorities of extorting millions of dollars from the officers and the auto licensing agents he commanded during his tenure between 1976 and 1982 as Mexico City’s police chief, a post Lopez Portillo appointed him to.

His palatial mansion outside Mexico City, equipped with stables, a disco, a dog track and a collection of vintage automobiles, was confiscated by authorities and opened for a time as a “museum of corruption.”

Durazo, who also maintained expensive homes in the United States and Canada on a salary equivalent to less than $1,000 a month, fled to Southern California when Miguel de la Madrid succeeded Lopez Portillo as Mexican president in December, 1982.

He lived for a time in Marina del Rey but fled when Mexico issued a warrant for his arrest. He was arrested in 1984 when he arrived aboard a private jet at the airport in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

Since he lived briefly in the Los Angeles area, he was returned here for extradition hearings.

Tuesday’s ruling ended more than a year of legal maneuvering on Durazo’s behalf.

A series of extradition hearings before U.S. Magistrate Volney V. Brown Jr. began last March with U.S. authorities seeking Durazo’s extradition on Mexican charges of extortion, the illegal stockpiling of unregistered weapons and the illicit possession of imported goods.

Defense attorneys argued that there was no direct evidence of Durazo’s involvement in any extortion scheme and that Mexican authorities falsified evidence against the former police chief.

The magistrate, however, ordered Durazo’s extradition last August on the extortion and illegal weapons charges, but ruled that he could not stand trial in Mexico on the illegal goods charge.

Ruling Upheld

Brown’s decision was appealed to U.S. District Judge Matt Byrne Jr., who three weeks ago upheld the magistrate’s ruling.

Durazo’s lawyers, Bernard Zimmerman and Jerrold Ladar, both of San Francisco, filed an emergency petition with the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals 2 1/2 weeks ago. But the appellate court refused Monday to intervene, prompting the unsuccessful appeal to Rehnquist and Stevens.