West Covina Businessman Gets 15 Years in Drug Case

A West Covina businessman accused of running a multimillion-dollar cocaine trafficking organization was sentenced Friday to 15 years in prison without possibility of parole and still faces probable charges in the death of U.S. drug agent Enrique Camarena.

U.S. District Judge Edward Rafeedie rejected Jesus Felix-Gutierrez’s request to withdraw his guilty plea on the drug charges, despite his protests that he is innocent and under “constant threats” from the government to prosecute him in the Camarena case.

“I am now sure that I am not guilty” of running a criminal organization, Felix-Gutierrez, owner of an East Los Angeles seafood company, told the judge. “Everything that is here is a lie.”

Felix-Gutierrez, 39, owns a Costa Rican ranch where Rafael Caro-Quintero, one of the men suspected of masterminding Camarena’s 1985 kidnap and murder, was sheltered before his arrest by Mexican police.

Caro-Quintero and another suspect in the case, alleged drug magnate Ernesto Fonseca-Carillo, are being held in a Mexican prison pending an investigation by authorities there.

Caro-Quintero has been named on drug charges in the same U.S. indictment that targeted Felix-Gutierrez and seven other defendants in connection with an alleged massive cocaine trafficking ring headquartered in Los Angeles with links to Latin America.

Federal prosecutors say they expect to charge one or more defendants soon with the murder of Camarena and his pilot, Alfredo Zavala Avelar.

The government’s plea agreement with Felix-Gutierrez specifically reserved the possibility of charging him in the Camarena case even if he pleaded guilty to the drug charges, Assistant U.S. Atty. Jimmy Gurule said.

But Felix-Gutierrez’s attorney, Kevin M. Kelly, argued Friday that his client still maintains his innocence and is entitled to withdraw the guilty plea because the court originally accepted it only conditionally.

Earlier, Kelly had argued that Felix-Gutierrez was coerced into pleading guilty with threats of prosecution in the murder case, a claim that he later withdrew.

But Rafeedie said Felix-Gutierrez is not entitled to admit the charges, then proclaim his innocence, and he called the various grounds on which he sought to withdraw his plea “wholly spurious and phony.”

“It is very clear to the court that this defendant was a major head of this narcotics distribution ring for many years,” the judge said.