Drug Cartel Accountant Gets 30-Year Prison Term

An accountant who oversaw a money laundering operation that funneled more than $50 million in drug profits to Colombia’s Medellin cocaine cartel was sentenced Monday to 30 years in prison in what was believed to be the longest sentence ever imposed in a money laundering case.

But in a setback to the government’s efforts to enforce a tough new drug kingpin statute in Southern California, U.S. District Judge Robert M. Takasugi dismissed a charge of operating a major narcotics operation that would have brought a mandatory life sentence.

The decision, which vacated the first Southland conviction under a statute directed at $10-million-plus narcotics organizations, in part affirmed Jesus Anibal-Zapata’s argument that the statute should not be directed at persons who merely handle the money for drug traffickers.

“Mr. Zapata acted more in the role of an agent or an independent contractor, absent control over those transactions,” the judge said, noting that Zapata had no ownership of narcotics distributed through the organization of Pablo Emilio Escobar-Gavaria, one of the major links in the Medellin cartel.

Assistant U.S. Atty. Russell Hayman argued that Zapata was an “important manager” in Escobar’s organization who openly acknowledged to undercover agents that the profits he was laundering came from loads of cocaine as large as five kilograms each.

Seizures of cocaine from Zapata’s clients in the Los Angeles area alone totaled more than 10,000 pounds during Operation Pisces, the government’s two-year undercover investigation of narcotics money laundering, Hayman said.

“Defendant bears responsibility for injecting staggering quantities of narcotic drugs into our country,” the prosecutor said in a sentencing memorandum to the court.

But Zapata’s attorney, Michael D. Abzug, said Zapata was simply acting on the orders of his superiors in Medellin, acting as “a middle man” who received only a few hundred thousand dollars for his work.

“The government’s constant attempt to use Mr. Zapata as a substitute defendant for Pablo Escobar is not only unfair, given the lack of evidence on this point, but in a general sense, unfair since Mr. Zapata should be sentenced according to what he did, and not an absent criminal suspect,” Abzug said.

Escobar has been indicted in Los Angeles in the same case, but, like most of the top leaders of the Medellin cartel, remains a fugitive.

Zapata had been the first to be convicted in Southern California under a 1986 law that provides mandatory life in prison without parole for “principal operators” of narcotics organizations grossing more than $10 million in the course of a year.

Even with Takasugi’s dismissal of that count, however, Zapata faced sentencing on two counts of conspiracy, four counts of possession and distribution of cocaine, three counts of unlawful interstate travel and two counts of money laundering.