Ex-Agent Gets Term in Luxembourg

Fugitive former narcotics agent Darnell Garcia, indicted in Los Angeles on drug-trafficking and money-laundering charges, has been sentenced to six months in prison in Luxembourg for traveling on a false passport, it was learned Friday.

One of Garcia’s attorneys, Mark A. Borenstein of Los Angeles, said the sentencing by a three-judge tribunal Thursday means that the U.S. government’s attempt to extradite Garcia to stand trial in Los Angeles cannot take place until next year.

“It could take a year or more before extradition proceedings are completed,” Borenstein said in a telephone interview from Luxembourg.

The indictment, most recently expanded last week, alleges that Garcia and two other former Drug Enforcement Administration agents, all of whom worked in the agency’s Los Angeles office, conspired to traffic in cocaine and heroin and laundered their profits through banks in Switzerland and Luxembourg.

Separately Friday, an alleged cocaine kingpin whose brother had alleged links to Garcia was arrested in the San Bernardino County community of Rialto.

Rodney P. Browning, 29, was arrested without incident in a pickup truck by a task force of eight deputy U.S. marshals and local and county law enforcement officers, said David Stanton, the chief deputy U.S. marshal for Los Angeles.

“A considerable amount of cash, drugs and weapons was in Browning’s (Rialto) residence,” Stanton said.

“Rodney Browning is a known member of the street gang known as the Black Guerrilla Family and is reported to be a major supplier of cocaine and crack to the Bloods and Crips street gangs in Los Angeles,” the marshal’s office said in a statement.

Browning, one of the U.S. Marshals Service’s 15 most wanted fugitives, along with his older brother, Elrader Browning Jr., headed a network that supplied cocaine to cities in Southern California and other parts of the country, according to the statement.

2 Life Sentences

Elrader Browning was charged in 1987 with netting an estimated $2.5 million a month from drug trafficking. He was convicted and sentenced to two consecutive life prison terms without the possibility of parole and fined $2 million.

One of the charges contained in the 42-count Garcia indictment alleges that Garcia leaked intelligence information through another alleged drug trafficker, Ron Waddy, to Elrader Browning in June, 1987, when Browning was about to be arrested by federal agents in Pasadena.

Waddy and his brother, Conway Willie Waddy Jr., are facing trial in Detroit. Ron Waddy was arrested in July in Paris where he was on the lam with Garcia, federal authorities allege. His scheduled extradition hearing is set for Sept. 27 in Paris.

Garcia’s extradition proceedings, to transport him for trial from Luxembourg to Los Angeles, is being handled by the State and Justice departments.

A State Department spokesman, David Denny, said the agency’s lawyers “would have to consult the (extradition) treaty” between Washington and Luxembourg to determine whether Garcia’s six-month sentence on the passport violation could snag the extradition process.

Expected to stand trial with Garcia, 42, of Rancho Palos Verdes, are two other former Drug Enforcement Administration agents, John Jackson, 40, of Claremont, and Wayne Countryman, 46, of Walnut; Jackson’s wife, Barbara, 41, and Jackson’s former business partner, Sherman Lair, 39, of Alta Loma.

Heroin Worth $7.5 Million

The DEA corruption investigation being conducted by the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles turns partly on the suspected theft in the 1980s of more than five pounds of Asian heroin with a street value of $7.5 million from the custody of the DEA here.

Garcia had been a fugitive for seven months, apparently traveling on a bogus Mexican passport until his arrest in early July by Luxembourg police, who got a tip from DEA agents.

The trial had been scheduled Nov. 7 before U.S. District Judge Terry Hatter in Los Angeles. But that date was recently canceled, and no new one has been set.

The chief prosecutor in the Garcia case, Assistant U.S. Atty. Joyce Karlin, said she did not know whether Garcia’s six-month sentence in Luxembourg would substantially delay the extradition proceedings.

But, in any case, Karlin said Friday that she will oppose Garcia’s trial being handled separately from the other defendants.