2 Ex-Mexican Bankers Named in $500-Million Fraud Arrested by FBI

Two former Mexican bank officials wanted for fraud in their homeland have been arrested by the FBI in Los Angeles, and the United States is facilitating their extradition, a federal prosecutor disclosed Wednesday.

Charles Goldberg, attorney for arrestee Francisco Naredo Moran, 44, told a U.S. magistrate that his client would fight extradition.

Magistrate Volney V. Brown Jr. agreed to Goldberg’s request to hold a bail hearing on April 30.

Naredo, who is being held at the federal Metropolitan Detention Center downtown, has been identified as the man Mexican authorities sought to obtain in an aborted swap with U.S. officials last year. Mexico would have traded a Guadalajara doctor, who is a suspect in the 1985 murder of U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration Agent Enrique Camarena.

On Wednesday, the other arrested man, Ernesto Santos Rosas, 45, said through his attorney, Morton Boren, that he would return to Mexico to face charges of fraud and bribery in a scheme that cost his bank millions of dollars.

In papers filed in Los Angeles federal court, Assistant U.S. Atty. Brad M. Sonnenberg said he was acting for the government of Mexico, which issued arrest warrants for the two men and was requesting extradition.

Sources in Los Angeles said that Francisco Naredo Moran is an alias for Isaac Naredo Moreno, the man Mexico tried to obtain in return for Dr. Humberto Alvarez Machain, the Guadalajara gynecologist who is a suspect in the Camarena case.

Alvarez Machain was indicted by a federal grand jury in Los Angeles in January, 1990, on charges that he administered drugs to revive Camarena so that the agent could be interrogated further at the home of a Mexican drug lord, where he was tortured and killed.

Robert K. Steinberg, one of Alvarez Machain’s lawyers, said Mexican consular officials told him that Francisco Naredo Moran and Isaac Naredo Moreno are the same man. Naredo had been living in the mid-Wilshire area.

At a hearing last year, DEA officials admitted that they began negotiating a possible swap involving Naredo with Mexican authorities in December, 1989.

Court documents state that U.S. officials believed Mexican law enforcement was “very much interested in obtaining the fugitive in California (Naredo) because he was alleged to have stolen approximately $500 million from various politicians in Mexico.”

A swap agreement was reached, according to testimony by a DEA agent, but broke down early last year. Subsequently, a DEA operative in Los Angeles arranged with friends in Mexico to kidnap the doctor and bring him to the United States.

Alvarez Machain was kidnaped in April, 1990, by current and former Mexican policemen and flown to El Paso, where he was arrested by DEA agents. A federal judge ruled last August that the kidnaping violated the U.S.-Mexican extradition treaty and ordered Alvarez Machain returned to Mexico. The suspect remains in custody at Metropolitan Detention Center while the decision is on appeal.

Papers filed by Sonnenberg assert that Naredo, deputy director general of the Banco de Cedulas, and Santos, director of the bank, made bad or phony loans, moved money between bank accounts to hide embezzlement and authorized the deposit of bad checks.

Times staff writer Ronald J. Ostrow in Washington contributed to this story.