Huge Bail Keeps Man Jailed in Drug Case : Simi Valley: The suspect extradited from Miami is held in lieu of $500 million, believed to be a state record.

A suspected Colombian drug money launderer has been secretly held in Ventura County Jail for nearly a week on $500-million bail, which legal experts believed to be the highest bail ever levied by a California judge in a drug trafficking case.

Ontoniel Urrego, 67, was arrested in Miami on March 18 and extradited to Ventura three days later at the request of the Ventura County district attorney, The Times has learned.

Urrego and at least three others are the target of a sealed Ventura County Grand Jury indictment charging them with conspiracy to sell illicit narcotics and violating California money laundering laws, law enforcement sources said.

One source called Urrego, who has been in the export-import business in Florida, “a major player” in the laundering of millions of dollars for a Colombian drug cartel.

Urrego’s attorneys could not be reached for comment.

His arrest and extradition grew out of an investigation spearheaded by the Simi Valley Police Department, which seized $2.5 million after a stakeout of the Urrego family’s home in Simi Valley.

At that time, three Colombians, including Floriberto and Martha Urrego of Simi Valley, and a Guatemalan were arrested. Simi Valley police said the four were doing business with South American drug traffickers.

The Urregos were detained for a few days in Ventura County Jail. When no charges were filed, they were released and disappeared.

Since Saturday, Ontoniel Urrego, who police said lived in Simi Valley several years ago, has been incarcerated in Ventura County Jail. He is scheduled to be arraigned on Friday.

The $500-million bail was set in August by Superior Court Judge Frederick A. Jones in connection with a fugitive arrest warrant for Urrego, sources said.

Through a court bailiff, Jones said he would not comment on the bail because it involved an ongoing case.

Simi Valley police have arrested Urrego’s sister-in-law, Luz Urrego, in connection with the sealed indictment, a law enforcement source said. She is also in Ventura County Jail and her bail was set at $1 million.

A source said two other Colombians remain fugitives in the case.

The Ventura County district attorney’s office has been attempting to keep the Urrego case secret until Friday’s arraignment before Superior Court Judge Charles W. Campbell Jr.

“We’re just not at liberty to explain on the record why we haven’t issued any news release,” said Chief Deputy Dist. Atty. Vincent J. O’Neill Jr. “We will be forthcoming once the first court appearance occurs,” he said. “That’s essentially how we handle indictment situations.”

Deputy Dist. Atty. James Grunert, who is in charge of Urrego’s prosecution, said he had never encountered so large a bail in his 11-year career as a county prosecutor. “I’ve never seen a bail higher than that or one that came close to that,” Grunert said.

He declined to comment directly on the case. But he suggested that a bail of that magnitude means that a defendant is either “very dangerous or there’s a high degree of flight risk.”

The bail’s size stunned attorneys familiar with big drug cases.

“It’s an indirect way of denying bail,” said Robert Malley, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California. “The Eighth Amendment says, ‘excessive bail shall not be required.’ I think this makes the Eighth Amendment relatively meaningless.”

Curt Hazell, a deputy prosecutor who heads the Los Angeles County district attorney’s narcotics unit, said the highest bail he could recall in drug trafficking cases was $5 million.

Two veteran criminal defense attorneys who have represented a number of individuals in California charged with drug trafficking and money laundering branded the $500-million bail “outrageous” and a “joke.”

The attorneys, David Z. Chesnoff of Las Vegas, Nev., and Michael D. Nasatir of Santa Monica, represented defendants in the 1989 law enforcement seizure of a record 21 tons of cocaine in a San Fernando Valley warehouse.

“That’s like no bail at all,” Nasatir said.

“It is probably historic,” Chesnoff added.

Not quite.

According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the highest bail ever set was $100 billion in 1989 by a Miami, Fla., judge for four men accused of participating in an armed robbery.

A bail of $5 billion was set by a San Francisco Municipal Court judge in 1988 for a woman accused of soliciting for prostitution, the book said. It was quickly reduced to $500.

Prof. Robert A. Pugsley, of Southwestern University School of Law in Los Angeles, said federal law allows federal court judges much wider latitude to deny bail.

At the state level, he said, refusing bail is commonplace in capital punishment cases.

In other instances, he said California’s penal code states that “the public safety shall be the primary consideration” in deciding whether to deny bail. The seriousness of a crime and the defendant’s potential flight risk are other important elements in a judge’s bail decision, he said.

To post bail, a defendant must pay a bondsman a fee totaling 10% of the bail. In Urrego’s case, that would be $50 million.

Urrego’s indictment and subsequent arrest culminated an investigation of almost three years since the arrests of Floriberto and Martha Urrego and the seizure of the $2.5 million.

The cash was confiscated after officers, who had the Urrego home under surveillance, saw two suitcases filled with cash being loaded into a car. They followed the car to a Chatsworth home, where they seized $1.5 million.

Officers then returned to the Urrego house and seized another $1 million. It was the largest sum ever confiscated by a Ventura County law enforcement agency.

Shortly afterward, about $90 million worth of cocaine was confiscated in the Los Angeles metropolitan area, and police said it was tied to the earlier cash seizure.

According to Simi Valley Police Lt. Richard Thomas, the subsequent investigation was “a cooperative effort” between his agency, federal drug enforcement agents and “a very substantial” effort by Ventura County district attorney investigators.

After Urrego’s recent arrest in Florida, one of those district attorney’s investigators, Mark Coronado, flew to Miami to interview the suspect. Coronado then requested Urrego’s extradition to Ventura.

He declined to comment on the case.