A Colombian customs worker admitted his role on Tuesday by taking bribes and channeling more than a million dollars as a drug product in a case that threatened to exhibit dirty transactions between agents of the American medication administration and their informants.
Omar Ambuila’s plea for surprise guilt of Omar Ambuila to a single conspiracy leader in order to commit money laundering came on the second day of his trial before the Federal Court in Tampa, Florida.
Ambuila, 63, was extradited to the United States from Colombia in 2023. He risks up to 20 years in prison during a conviction in April.
The procedure had to shed new light on a scandal that led to more than a dozen disciplined or passed out of their work for a range of misconduct during the DEA money laundering surveys around the world .
Among the witnesses called to testify by the government was Jose IrizarryA notoriously corrupt DEA agent purging a long federal prison sentence for his role in a closely linked silver laundering plot.
The Internal Returning Service and the American Department of Internal Security came to suspect Ambuila first after her daughter has published photos of her carrying creators handbags, taking a luxury vacation in Paris and leading a Red Lamborghini of $ 330,000.
“People assume that because they cannot do it, you cannot do it either,” wrote Jenny Ambuila in an article on Facebook of May 2017 where she shows a photo of the Lamborghini. “Prove them the opposite.”
Joaquin Sarmiento / AFP via Getty Images
The sumptuous lifestyle and fairy tale of the graduate of the University of Miami of 20 years did not correspond to his modest income as influencer of the social media or to that of his father, who earned around $ 2,000 per month in As long as intermediate level supervisor in the main port of Colombia in Buenaventura, a major transit point for the United States cocaine.
A piece of the funds used in 2016 to pay the Lamborghini Huracan Spyder from a account controlled by Jhon Marin, that a criminal investigator of the IRS described at the trial as the nephew based in Florida of a “smuggling of smuggling known in Colombia “.
An Associated Press survey previously identified the smuggler as Diego Marin, a long -standing informant of the known DEA of the investigators under the name of “Contraband King” of Colombia for having allegedly laundered money through imported household appliances and other goods. A mine of government files obtained by AP described Marin as a single source of the application of American laws which was ultimately deactivated and then operated by federal agents “out of books”.
For years, DEA agents have celebrated a sailor in the world after having allegedly targeted it, according to the files, Marin frequently picked up the bill for dinners and prostitutes.
Two marine lawyers refused to comment on the case.
Marin was not charged in the United States, but prosecutors in Colombia asked his extradition from Spain, where he lived, to face criminal accusations.
In an unusual decision, Colombian President Gustavo Petro spoke to his Spanish counterpart of the case and described a sailor in a position of social media as the main “smuggling of smuggling and the laundry laundering” in the country.
Nevertheless, sailor, who has Spanish citizenship, was authorized under bail during the fight against extradition. He would then have fled and was later captured in Portugal, where he remains imprisoned.
Chris O’Meara / AP
Irizarry, who is Purge a 12 -year sentence For his crimes, described to the AP how sailor for years has welded civil servants in Colombia and good prostitutes, meals and expensive tickets for us, American anti-narcotic agents, to avoid arrest. He gave an account similar to federal investigators, saying that DEA agents falsified the government archives on sailor to justify prodigal international trips.
“Irizarry has abused the confidence of the American people when he has repeatedly violated his oath as a federal officer for the application of the law”, ” The DEA administrator Anne Milgram said After Irizzary was sentenced in 2021.
The Irizarry affair underlined the continuous use of the DEA of so-called attorney general exempted operations to launder tens of millions of dollars a year on behalf of the most violent drug cartels in the world through screens companies. The agents describe the ageos as a robust tool that led to scores of high -level arrests and cocaine attacks.
But the DEA was also faced with criticisms to allow huge sums of money in the operations not to sow, allowing cartels to continue to exercise their profession, and not to closely monitor and follow the bites, which makes it difficult to assess their results.
Colombia remains the head of the world cocaine producerDespite decades of war against cartels.
At the Tampa Federal Court on Tuesday, Ambuila did not show any emotion as judge of the American district court Virginia Hernandez-Covington complained of the considerable amount that the United States Ministry of Justice has spent to prepare for a scratch trial After only two days. No later than this month, the prosecutors led by Joseph Palazzo had offered Ambuila a advocacy agreement recommending a purged time.
“I feel the obligation not to waste government spending,” said the judge.