Thread: Arellano Félix cartel leader headed to prison

Arellano Félix cartel leader headed to prison

Written by
Greg Moran
1 a.m., April 1, 2012

SAN DIEGO — Late last year, a strange scene unfolded several times a week on the roof of the private federal jail at the corner of Front and C streets in downtown San Diego.

There, sometime between midnight and 3 a.m., a stocky, 5-foot 10-inch man under heavy guard walked about the roof, breathing the night air and gazing at the stars above while most of the city slept.

For security reasons, the times he took his hourlong exercise were never the same two nights in a row.

The inmate was Benjamin Arellano Félix, once the feared leader of a Tijuana drug cartel that bore his family’s name.

Today, the 58-year-old Arellano will again be under heavy guard, this time inside a downtown federal courtroom for his formal sentencing. He will likely be sent to a super maximum security prison for 25 years — the term his defense lawyers and the U.S. Attorney’s Office in San Diego have agreed to under a plea bargain.

The hearing will be historic, marking the end of one era in the drug war, said David Shirk, director of the Trans-Border Institute at the University of San Diego.

At one time, the Arellano Félix Organization was “the most feared and by some accounts most powerful criminal organization in Mexico,” Shirk said.

“And Benjamin was the face of that organization. In some ways this is the closure of a chapter in the drug war in Mexico,” he said. “That’s a book that is still being written, however.”

For years, U.S. authorities pursued Arellano and others in his cartel. In January, he finally pleaded guilty to racketeering and money laundering conspiracy charges.

He admitted being the leader of the organization that smuggled untold tons of drugs into the U.S., bribed and corrupted scores of public officials in Mexico, and controlled the cartel’s turf through kidnappings and murders.

It was a lucrative trade over the years. Part of the plea agreement calls for Arellano to forfeit $100 million in profits, probably a symbolic figure for a man who has been jailed for a decade in Mexico and the U.S.

The AFO came to power in the 1980s and distinguished itself with a ruthless brand of enforcement on a scale that had not been seen before among drug gangs in Mexico, said Peter Nuñez, a former U.S. attorney in San Diego.

“They racheted it up, no question about it,” said Nuñez. “They were game-changers.”

The cartel had caches of sophisticated automatic weapons it purchased from the U.S. and other countries, recruited street gang members for violent missions, and carried out targeted assassinations of rivals who threatened the AFO’s turf.

One mission in 1993 that used San Diego street gang members was meant to kill a rival cartel leader at the Guadalajara airport but ended in a violent shootout that killed Roman Catholic Cardinal Posadas Ocampo.

That kind of brazen violence was something largely introduced by the AFO, said Nuñez, and continues today.

“Other cartels tried to adopt the same strategy,” he said. “You had this escalation.”

The power of the AFO has faded under a sustained decade-long effort by U.S. law enforcement to investigate, indict, extradite and imprison its leaders. As the cartel’s power waned, its leaders were replaced by more violent drug traffickers who have plunged Mexico into a bloody war that has killed at least 50,000 people since 2006.

“By the standards of the 1990s, the AFO was a very violent and frightening organization,” Shirk said. “But by the standards of today, where we have seen an exponential increase in the violence in Mexico, the AFO looks almost quaint.”

With that kind of legacy, Shirk said the plea agreement Arellano got, with its 25-year sentence, has stirred some controversy.

Others in the cartel have had more severe sentences, including his brother Francisco Javier Arellano Félix, who is serving a life sentence. Several top AFO lieutenants are serving terms of 30 years or more.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office has declined to discuss the reasons behind the plea and did not want to comment before the sentencing.

Anthony Colombo Jr., Arellano’s former defense lawyer who negotiated the plea, has said prosecutors considered the time and expense it would take to try the case, as well as Arellano’s age.

The witnesses against him would be former cartel members whose testimony could be undercut because they agreed to cooperate in exchange for potentially reduced sentences.

Arellano was arrested in Mexico in 2002 and extradited to the U.S. in 2011. Most of his time here was spent at the Metropolitan Corrections Center in downtown San Diego, living in administrative segregation. That meant he was in a cell 23 hours a day, Colombo said.

One hour a day, he was allowed into an adjacent cell, where he could exercise by doing pushups, running in place, or walking up and down a three-step stair in a corner of the cell.

He was not allowed to exercise out on the high-rise jail’s roof, as other inmates were, Colombo said.

When Colombo challenged those conditions, Arellano was moved for a time to the Western Region Detention Facility on C Street, operated by a private company for the government. That’s when he was allowed his midnight walks on the jail roof.

But after awhile, Arellano returned to MCC at his request, Colombo said. The cells there have a small window that looks out on the city, which the cells at the C Street jail do not.

Arellano wanted a window.

In his few court appearances, he has said little, listening calmly as an interpreter translated the proceedings for him.

Shirk said that silence will likely continue, since over the years Arellano has said little to the outside world.

“In a lot of ways, Benjamin will be going behind bars with lots of secrets,” he said. “I would not expect him to say anything more at this hearing than a simple yes or no. A few waves maybe to his family.

“And that’s it.”

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