ICE Agent's Prosecution May Mean International Crime Boss's Freedom
January 13th, 2008 at 07:42am
Mike McGarry

The prosecution of Cory Voorhis, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent who is charged in a high-profile case with three federal misdemeanors for allegedly illegally accessing a restricted database, could lead to the dismissal of charges or to drastically reduced charges for the alleged head of the notorious Mexico-based criminal Castorena Family Organization (CFO), some say.

Voorhis was the lead ICE investigator in a five-year, multi-agency investigation that broke the back of CFO, the most extensive and sophisticated criminal counterfeit ID organization ever to operate in the U.S. To date, the alleged patriarch of CFO, Pedro Castorena-Ibarra, had been held by Mexican authorities while he has been fighting extradition to the U.S. to face charges from a federal grand jury indictment.

In a surprise development, Castorena-Ibarra appeared in federal court in Denver on Thursday, January 10, according to newspaper reports.

Michael Riebau, a former 33-year Department of Homeland Security criminal investigator and a spokesman for Cory Legal Defense, an organization formed to help raise funds for Voorhis’ legal costs, said the government’s prosecution of Voorhis will sabotage the case against Castorena-Ibarra. Riebau said that Voorhis would have been the government’s key witness against Castorena-Ibarra but because Voorhis is currently facing charges, his creditability as a witness has been severely compromised.

“The travesty in this case is profound,â€