Trial for accused Gulf Cartel chief pushed to 2009

September 6, 2008 - 9:23PM
By Jeremy Roebuck, The Monitor
Buried under stacks of documents, transcripts and wiretap recordings, lawyers for the purported former head of the Gulf Cartel will have an extra four months to prepare his defense.

U.S. District Judge Hilda Tagle pushed back the trial of Osiel Cárdenas Guillén, 40, to early 2009 late last month in an effort to give prosecutors and defense attorneys more time to review the mountain of evidence that has accrued in his case.

"To date, the government has provided thousands of pages of reports, interviews, hundreds of tape recorded conversations and voluminous other records," Cárdenas' legal team said in court filings asking for an extension.

The purported kingpin - who is accused of running the dominant drug smuggling organization in Mexico's Tamaulipas state from 1996 to 2003 - has been held in solitary confinement since Mexican authorities extradited him to the United States last year.

But federal prosecutors have built a case against him dating back at least nine years, according to court filings.

They have amassed more than 14,000 scanned reports, taken statements from more than 100 witnesses, recorded hours of conversations from at least 10 wiretaps and allegedly linked the man to almost 20 drug seizures in cities spanning Mission to Atlanta - and continue to add to that list.

"All of this material must be translated from English to Spanish for the client and Spanish to English for his attorneys," Houston-based defense lawyer Michael Ramsey wrote in court filings.

Complicating matters further, Cárdenas' legal team is only granted 10 hours each week to review this evidence with him because of the tight security federal authorities have imposed for his case.

Mexican government officials initially cited security as one of the reasons they handed Cárdenas over to the United States.

Since he arrived here, U.S. Marshals have kept his exact location a secret and advised Judge Tagle to move court hearings from Brownsville to Houston - farther from cartel's zone of influence.

During his tenure over the Gulf Cartel, Cárdenas ran a complex network of smugglers responsible for moving more than six tons of cocaine and marijuana a month across the Texas-Mexico border, according to a federal indictment in his case.

He reportedly often resorted to threats and violence to protect his turf and is accused of threatening the lives of an undercover FBI agent and U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agent during a particularly bloody 1999 street battle in Matamoros.

Mexican federal agents apprehended him after that fight, but Cárdenas managed to run his organization from a high-security prison east of Mexico City up until his extradition in January 2007, prosecutors allege.

He was originally indicted in the United States in 2000 on multiple counts of conspiracy, drug possession, money laundering and attacks on U.S. federal agents.

His four-man legal team - including McAllen attorneys Roberto Yzaguirre and C.J. Quintanilla - did not return calls seeking comment.

Cárdenas' trial is now set to start in March 2009.

http://www.brownsvilleherald.com/news/g ... trial.html