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Mexico’s Former Top Cop Charged in U.S. With Aiding Cartel

Mexico’s Former Top Cop Charged With Aiding Drug Cartel

(Bloomberg) -- Mexico’s former top federal police official, who was appointed by the president to spearhead a war on drugs, has been arrested in the U.S. for allegedly taking millions of dollars in bribes to help protect the deadly Sinaloa cartel run by convicted kingpin “El Chapo” Guzman.

Genaro Garcia Luna, 51, was charged with drug trafficking conspiracy in a federal indictment unsealed Tuesday in New York, after he was arrested in Texas. While serving in several high-ranking positions from 2001 to 2012, he accepted bribes to protect the cartel’s drug-trafficking activities and cleared the way for multi-ton shipments of cocaine and other drugs into the U.S., Brooklyn U.S. Attorney Richard Donoghue said Tuesday.

His arrest “demonstrates our resolve to bring to justice those who help cartels inflict devastating harm on the United States and Mexico, regardless of the positions they held while committing their crimes,” Donoghue said in a statement.

Prosecutors charge that Garcia Luna engaged in three separate drug conspiracies since 2001, when he was appointed to head the newly created Federal Investigation Agency under then-President Vicente Fox. From 2006 to 2012, he served as the country’s Secretary of Public Security, overseeing the Federal Police Force, and was one of the country’s officials in charge of implementing then-President Felipe Calderon’s war on drug trafficking.

But while serving as the nation’s top law-enforcement official, Garcia Luna secretly allowed the Sinaloa cartel to operate “with impunity” in Mexico, prosecutors said. He provided “safe passage” for drug shipments, disclosed sensitive information about government investigations, and shared law-enforcement intelligence about rival drug cartels, prosecutors said.

Garcia Luna’s assistance was so crucial in facilitating large drug shipments into the U.S. that Sinaloa operatives twice personally delivered to him briefcases filled with cash, each containing $3 million to $5 million, prosecutors said.

Millionaire

By the time he relocated to the U.S. in 2012, banking and financial records show that Garcia Luna had amassed a personal fortune worth millions of dollars, according to Donoghue. Prosecutors said they’ve also interviewed “numerous” former cartel members who’ve agreed to cooperate who confirm they’ve paid Garcia Luna “tens of millions of dollars over several years.“

Garcia Luna was arrested in Dallas on Monday. Prosecutors in New York said they’ll seek to move him to Brooklyn to face the charges.

U.S. officials said they will ask a federal judge to hold Garcia Luna without bail because he is a significant risk to flee prosecution, with connections to high-ranking cartel members and corrupt officials in Mexico who could help him flee and then shield him from American authorities. Garcia Luna has traveled between the U.S. and Mexico at least 280 times since 2002, they said. A detention hearing in Dallas was set for Dec. 17.

El Chapo, whose full name is Joaquin Guzman Loera, was sentenced earlier this year to life in prison after a federal trial in Brooklyn that featured testimony by turncoat drug traffickers. They described his brutal leadership of one of Mexico’s most powerful criminal organizations, which smuggled more than $12 billion worth of drugs.

After years of evading authorities, El Chapo was captured in Mexico but escaped with the help of bribes paid to local, state and federal police, including some of the highest-ranking officials in Mexican government, according to trial testimony.

A former Sinaloa cartel leader, Rey Zambada, testified at the drug lord’s trial that he twice met Garcia Luna in a restaurant and each time gave him a briefcase stuffed with at least $3 million in cash, according to the U.S. government’s detention memo.

The U.S. also said on Tuesday it would seek to seize Garcia Luna’s assets and property, which they say are the proceeds of his crimes.

--With assistance from Cyntia Barrera Diaz.

To contact the reporter on this story: Patricia Hurtado in Federal Court in Manhattan at pathurtado@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: David Glovin at dglovin@bloomberg.net, Steve Stroth

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