When Colombian authorities boarded a ship in January 2006, they found more than just narcotics. They discovered a navigational chart with crucial information: the current locations of Colombian and US Navy and Coast Guard patrol boats.
The Colombians investigated, US officials said, and uncovered a ring of cocaine smugglers who also trafficked in navigational charts, selling them to drug organizations that used them to plan routes and avoid interdiction by law enforcement as they moved drugs on the high seas.
The office of Michael Garcia, the US attorney in Manhattan, said on Friday that since 2002, the ring had shipped thousands of kilograms of cocaine, worth tens of millions of dollars, through the Caribbean Sea and Central America and into the US and elsewhere.
The ring’s success, the prosecutors suggested in court papers, was due in part to its unusual knowledge of what routes to avoid.
Garcia’s office also said that this week it had extradited one defendant, a former petty officer in the Colombian Navy, to face conspiracy charges.
In an affidavit filed by the US government, the former petty officer, Otoniel Ricardo Cabarcas Avendano, 45, is accused of being primarily responsible for selling the navigational charts to other traffickers.
Avendano appeared on Friday in US District Court in Manhattan, where his lawyer entered a plea of not guilty. A federal magistrate judge ordered him held without bond.
Two other men had already been brought to the US for prosecution, court papers showed.
One was the captain of the ship, boarded in 2006, where the chart that led to the investigation was discovered. The captain, Raul Alberto Alvarez-Hamburger, is a former Colombian naval officer.
The other man, Eduardo Uejbe Jaramillo, who was extradited in August, ran a military contracting firm that sold uniforms to the Colombian Coast Guard, prosecutors said. He had developed relationships with high-ranking Colombian naval officials, through which he gained access to confidential information, the prosecutors said.
Garcia’s office said it was also seeking the extradition of two other defendants: a civilian employee at the navy base in Cartagena, Colombia, and a retired naval petty officer.
In a meeting last year that was secretly monitored, prosecutors said, one of the men said he was aware of officers who were compromised and who could be approached for information.
The other man said he had sold information about the positions of vessels six or seven times in the previous year, prosecutors said.
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