Former Mexico top cop Genaro Garcia Luna won’t get a new trial, a Brooklyn judge ruled — determining that the crooked law enforcer offered fellow inmates at the Metropolitan Detention Center up to $2 million in bribes to cook up a story that his rivals were looking to frame him.
Garcia Luna, 56, Mexico’s ex-secretary of public security, was convicted after a four-week trial last year of taking millions of dollars in bribes from El Chapo’s notorious Sinaloa cartel.
Garcia Luna’s lawyer, Cesar de Castro, filed a motion to vacate the conviction in December, alleging several witnesses at the trial perjured themselves.
As part of that motion, de Castro provided an affidavit from an MDC inmate named Edgardo Mejia, who said he saw a fellow inmate talk on a contraband cell phone with two of the government’s cooperating witnesses. One of the cooperators bragged about concocting a story about Garcia Luna to shave years off his sentence, he complained.
Prosecutors made a point at the trial to say their cooperators weren’t communicating with each other.
When prosecutors investigated Mejia’s claims, they learned that Garcia Luna offered to pay other inmates to confirm the tale, Judge Brian Cogan said in his 16-page ruling Tuesday.
One of those inmates took notes, and recorded Garcia Luna with a contraband cell phone, the judge wrote. In the recording, Garcia Luna could be heard telling the inmate to come up with a story convincing enough that de Castro would believe it, the judge wrote.
“The notes and the recording are just as damning as they could be,” Cogan wrote. “This was a clear scheme by defendant to obstruct justice through bribery – defendant started out with a $500,000 offer of a bribe, but to overcome (the inmate) hesitation, the offer ultimately went up to $2 million.”
De Castro declined to comment about the behind-bars bribery allegations, except to say that he addressed them in his reply brief, which challenges the inmate’s timeline of events, questions if his notes were real, and calls the recording “incomprehensible.”
De Castro said he was “extremely disappointed” with the ruling. “We respect but disagree with the decision and are especially concerned that the Court did not address fundamental problems with this prosecution,” he said, noting that one witness testified that he was present in a facility with Garcia Luna that hadn’t actually been built yet, and was shown software that hadn’t been created at the time of their meeting.
“Mr. Garcia Luna will appeal,” he said.
Source.- OEM
