Efrain Antonio Campo Flores, 30 years old, and Franqui Francisco Flores de Freitas, 31 years old, were each convicted on one drug conspiracy charge and
now face a maximum of life in prison.
After less than two weeks of testimony, the jury of seven women and five men deliberated for approximately six hours to reach the guilty verdict.
Prosecutors say the nephews were planning to send planes loaded with cocaine from Venezuela to Honduras, with the U.S. as the ultimate destination, in hopes of receiving tens of millions of dollars in profit. They were arrested last year by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration in Haiti, a few days before the first shipment was due to take place.
“The defendants thought they were above the law,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Brendan Quigley said in his closing statement. “They thought they could operate with impunity in Venezuela because of who they were and who they were related to.”
The nephews flaunted their political connections and access to the “presidential ramp” at an airport in Venezuela, prosecutors alleged. In one recording, Mr. Campo Flores said he needed the money from the drug deal to support the parliamentary campaign of his aunt Cilia Flores, the first lady of Venezuela.
Venezuelan officials have called the nephews’ arrests a kidnapping and accused the U.S. of trying to destabilize the country. In recent years, the U.S. has indicted several top Venezuelan officials on drug-trafficking and money-laundering charges.
At trial, the defense team, led by white-shoe law firms Boies Schiller & Flexner LLP and Sidley Austin LLP, argued that the nephews were entrapped by DEA informants in a sting operation and never had the ability or intention to carry out a cocaine deal of this size. The recordings of the nephews discussing drug shipments amounted to “a bunch of talk,” and nothing more, defense lawyers said.
“The government here relied on some of the worst, most conniving, deceitful informants,” said David Rody, Mr. Flores de Freitas’s lawyer, in his closing statement.
Mr. Rody declined to comment after the verdict. Randall Jackson, a lawyer for Mr. Campo Flores, said their clients are “obviously disappointed,” and the defense team will be “evaluating next steps.”
The guilty verdict comes as a relief for prosecutors, who suffered a major setback at trial when a key witness was caught lying on the stand.
The witness, Jose Santos Peña, was a longtime DEA informant who posed, along with his son, as Mexican drug traffickers during meetings with the nephews. After the nephews’ arrests, prosecutors discovered Mr. Santos Peña failed to disclose that he was a cocaine user who was illegally trafficking drugs while working for the DEA. He recently pleaded guilty and went to jail, but still maintained a deal where the government would recommend a reduced prison sentence if he testified truthfully at trial.
During trial, Mr. Santos Peña said he wasn’t allowed to speak with his son in jail and hadn’t done so. However, defense lawyers produced recordings of his jail phone calls that they said contradicted this testimony and showed that he may still be dealing drugs. In a dramatic moment before the jury, Mr. Quigley told Mr. Santos Peña that the government was ripping up his cooperation agreement because he had lied.
Prosecutors asked jurors to focus on confessions given by the defendants to a DEA agent a few hours after their arrest in Haiti, where they allegedly admitted to participating in a drug deal that would send cocaine to the U.S. Defense lawyers called the confessions unreliable, saying they were coerced and not properly recorded.
After the verdict, one juror, Robert Lewis, said of the jury deliberations, “Nobody was in love with the witnesses,” saying some of them were clearly “bad guys.” The 12 jurors ultimately decided to look past the unreliable witnesses and convict based on the recordings and text messages presented by the prosecution, said Mr. Lewis, a 69-year-old architect from Westchester County.
To fight the defense’s entrapment argument, the government said the nephews were plotting the cocaine deal months before their first meeting with a DEA informant in October 2015, pointing to texts from August 2015 where the defendants discussed shipping drugs. The detailed discussions about the logistics and timing of a drug deal show how committed the nephews were to the deal, according to prosecutors.
No drugs were seized as part of the investigation, but prosecutors presented recordings from a meeting in Caracas, where the nephews brought a brick of a white substance to Mr. Santos Peña. He testified at trial that he had crushed a small amount into his hands and determined the substance was cocaine.
Defense lawyers argued there was no proof the substance was a real drug because Mr. Santos Peña failed to bring a sample back to the DEA.
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