The U.S. government made its cocaine-smuggling case against a British Virgin Island’s premier by casting a confidential informant as a Mexican cartel trafficker.
The informant, who went by the name “Roberto,” collected hundreds of recorded conversations and text messages with BVI premier Andrew Fahie while they discussed million-dollar bribery payments for access to the British territory, a prosecutor said Monday at the start of the former politician’s drug-trafficking trial in Miami federal court..
Fahie agreed to let thousands of kilos of cocaine pass through his ports to be sold in the United States — “all so the defendant could stuff his own pockets with bribe money,” prosecutor Sean McLaughlin told jurors during an opening statement dominated by themes of “greed, arrogance and corruption.”
Yet Fahie’s defense team countered that his words will show he had no intention of using his power to enrich himself on cocaine shipments to the United States, without elaborating. Rather, one of his lawyers argued during an opening statement that Fahie was “framed” by the United Kingdom, which oversees the BVI archipelago as an overseas territory.
“He believed the U.K. government was involved in a scheme to frame him to remove him from office,” attorney Joyce Delgado told the 12-person jury.
What Delgado did not tell the jurors was that the undercover operation was directed by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, not the British government. At the time of the DEA sting, the U.K. government was concluding a corruption investigation of Fahie’s administration — but British authorities said it was not related to the DEA’s sting operation.
Corruption in the small islands of the Caribbean, which became a major drug transshipment point for U.S.-bound cocaine shipments in the 1980s, has always been a concern for the U.S. government. U.S. officials have been helping the U.K. government in its investigation of money laundering allegations in the dependent British territories in the Caribbean.