Police say lawyer helped kill own client

Man was awaiting trial, tied to largest cocaine bust in OPP history

A criminal lawyer in Argentina has been charged with helping a Mexican cartel sicario — or hit man — murder one of her clients as he awaited trial on charges connected to the largest cocaine seizure in the history of the Ontario Provincial Police.

Lawyer Julieta Estefania Bonanno, 29, was arrested last week in Buenos Aires. She is charged with helping a hooded hit man shoot her client Rodrigo Alexander Naged-Ramirez, 59, and his son dead in their apartment complex in that city on June 4.

At the time of his killing, Naged-Ramirez was under house arrest, awaiting trial in Argentina on charges connected to a Canadian drug bust.

Naged-Ramirez was charged after police in the GTA and Argentina seized tonnes of cocaine in the GTA, Stoney Creek, Montreal and Argentina.

The scope and brutality of the case didn’t surprise a Torontoarea journalist who covered organized crime on the MexicanU.S. border in the early 2000s, before he was forced to seek asylum in Canada over cartel death threats.

“This is a clear indication of how the Mexican drug cartels have expanded their criminal influence across the world,” said Luis Horacio Najera, who was based in Ciudad de Juarez, Mexico, covering cocaine trafficking, gun smuggling, corruption and the drug trade.

Naged-Ramirez’s son, Jhon Naged, 30, was also shot dead point blank on June 4 in the apartment he shared with his father in the Belgrano district of Buenos Aires.

Naged, a Colombian national, was not charged in the cocaine case.

The Canadian side of the case is called Project Hope. Last August, OPP commissioner Vince Hawkes announced police had found at total of1,062 kilograms of 97-per-cent-pure cocaine with a street value of $250 million.

Police said they seized the cocaine in warehouses in Toronto and Stoney Creek and inside containers in Montreal. The first arrests in the case came after a traffic stop on Highway 410. The cocaine was apparently sourced from the Michoacan region of Mexico and shipped through the Andes to Chile and Argentina, before it was shipped to Canada, Najera said.

“Argentina has been a significant port of transit, or a ‘trampoline’ for Mexican drug cartels because of its location and international trade with Europe and North America that facilitate movement of drugs, in particular cocaine from the Andean region,” Najera said.

In Argentina, the case was called Bobinas Blancas — “Project White Coils” — because some of the cocaine was shipped in containers of steel coils.

No court date has been set for Bonanno.