Philippe sentenced to 9 years in prison

MIAMI — Guy Philippe, an elected Haitian senator and former police commander who eluded capture in Haiti for more than a decade, was sentenced to nine years in prison in Miami federal court Wednesday for accepting bribes to protect cocaine smugglers who used the island to ship drugs to the United States.

Philippe had pleaded guilty in late April to a drug-related, money laundering conspiracy charge. His plea agreement allowed him to avoid going to trial in May on a more serious trafficking charge that could have sent him to prison for the rest for his life. Instead, he faced up to 20 years on the money laundering conviction, but under the federal sentencing guidelines the punishment amounted to about half that time.

Philippe said nothing to U.S. District Judge Cecilia Altonaga as she affirmed a sentence agreed upon by the defense and prosecutors.

The sentencing culminates a federal investigation into drug trafficking, money laundering and corruption at the highest levels of Haiti’s government more than a decade ago. It was viewed as a deal for both sides.

A prison sentence was inevitable after an earlier decision by the judge to dismiss the case based on Philippe’s claim of immunity as a senator-elect in Haiti, but Judge Altonaga also had chastised the federal government for not trying harder to arrest Philippe since his 2005 indictment. He was arrested by Haitian National Police and turned over to the Drug Enforcement Administration just days before he was to be sworn in.

Philippe, arrested in January, admitted he accepted between $1.5 million and $3.5 million in cocaine profits from Colombian traffickers for allowing them to use Haiti to ship cocaine to Miami and other parts of the United States between 1999 and 2003. The following year, Philippe gained widespread notoriety when he led a revolt to oust Haiti’s president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

Philippe, who unsuccessfully ran for president in 2006, was elected in November to a six-year Senate term. His seat has remained empty until the resolution of his criminal case in Miami.

Philippe is the last highprofile defendant from a U.S. crackdown on cocaine smuggling through Haiti that yielded the convictions of more than a dozen drug traffickers, Haitian senior police officers and a former Haitian senator. For more than a decade, federal agents, in collaboration with the Haiti National Police, made at least 10 attempts to arrest Philippe: setting up checkpoints, paying informants, launching a U.S. military operation and pursuing him in a foot chase only to lose him in dense vegetation.

Before striking his plea agreement, Philippe had insisted that as an elected Haitian senator, he could not be charged by U.S. authorities. He also claimed that his Jan. 5 arrest by DEA agents amounted to kidnapping.

But Judge Altonaga ruled in March that he was not protected by sovereign immunity because he had not been sworn in before his arrest outside a Portau-Prince radio station.

After that major setback, Philippe, who initially pleaded not guilty, struck his deal with the U.S. attorney’s office.