U.S. taxpayers to get stake in ‘Passion’ prequel

Court orders drug trafficker to give up share of movie

The U.S. taxpayer may be getting into the movie business. In a real-life case of drugs and extortion that could itself make a pretty good screenplay, prosecutors have forced a Mexican drug trafficker to turn over his stake in a planned prequel to Mel Gibson’s 2004 blockbuster The Passion of the Christ.

Some of the big names behind the Hollywood project include Houston megachurch pastor Joel Osteen, who had no idea about the script’s unsavoury backstory.

“When you get a script, you just don’t think to say, ‘Hey, was this script ever tied to a Mexican cartel?’” said Donald Iloff, a spokesman for Osteen’s Lakewood Church.

Jorge Vazquez Sanchez pleaded guilty this week in federal court to extortion and money laundering in a deal that required him to give up a 10 per cent stake in future profits

When you get a script, you just don’t think to say, ‘Hey, was this script ever tied to a Mexican cartel?’

DONALD ILOFF

of Mary, Mother of Christ, which is scheduled to begin production this year.

Aloe Entertainment, the Los Angeles-based production company that paid more than $900,000 for the script, said it knew nothing about Vazquez, who was sentenced to seven years in prison.

Had Vazquez kept his stake, “we don’t know what would have happened,” the company said in a statement.

Vazquez, a Mexican citizen identified in court documents as a drug trafficker who laundered money, acquired the screenplay in 2008. He and one of his co-defendants extorted a San Antonio businessman named Arturo Madrigal to wrest control of the script from Madrigal’s company, according to court documents.

Earlier in 2008, Macri had foreclosed on a loan made to Benedict Fitzgerald, writer of the The Last Passion of the Christ. The foreclosure gave the company control of the prequel, said Richard Rosenthal, attorney for Aloe Entertainment.

Aloe had paid one of Vazquez’s co-defendants $925,000 for the script, believing the company was run by a San Antonio real estate mogul. Aloe executives hired an entertainment copyright attorney who spent more than three months researching the screenplay’s origins before the company paid for it.

When prosecutors moved to seize Vazquez’s assets, the stake he had retained in the film’s profits was included.

The plea deal is probably “the first time that a major motion picture was made in which 10 per cent of the profits went to the American taxpayers,” Rosenthal said. “It would be an incredibly unique story.”