Two Miami attorneys face probe in bribery case involving payoffs for DEA secrets
Since the cocaine cowboys era, a small network of Miami criminal defense lawyers has competed to represent Colombian drug traffickers who pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees to work out cooperation deals with the feds.
Two of them — veteran attorneys David Macey and Luis Guerra — are in deep trouble, according to a federal court filing.
Macey and Guerra are identified as the new targets of federal prosecutors who recently won convictions of two former U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agents in a corruption trial in New York. In November, the former South Florida DEA agents were found guilty of accepting bribes in exchange for providing the two Miami defense lawyers with confidential DEA information on potential narco-suspects, according to the court filing by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Manhattan.
Prosecutors are asking a federal judge to allow them to review nearly 900 protected emails, text messages and recordings of phone calls between the attorneys and Manny Recio, a former DEA agent who retired from the Miami field office five years ago and then worked as a private investigator for Macey and Guerra. Recio was accused of using payments from the two lawyers to bribe a DEA supervisor, John Costanzo,
to gain access to secret records on suspects so that the attorneys could line them up as clients before they were charged with drug trafficking.
Prosecutors said the attorneys gave the two veteran agents nearly $100,000 in cash and gifts, including paying a $50,000 down payment for Costanzo to purchase a Miami-area townhouse.
This month, prosecutors
asked the federal judge in the New York bribery case to invoke the “crime fraud exception” to the attorney-client and workproduct privilege protecting the communications between Recio and the two Miami attorneys, claiming the records are “integral to the bribery scheme.” The Associated Press was the first to report on the prosecutors’ expanding bribery case.
“Throughout the bribery scheme, Costanzo repeatedly leaked information to Recio to benefit him and the attorneys he worked with,” prosecutors Mathew Andrews Emily Deininger and Sheb Swettin wrote in a 28-page memo that quotes from wiretapped communications between Recio and Costanzo that were presented during trial.
“Costanzo was leaking information so that Macey and Guerra could bring in more clients, and part of the scheme required Recio to convey the inside information to Macey and Guerra,” the prosecutors wrote.
But Guerra’s Miami defense attorneys said that the New York prosecutors have distorted the nature of the payments, saying that Guerra hired Recio as an independent private investigator who was paid by the attorney’s clients. Macey also had the same arrangement with Recio.
“In five years of investigation, there is no evidence found that Mr. Guerra paid a bribe because, in fact, Mr. Guerra has never paid a bribe,” said his defense attorneys, Orlando do Campo and Daniela Jaramillo.
Macey and his New York defense attorney, Andrew Michaelson, did not respond to email requests to comment on the allegations.
The prosecutors’ motion to access the privileged communications in the bribery case is significant in its own right, but also because they openly identified Macey and Guerra as unindicted co-conspirators who allegedly reaped benefits from the bribery scheme.
Macey, who was admitted to the Florida Bar in 1999, and Guerra, who was admitted in 1990, have not been charged with wrongdoing. But federal prosecutors outed them during the DEA agents’ trial as “crooked attorneys” who “paid handsomely for DEA secrets.”
Jon Sale, a prominent white-collar defense lawyer in South Florida, said the federal prosecutors are expanding their investigation into the two Miami lawyers because they apparently did not have enough evidence to charge them in the initial case against the two former DEA agents.
Sale said that for the prosecutors to gain access to the protected communications, they must show the judge there’s probable cause the records “were intended to facilitate or conceal a fraud or crime.”
“If the prosecutors are pursuing a case against the two lawyers, these
DAVID MACEY, WHO WAS ADMITTED TO THE FLORIDA BAR IN 1999, AND LUIS GUERRA, WHO WAS ADMITTED IN 1990, HAVE NOT BEEN CHARGED WITH WRONGDOING.
documents could incriminate the lawyers or might also demonstrate the lawyers were not engaged in wrongdoing,” said Sale, a former federal prosecutor in Manhattan and Miami.
“Incriminating documents are frequently used to induce people [like Recio and Costanzo] awaiting sentencing to cooperate with the government,” he added. “However, there’s always the danger that putting pressure on people could also induce them to give false testimony.”
Both Recio and Costanzo face sentencing hearings on their bribery convictions in late April.