A Guyanese man who was held at the JFK Airport in New York last September with what was later determined to be cocaine in rum has been jailed for 27 months in what the US said was a long-running narcotics importation conspiracy.
According to court documents seen by Stabroek News, Cleveland Charles, 32, was on June 30, 2016 sentenced to 27 months each on four counts but the sentences will run concurrently. The judge in the case was Roslynn R. Mauskopf.
The 27-month sentence was what the US government had been seeking as it had argued that Charles had been part of a sophisticated operation. Charles’ lawyer had appealed for a sentence of time served, noting among other things that Charles would at the end of the case be banned from entering the United States.
In a submission to the judge three days before sentencing, the US had charged that “the defendant was a long-time participant in an extremely sophisticated narcotics conspiracy that devised a hard-to-detect method of importing substantial amounts of cocaine into the community. In addition, when arrested, the defendant initially lied to law enforcement and only accepted responsibility on the morning of trial (February 2nd, 2016). Finally, the defendant’s behaviour while incarcerated – especially his continued affinity for (name given), the leader of the drug trafficking organization – requires a substantial sentence.”
On June 16, 2016, the US Drug Enforcement Administration Northeast Laboratory released a report on the amount of cocaine found in the rum and pegged this at 422.6 grammes. The US therefore sought incarceration of 27 months.
Glowing
Several glowing testimonials were submitted to the judge on behalf of Charles in a bid to have him set free. A copy of a basic financial management course that he took while in prison was also tendered.
Charles, who had been a driver with a taxi service in Guyana, had pleaded guilty to four counts: conspiracy to import cocaine, conspiracy to possess cocaine with intent to distribute, importation of cocaine and possession of cocaine with intent to distribute.
Prior to his sentencing, the US and Charles’s lawyer had argued over whether evidence gathered from his cell phone should be suppressed. On January 13, 2016, the court held a hearing to determine whether the contents of Charles cellular phone were illegally obtained and on January 28 it granted Charles’ motion to suppress the evidence gathered from a search of the phone on December 17, 2015. An earlier search on the phone had been done by the same agent on September 10, 2015.
Had the evidence from the searches been available to the court the US might have been able to draw in other suspects. In her ruling, the judge said “the totality of circumstances renders implausible Agent Schrader’s explanation for seeking the warrant in preparation for trial, and that the decision to seek the warrant was tainted by the evidence obtained in the unlawful searches… Here, as the warrant itself makes plain, and as further demonstrated by other facts and circumstances, the information sought by the warrant was designed to connect Charles to a broader conspiracy – one that included CS-1 and two other potential co-conspirators. The agents would not have known of Charles’ connection to those co-conspirators but for the information gleaned from the unlawful searches.”
From the case presented by the US, on September 5, 2015 Charles arrived at the Cheddi Jagan International Airport in advance of a scheduled Caribbean Airlines flight to JFK and after passing through security at the airport bought a bottle of rum from the duty-free shop. He then boarded the plane and after a layover in Trinidad and Tobago, arrived at JFK.
After passing through immigration at JFK, Charles was stopped by Customs and Border Protection personnel and the cocaine discovered. He was placed under arrest and his cell phone seized. On September 10, 2015 an agent from the US Department of Homeland Security conducted a search of the phone. He took around 20 photos of the phone and incriminating Facebook messages. A “Cellebrite” machine search also extracted certain text messages.
The US said that law enforcement agents had previously arrested another drug courier whose trip was “remarkably similar” to the defendant’s. Both came from Guyana on the same airline to JFK with a `duty free’ bag and bottles of liquid cocaine purporting to be rum. This other courier, identified only as CS-1 decided to accept responsibility for his actions and had hoped for a cooperation agreement. During the course of several meetings CS-1 identified other members of the conspiracy, including two individuals who, as was revealed by the photographic searches of Charles’ cell phone were in contact with Charles.
In their plea for a time-served sentence, Charles’ lawyers had said that this was his first brush with the law and they denied that he had transported cocaine in a similar manner on a previous trip. They argued that a visit earlier in 2015 was a “lawful and legitimate visit to his friends” who live in New York. The lawyers urged against “unwarranted sentence disparities,” noting that another Guyanese defendant with a similar case, Mark Ferdinand, had been sentenced to time served – seven months of incarceration.
