16593: Edouard -News!!! Drug trafficker is ready to talk (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Felix Edouard <loveayiti@hotmail.com>


This is going to be interesting.....


Drug trafficker is ready to talk
Haitian pleads guilty to smuggling, wants to implicate leaders on island
BY LARRY LEBOWITZ
lebowitz@herald.com

Miami Herald


KETANT


One of Haiti's most flamboyant drug traffickers pleaded guilty Thursday in
Miami and is offering information he says could implicate high-ranking
military, police and political leaders on the island.

Jacques Beaudoin Ketant, 42, confessed to helping smuggle at least 30 tons
of Colombian cocaine into the United States between 1986 and 1997. He agreed
to start debriefings with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration in the
hope of reducing a maximum sentence of 40 years in prison.

Without naming names or offering any details, Miami defense attorney Ruben
Oliva said Ketant can implicate plenty of Haitian leaders who allowed the
island to become a major stopover point on the cocaine pipeline between
Colombia and the United States since 1986.

''He has plenty to offer them,'' Oliva said. ``He can be a huge, huge help
to the DEA.''

While federal prosecutors and DEA officials would not comment on specific
individuals who might be targeted with Ketant's assistance, no one doubts
that Ketant was a major player in Haiti with nefarious friends throughout
the hemisphere.

''We're definitely looking forward to talking to Mr. Ketant,'' said Thomas
Raffanello, head of the DEA Miami field office, whose jurisdiction includes
the Caribbean.

Raffanello said Ketant could be an important asset to investigators hoping
to build cases against major Colombian traffickers and middlemen in Curacao
and Panama.

Before his capture, Ketant had last been seen in the United States in May
1996. DEA agents confronted him on the streets of New York, but he dropped
nearly 20 pounds of cocaine and fled on foot.

Assistant U.S. Attorney John Kastranakes said Ketant apparently dressed up
as a woman to slip past security on a flight to Port-au-Prince.

Ketant openly walked the streets of Port-au-Prince without any fear of being
sent back to South Florida, where he was indicted in 1997.

Ketant, who described himself in court as an entrepreneur, sank his drug
profits into discotheques, gas stations and rental properties across Haiti.
The former Miami-Dade Community College student lived in an elaborate
mansion with wrought-iron balconies in the upscale Petion-Ville neighborhood
on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince.

''He was a powerful man in his own right,'' Raffanello said.

But earlier this summer, Ketant's bodyguards intervened in a schoolyard
fight at the Union School, an American academy where one of Ketant's sons
rubbed shoulders with the children of U.S. Embassy officials.

Outraged American officials reportedly pressured Haitian President
Jean-Bertrand Aristide to have the national police arrest Ketant. Police
turned him over to the DEA agents attached to the embassy. He was flown to
Miami that same afternoon.

Miami attorney Ira Kurzban, who represents the Aristide government, said at
the time that Ketant was ``expelled.''

Ketant was the primary contact in Haiti for the Medellín, Cali and Northern
Valley cartels for years, operating several airstrips where large quantities
of cocaine were dropped.

DEA agents say Ketant had a large crew of smugglers and ''swallowers'' who
would move the drugs to Miami, Chicago and New York in suitcases, boats and
their stomachs.

He also controlled a vast network of military, police and customs officials
in Haiti and the United States who provided security information and were
well paid to purposely turn their heads when drugs were passing through
their borders.

Ketant clearly had friends in high places. One of Ketant's codefendants,
former Haitian Police Chief Michel ''Sweet Mickey'' Francois, is a fugitive
hiding in Honduras, outside the reach of U.S. agents.

Raffanello has plenty of experience working with high-profile witnesses
willing to testify against higher-profile defendants.

As an agent, he helped convince Medellín cartel figurehead Carlos Lehder to
testify against Panamanian strongman Gen. Manuel Noriega. In return, Lehder
had his sentence reduced from 180 to 100 years.

''We're willing to talk to anybody,'' Raffanello said. ``And I mean
anybody.''

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