U.S. Sentences Colombian Drug Kingpin to 30 Years

Salazar-Espinoza was arrested in Colombia in 2005 and extradited to New York in August 2006.

A Colombian man who prosecutors called one of the world's most significant drug kingpins was sentenced on Tuesday to 30 years in prison for money-laundering and smuggling cocaine from Colombia to the United States.

Manuel Felipe Salazar-Espinoza, also known as "Hoover," was convicted in June in federal court of heading an international drug trafficking ring that laundered millions of dollars and smuggled cocaine by the ton aboard speedboats between Colombia and Panama.

The drugs were then shipped to Mexico and smuggled into the United States.

Salazar-Espinoza was arrested in Colombia in 2005 and extradited to New York in August 2006.

Under terms of his extradition, U.S. authorities assured Columbia Salazar-Espinoza, 58, would not be given a life sentence, prosecutors said.

U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan said Salazar-Espinoza had entered the narcotics trade "not because he knew of no other life," but because "it was a way to make even more money, vast amounts of money," according to a statement from the U.S. Attorney's office.

"The only life the defendant knows is international drug trafficking," Kaplan said. But he declined to impose a sentence that would "inevitably be a life sentence."

Prosecutors said Salazar-Espinoza became connected to the international cocaine trade in the 1980s.

From 2002 to 2005, he conspired with Mexican cocaine cartel leaders to, each week, import "ton-quantities" of cocaine from Colombia to the United States and to launder $12 million to $14 million in narcotics proceeds.

At the time of his arrest, Salazar-Espinoza was planning two shipments of cocaine to the United States that measured more than six tons, prosecutors said.