New York
45-Year Sentence for Otoniel, Who Ran a Colombian Drug Cartel
A man described by prosecutors as “the most violent and significant” Colombian drug trafficker since Pablo Escobar was sentenced to 45 years in prison by a judge in Brooklyn federal court on Tuesday.
The man, Dairo Antonio Úsuga David, 51, also known as Otoniel, was extradited from Colombia last year and pleaded guilty in January to running the Gulf Clan, a paramilitary group that operates as a huge cartel. The group used extreme violence to control swaths of Colombia and silence rivals and law enforcement officers, prosecutors said.
Francisco J. Navarro, a prosecutor, said during the proceeding that Mr. Úsuga was Colombia’s most dangerous narco-trafficker of the century and called him the “supreme leader” of the Gulf Clan, which he said ruled “violently and without mercy.” He said Mr. Úsuga was responsible for an “uncountable” number of murders. Several Colombian government representatives watched from the gallery.
When Mr. Úsuga was captured by the Colombian military at a remote jungle hide-out in 2021, then-President Iván Duque described him the most feared trafficker in the world and compared his arrest to the fall of Mr. Escobar in the 1990s. The president also declared that the arrest marked “the end of the Gulf Clan.” But new leaders have emerged to take Mr. Úsuga’s place.
The charges in New York and coordinated ones in southern Florida included conspiracy to ship vast quantities of cocaine north by land and sea. Mr. Úsuga’s lawyers said that he had accepted responsibility for his crimes but argued that he had been a child soldier in Colombia’s decades-long civil war.
Before the sentencing, the defendant addressed the court himself, seated in a khaki prison uniform, his graying beard neatly trimmed. Through an interpreter, Mr. Úsuga asked forgiveness and said he had advice for Colombia’s youth: “Not to take the path I have taken.”
He called on the United States to support negotiations toward peace in Colombia with all parties — including drug traffickers.
Judge Dora L. Irizarry rebuked the defense lawyers for their focus on Mr. Úsuga’s upbringing, noting she had grown up in a rough area of public housing in the South Bronx. Instead of overcoming hardship, the judge said, Mr. Úsuga had directed his energy toward rising in an inherently violent industry.
“I see it every day with people who come before me with their lives wasted,” Judge Irizarry said.
As part of Mr. Úsuga’s plea agreement, he agreed to forfeit $216 million. He will be deported and face other charges in Colombia at the end of his sentence.
The Drug Enforcement Administration had investigated Mr. Úsuga for nearly 20 years, its administrator, Anne Milgram, said this year, and he was indicted in New York in 2009. American officials said that his group, strongest in northwestern Colombia, was composed of “former members of terrorist organizations” that controlled drug routes and laboratories.
According to the indictments, Mr. Úsuga ran the cocaine production and shipping pipeline to the United States from 2003 until his capture. In 2012, he became the head of the clan, according to prosecutors.
Today, the group continues to control vast swaths of territory near the border with Panama and on the Caribbean and Pacific coasts and has thousands of members, according to Colombian security forces.
It uses sicarios, or assassins, to carry out killings, torture and kidnapping, the authorities said. Mr. Úsuga offered rewards for killing members of law enforcement, prosecutors said. A bounty was even put on a police dog.
The defendant was also accused of personally ordering the murders of people who worked for a rival trafficker — and the gruesome torture and killing of one of his men who betrayed him.
Elizabeth Dickinson, the senior analyst for Colombia for the International Crisis Group, said that the Gulf Clan had become more powerful since a 2016 peace agreement with the country’s largest leftist insurgent group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC.
The vacuum left when FARC laid down arms was not filled by the government, and criminal groups stepped in to control a lucrative illicit economy that includes drug and human trafficking. The Gulf Clan’s territory includes the area near the Darién Gap, the stretch of jungle between Colombia and Panama that thousands of migrants use to trek north.
“They took over a lot of the territory that this group had previously controlled, and I think today they’re really at the strongest point they’ve ever been at,” Ms. Dickinson said.
“What we’ve seen since his arrest is this organization has, if anything, grown more cohesive and more aggressive,” she said.
Maria McFarland Sánchez-Moreno, a staff member at Human Rights Watch, said that Mr. Úsuga had begun to participate in tribunals after his arrest — and to name powerful people in government who played a role in his crimes. But at that point, the talks were stopped and he was extradited.
“Extradition has turned into a tool for powerful actors in Colombia to silence people who were finally talking about the horrible things that they did and the individuals who were complicit in their crimes,” she said.
Julie Turkewitz contributed reporting.
Today would have been the first Monday of New York City’s congestion pricing plan. Before it was halted by Gov. Kathy Hochul, the plan was designed to rein in some of the nation’s worst traffic while raising a billion dollars for the subway every year, one toll at a time.
A year’s worth of tolls is hard to picture. But what about a day’s worth? What about an hour’s?
To understand how the plan could have worked, we went to the edges of the tolling zone during the first rush hour that the fees would have kicked in.
Here’s what we saw:
Video by Noah Throop/The New York Times; animation by Ruru Kuo/The New York Times
You probably wouldn’t have seen every one of those cars if the program had been allowed to proceed. That’s because officials said the fees would have discouraged some drivers from crossing into the tolled zone, leading to an estimated 17 percent reduction in traffic. (It’s also Monday on a holiday week.)
The above video was just at one crossing point, on Lexington Avenue. We sent 27 people to count vehicles manually at four bridges, four tunnels and nine streets where cars entered the business district. In total, we counted 22,252 cars, trucks, motorcycles and buses between 8 a.m. and 9 a.m. on Monday.
We wanted to see how the dense flow of traffic into the central business district would have generated money in real time.
Though we can’t know that dollar amount precisely, we can hazard a guess. Congestion pricing was commonly referred to as a $15-per-car toll, but it wasn’t so simple. There were going to be smaller fees for taxi trips, credits for the tunnels, heftier charges for trucks and buses, and a number of exemptions.
To try to account for all that fee variance, we used estimates from the firm Replica, which models traffic data, on who enters the business district, as well as records from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and city agencies. We also made a few assumptions where data wasn’t available. We then came up with a ballpark figure for how much the city might have generated in an hour at those toll points.
The total? About $200,000 in tolls for that hour.
Note: The Trinity Place exit from the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, which would have been tolled, is closed at this hour.
It’s far from a perfect guess. Our vehicle total is definitely an undercount: We counted only the major entrances — bridges, tunnels and 60th Street — which means we missed all the cars that entered the zone by exiting the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive or the West Side Highway.
And our translation into a dollar number is rough. Among many other choices we had to make, we assumed all drivers had E-ZPass — saving them a big surcharge — and we couldn’t distinguish between transit buses and charter buses, so we gave all buses an exemption.
But it does give you a rough sense of scale: It’s a lot of cars, and a lot of money. Over the course of a typical day, hundreds of thousands of vehicles stream into the Manhattan central business district through various crossings.
Trips into tolling district, per Replica estimates Note: Data counts estimated entrances on a weekday in spring 2023. Source: Replica.
Queens-Midtown Tunnel
50,600
Lincoln Tunnel
49,200
Williamsburg Bridge
27,900
Manhattan Bridge
24,000
Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel
23,100
Queensboro Bridge
21,700
Brooklyn Bridge
17,100
Holland Tunnel
15,400
All other entrances
118,000
Total
347,000
The tolling infrastructure that was installed for the program cost roughly half a billion dollars.
The M.T.A. had planned to use the congestion pricing revenue estimates to secure $15 billion in financing for subway upgrades. Many of those improvement plans have now been suspended.
Methodology We stationed as many as five counters at some bridges and tunnels to ensure that we counted only cars that directly entered the tolling zone, not those that would have continued onto non-tolled routes.
Our count also excluded certain exempt vehicles like emergency vehicles.
We used estimates of the traffic into the district to make a best guess at how many of each kind of vehicle entered the zone. Most of our estimates came from the traffic data firm Replica, which uses a variety of data sources, including phone location, credit card and census data, to model transportation patterns. Replica estimated that around 58 percent of trips into the central business district on a weekday in spring 2023 were made by private vehicles, 35 percent by taxis or other for-hire vehicles (Uber and Lyft) and the remainder by commercial vehicles.
We also used data on trucks, buses, for-hire vehicles and motorcycles from the M.T.A., the Taxi and Limousine Commission and the Department of Transportation.
For simplicity, we assumed all vehicles would be equally likely to enter the zone from 8 a.m. to 9 a.m. as they would be in any other hour. We could not account for the other trips that a for-hire vehicle might make once within the tolled zone, only the initial crossing. And we did not include the discount to drivers who make under $50,000, because it would kick in only after 10 trips in a calendar month.
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Jury Deliberation Re-charge
SUPREME COURT OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK
COUNTY OF NEW YORK CRIMINAL TERM
-
-
PART: 59
Χ
THE PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK,
-against-
DONALD J. TRUMP,
DEFENDANT.
BEFORE:
Indict. No.
71543-2023
CHARGE
4909
FALSIFYING BUSINESS
RECORDS 1ST DEGREE
JURY TRIAL
100 Centre Street
New York, New York 10013
May 30, 2024
HONORABLE JUAN M. MERCHAN
JUSTICE OF THE SUPREME COURT
APPEARANCES:
FOR THE PEOPLE:
ALVIN BRAGG, JR., ESQ.
DISTRICT ATTORNEY, NEW YORK COUNTY
One Hogan Place
New York, New York 10013
BY:
JOSHUA STEINGLASS, ESQ.
MATTHEW COLANGELO,
ESQ.
SUSAN HOFFINGER, ESQ.
CHRISTOPHER CONROY, ESQ.
BECKY MANGOLD, ESQ.
KATHERINE ELLIS, ESQ.
Assistant District Attorneys
BLANCHE LAW
BY:
TODD BLANCHE, ESQ.
EMIL BOVE, ESQ.
KENDRA WHARTON, ESQ.
NECHELES LAW, LLP
BY: SUSAN NECHELES, ESQ.
GEDALIA STERN, ESQ.
Attorneys for the Defendant
SUSAN PEARCE-BATES, RPR, CSR, RSA
Principal Court Reporter
LAURIE EISENBERG, RPR, CSR
LISA KRAMSKY
THERESA MAGNICCARI
Senior Court Reporters
Susan Pearce-Bates, RPR, CCR, RSA
Principal Court Reporter
SUPREME COURT OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK
COUNTY OF NEW YORK CRIMINAL TERM
-
THE PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK,
PART: 59
Indict. No.
71543-2023
CHARGE
-against-
DONALD J. TRUMP,
DEFENDANT.
BEFORE:
4815
FALSIFYING BUSINESS
RECORDS 1ST DEGREE
JURY TRIAL
X
100 Centre Street
New York, New York 10013
May 29, 2024
HONORABLE JUAN M. MERCHAN
JUSTICE OF THE SUPREME COURT
APPEARANCES:
FOR THE
PEOPLE:
ALVIN BRAGG, JR.,
ESQ.
DISTRICT ATTORNEY, NEW YORK COUNTY
One Hogan Place
New York, New York 10013
BY:
JOSHUA STEINGLASS, ESQ.
MATTHEW COLANGELO,
ESQ.
SUSAN HOFFINGER, ESQ.
CHRISTOPHER CONROY, ESQ.
BECKY MANGOLD, ESQ.
KATHERINE ELLIS, ESQ.
Assistant District Attorneys
BLANCHE LAW
BY:
TODD BLANCHE, ESQ.
EMIL BOVE, ESQ.
KENDRA WHARTON, ESQ.
NECHELES LAW, LLP
BY: SUSAN NECHELES, ESQ.
Attorneys for the Defendant
SUSAN PEARCE-BATES, RPR, CSR, RSA
Principal Court Reporter
LAURIE EISENBERG, RPR, CSR
LISA KRAMSKY
THERESA MAGNICCARI
Senior Court Reporters
Susan Pearce-Bates,
RPR, CCR, RSA
Principal Court Reporter
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