MIAMI _ Guy Philippe, an elected Haitian senator and former police commander who eluded capture in Haiti for more than a decade, was sentenced to nine years in prison in Miami federal court Wednesday for accepting bribes to protect cocaine smugglers who used the island to ship drugs to the United States.
Philippe, 49, had pleaded guilty in late April to a drug-related, money laundering conspiracy charge. His plea agreement allowed him to avoid going to trial in May on a more serious trafficking charge that could have sent him to prison for the rest for his life. Instead, he faced up to 20 years on the money laundering conviction, but under the federal sentencing guidelines the punishment amounted to about half that time.
Philippe said nothing to U.S. District Judge Cecilia Altonaga as affirmed a sentence agreed upon by the defense and prosecutors. His prosecution, which initially attracted a throng of supporters, including his wife, to the federal courthouse earlier this year, ended on an anti-climactic note. There was only one curious spectator who showed up on Wednesday for his sentencing hearing, which lasted only 10 minutes.
The sentencing culminates a federal investigation into drug trafficking, money laundering and corruption at the highest levels of Haiti's government more than a decade ago. It was viewed as a deal for both sides.
A prison sentence was inevitable after an earlier decision by the judge to dismiss the case based on Philippe's claim of immunity as a senator-elect in Haiti but Altonaga also had chastised the federal government for not trying harder to arrest Philippe since his 2005 indictment. He was arrested by Haitian National Police and turned over to the Drug Enforcement Administration just days before he was to be sworn in.
"By denying the motion to dismiss, it put the defense in a difficult position," said defense attorney Alan Ross, who handled the case with lawyer Zeljka Bozanic. "What you saw was both parties compromising. The defendant gave up his right to trial, and the government gave up its chance for a longer sentence."
Asked why his wife, Natalie, was absent from the courtroom, Bozanic said: "We did not want to make this into a show." She added that the defense did not file the customary character letters with the judge because "we wanted this to go as smooth as possible. This was the best possible outcome he could get."
Philippe, arrested in January, admitted he accepted between $1.5 million and $3.5 million in cocaine profits from Colombian traffickers for allowing them to use Haiti to ship cocaine to Miami and other parts of the United States between 1999 and 2003. The following year, Philippe gained widespread notoriety when he led a revolt to oust Haiti's president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
Philippe, who unsuccessfully ran for president in 2006, was elected in November to a six-year Senate term. His seat has remained empty until the resolution of his criminal case in Miami.
According to a statement filed with his plea deal, Philippe admitted that he not only shared the bribes from narco-traffickers with fellow officers in the Haitian National Police, but he also wired hundreds of thousands of dollars to the United States to buy a home in Broward County, Fla., and support his family.
Philippe wired $376,000 from banks in Haiti and Ecuador to a joint account with his wife, Natalie, at First Union in Miami. To avoid detection, Philippe used the names of others to wire the funds to his account, according to the statement signed by the defendant and prosecutors Lynn Kirkpatrick and Andy Camacho. Philippe also admitted he deposited more than $70,000 into his account in a series of transactions of less than $10,000 to avoid federal reporting requirements.
Philippe is the last high-profile defendant from a U.S. crackdown on cocaine smuggling through Haiti that yielded the convictions of more than a dozen drug traffickers, Haitian senior police officers and a former Haitian senator. Among them: Beaudouin "Jacques" Ketant, a Haitian narco-trafficker who accused former President Aristide of turning a blind eye to the cocaine. Ketant, initially sentenced to 27 years in a U.S. prison, was deported to Haiti in 2015 when his term was cut in half after assisting federal prosecutors in their probe.
For more than a decade, federal agents, in collaboration with the Haiti National Police, made at least 10 attempts to arrest Philippe: setting up checkpoints, paying informants, launching a U.S. military operation and pursuing him in a foot chase only to lose him in dense vegetation.
Before striking his plea agreement, Philippe had insisted that as an elected Haitian senator, he could not be charged by U.S. authorities. He also claimed that his Jan. 5 arrest by DEA agents amounted to kidnapping.
But Altonaga, the federal judge, ruled in March that he was not protected by sovereign immunity because he had not been sworn in before his arrest outside a Port-au-Prince radio station.
After that major setback, Philippe, who initially pleaded not guilty, struck his deal with the U.S. attorney's office.
