DEA Used Westchester Airport in International Drug Bust

HARRISON, NY — When federal law enforcement officials closed in on two drug traffickers in Haiti, they flew them to the United States in a DEA jet through Westchester County Airport.

The two men were f0und guilty Nov. 18 of conspiring to import cocaine into the U.S., Preet Bharara, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, announced.

Efrain Antonio Campo Flores and Franqui Francisco Flores de Freitas and others agreed to distribute more than 800 kilograms of cocaine, he said.

"As the evidence at trial established, the two men thought they would make millions of dollars sending hundreds of kilograms of cocaine to the United States," Bharara said. "What they ended up with is a conviction in an American court and the prospect of years in federal prison.”

The case included a sting operation that defense attorneys argued was so flawed it should lead to the men's acquittal, according to ABC News, with a witness whose cooperation deal was rescinded when prosecutors found out he had been dealing drugs while being paid a lot of money as a DEA informant.

"He was slime," juror Robert Lewis, a 69-year-old architect from Westchester County, said of the informant, Jose Santos-Pena, ABC News reported.

According to the prosecutors, beginning in August 2015, Flores, 30, and Flores de Freitas, 31, worked with others in Venezuela and elsewhere in an effort to dispatch large loads of cocaine via aircraft from Simón Bolívar International Airport in Venezuela through Honduras to the United States. An informant gave the DEA information and two undercover sources worked the sting.

Prosecutors said that when the two flew to Haiti to pick up an initial multi-million-dollar payment for the cocaine, they were arrested by Haitian law enforcement, expelled from the country, and flown to the USA on a DEA jet that landed at Westchester International Airport.