2 Nephews of Venezuela’s First Lady Convicted on Drug Charges in U.S. Court

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Efrain Antonio Campo Flores, second from the left, and Franqui Francisco Flores de Freitas with law enforcement officers after their arrest in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, last year.


Manhattan U.S. Attorney’s Office, via Reuters

Two nephews of Venezuela’s first lady were convicted in Manhattan on Friday of conspiring to transport cocaine to the United States.

Efrain Antonio Campo Flores and his cousin Franqui Francisco Flores de Freitas, nephews of the first lady Cilia Flores, were found guilty by a jury in Federal District Court. Ms. Flores is the wife of the Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro.

The verdict came after less than a day of deliberation, The Associated Press reported.

The two were arrested in November 2015 in Haiti and charged with conspiring to transport more than 1,700 pounds of cocaine to the United States.

Mr. Flores, 30, and Mr. Flores de Freitas, 31, face sentences of 10 years to life in prison.

A defense lawyer told the jury on Thursday that the men should be acquitted because a federal sting operation was so flawed that prosecutors had to take the rare step of notifying their star witness that they were tearing up his cooperation deal because of his lies, The A.P. reported.

“He lied in your face!” David Rody, the lawyer who represented Mr. Flores de Freitas, told jurors. “You saw a rare thing, a government cooperator get ripped up in court.”

Randall W. Jackson, who represented Mr. Flores, told Reuters after the verdict, “Our client’s obviously disappointed, but we want to see what the next steps are.”

Prosecutors had urged jurors to look at other evidence in the case, including statements the defendants made to federal agents and recordings of meetings.

The United States attorney for the Southern District, Preet Bharara, said in a statement: “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. What they ended up with is a conviction in an American court and the prospect of years in federal prison.”

American investigators have long accused the government in Caracas of corruption and of being involved in drug trafficking. The convictions on Friday come after complaints by American prosecutors last year that a leader of the country’s antidrug agency was on the payroll of narcotics traffickers and tipped them off to raids.

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