George was unrepentant; at a prison meeting he asked me to go to the French Antilles to check on a missing smuggling vessel, and whispered to me to tell a mutual friend that, " as soon as I am out, we will be back in business. " Apparently the lure of easy money in the narcotics world was even stronger than the instinct for self-preservation. You are in jail, looking at serious charges, and you are already thinking about committing future crimes ? As we shall soon see, this was to be his undoing.

Our able investigator found that the witnesses, all of whom were cooperating to obtain reduced sentences had pending criminal cases of their own (known as "working off a beef"),  whilst all the defendants, looking at long sentences  for narcotics trafficking, had never been convicted before of any crimes. This created credibility problems for the US Attorney's office.

A major witness, Joe from Miami Beach, the same individual (George's neighbor) who had unsuccessfully attempted to sting me a few months earlier (see Part 9) was found by our investigator to have run afoul of the law in a child custody dispute in New England. The evidence against him was sufficient to cast doubts on his truthfulness as a witness at trial.

After a lengthy trial, all the defendants, including George, were amazingly acquitted, notwithstanding 600 kilos of cocaine found on board their ship in the Miami River. It seemed that the jury had trouble believing the characters who were testifying against my clients, as their "colourful" criminal pasts had been exposed during their cross-examination.

At the acquittal, the Assistant US Attorney attempted to have George rearrested on other drug charges, pulling out an indictment he was holding in his file, but since extradition laws prohibit being tried for any charges other than those you are actually extradited for, the District Judge  eventually ordered his release.

The Assistant US Attorney who tried the case resigned soon after; was he pushed out ? I do not know, but he soon made a smooth transition into representing defendants who were cooperating with the authorities, what criminal derivatively refer to as "snitches."

One of the younger lawyers in the law firm representing him picked up George at the Federal Detention Centre, and drove him right to Miami International Airport, and a flight to France and freedom. Justice had not been served that day, but as she was not to be denied.

George reassembled his organisation, this time on France's Mediterranean coast, and commenced to bring  cocaine into Europe, whose residents were just then acquiring a taste for the drug. As related to me later by a DEA agent the posted to France, he and his gang were arrested in the biggest "coke" case ever to occur in France, then or since.

George, who had gained a rare a second chance in life from his Miami case, received a 20-year sentence. It was your classic illustration of the lure of crime; even successful, independently wealthy criminals rarely quit the life until they are imprisoned, dead from a drug overdose, or otherwise incapacitated or disabled. Call it arrogance, wanting the beat the system, or just a bad habit that cannot be broken; criminals, even the best & brightest, do not quit by choice.

Did he die in prison ? After all, 20 years is a long time, and the French criminal justice system (think Napoleonic code, not the English common law system) has no parole. I do not know the end of his story, but I am tempted one day to see whether his family still owns that impressive townhouse outside of Paris.

I am also tempted to ascertain whatever happened to his Taiwanese wife and partner in crime. She received a 10-year sentence from the french court, and they had a very young child. It gets worse; there is an
unverified story that her criminal appeal, deemed to be totally without merit at law, resulted in her sentence being doubled, to twenty years. You've gotta love that for justice.

The placard, which is never changed, on the top of the prison bus that transports people to trial at the Miami federal court is marked " Destiny."  I would call that poetic license of a sort. 

NEXT WEEK: The hits just keep on coming; more money laundering operations in the tax havens of the Caribbean, and what the clients did with their spare time.