How a Miami cocaine case went off the rails. It all started with an unpaid $250,000 loan

It started out as a routine sentencing of a Colombian cocaine smuggler and wound up as a messy and very Miami legal drama.

You’ve got a local jeweler who deals in high-end watches claiming he’s been stiffed on a quarter-million loan to the smuggler’s friend, who bankrolled his legal defense.

You’ve got an attorney hired by the jeweler to collect the debt making his claim in a criminal case, something that just never happens in by-the-book federal court.

And you’re got a doozy of a motion by the jeweler’s attorney, arguing the drug trafficker should get punished hard because his pal who took out the loan hasn’t paid up, that the FBI fell down on the job of investigating the unpaid debt, and that the defense attorney for the smuggler ought to be sanctioned for any number of reasons.

That defense attorney, David M. Fernandez, was not a happy camper, calling it a tactic to coerce him and his client into dealing with an unpaid loan that neither had agreed to or were responsible for.

“This is an attempt at extortion,” Fernandez, a licensed lawyer since 2005 with no Florida Bar complaints, told the Miami Herald Tuesday. “It was all a shock to me. This is the most bizarre case in my entire history of practicing law.”

The plot of this story is winding.

The jeweler’s lawyer, Simon T. Steckel, filed a motion on the eve of the smuggler’s sentencing hearing in mid-April, urging the judge to give convicted coke smuggler Juan Jose Valencia Zuluaga more time behind bars because of an unpaid $250,000 loan that paid his legal fees.

Steckel’s client, Joel Vigo, whose family has been in the Miami jewelry business for years, accused the borrower — Zuluaga’s friend, Manuel Gil — of trying to swindle him, according to Steckel’s motion. The filing also implied that the coke smuggler and his defense attorney were complicit because the loan had paid for the defense legal bill.

“Hence, this ultimate theft of money from Vigo was used to benefit” them, Steckel wrote in the filing.

Steckel, a veteran defense attorney who acknowledged in his filing that his tactic was “unusual,” also accused the FBI and federal prosecutors of failing to investigate the jeweler’s allegations about an unpaid loan before the sentencing hearing this month.

Fernandez argued Steckel had no business interfering in a federal criminal case to collect a debt. And at Zuluaga’s sentencing, U.S. District Judge Darrin Gayles agreed, telling the jeweler’s attorney that his client should seek to resolve his loan dispute in another arena, namely state circuit court. He then sentenced Zuluaga to 14 years in prison after he pleaded guilty to conspiring to distribute more than five kilos of cocaine. The punishment was at the low end of the sentencing guidelines and recommended by federal prosecutor Ellen D’Angelo.

But the judge, for reasons not explained, also allowed Steckel’s filing to remain in the court record, despite Fernandez’s request to strike “the irrelevant and inflammatory assertions.” The judge did not address Steckel’s additional motion seeking sanctions against Fernandez.

Meanwhile, the FBI, which had looked into the jeweler’s allegations, directed questions to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for comment. That office declined to comment. But D’Angelo, the prosecutor, said in an email cited in Steckel’s filing that the FBI had found no “direct link” between the jeweler Vigo and the cocaine smuggler and no basis to investigate the loan agreement.

Gil had first arranged the $250,000 loan from Vigo after Zuluaga’s arrest last year in order to pay the defendant’s legal fees, according to Steckel’s filing.

“Gil agreed to repay Vigo ‘right away’ suggesting that he could have the funds back to Vigo within 24 hours from Zuluaga,” Steckel wrote in his filing. “Vigo agreed, as long as there was a paper trail to Fernandez showing the actual payment of purported legal fees directly to him. ... Fernandez was aware of this arrangement and instantly accepted the money from Vigo without objection.”

Fernandez said he knew Gil had made arrangements to pay his friend’s legal fees but did not know Gil had borrowed the money from the jeweler. “Absolutely not,” Fernandez said.

Legal experts said such arrangements are common in South Florida, especially in a drug-trafficking case where the accused may have trouble finding available money that is untainted by criminal activity.

Experts also noted the uncommon turn of events in the cocaine smuggler’s case.

Jon Sale, a prominent criminal defense attorney in South Florida, said he has never seen a third party try to intervene in a federal sentencing in order to settle a financial dispute. Sale said the decision whether to investigate an allegation is strictly left to the executive branch, the FBI and the U.S. Attorney’s Office, as “a matter of separation of powers.”

There’s even more to the story: it also turned out that Vigo and Gil have had past differences.

They knew each other because they had done jewelry transactions, mainly buying and selling fancy watches, over the past decade. But their business relationship is apparently strained. In March, Gil sought a temporary restraining order against Vigo in Miami-Dade’s family court. It was granted, but a full hearing on the stay-away order is set for June, court records show.

Vigo’s lawyer in that case also is Steckel. Gil’s attorney Tony A. Haber did not respond to a request for comment.