(Excerpted from the Miami Herald, 5.23.14, Jay Weaver reporting)
Bolivia’s convicted anti-corruption chief, Mario Fabrizio Ormachea faces sentencing Friday for traveling to Miami to extort a rich Bolivian businessman for $30,000 in exchange for making trumped-up charges against him disappear back home.
Ormachea’s wealthy target was Humberto Roca, former owner of Aerosur Airlines, who fled Bolivia for the United States in 2011 after he was charged with “illegal enrichment” in his native country.
He said Ormachea threatened that if he did not pay the bribes, the senior Bolivian police officer would pursue the illegal-enrichment charges against him and seek his extradition to Bolivia.
He testified that Ormachea contacted him by telephone to say he was coming to Miami to meet him last August. Roca’s Miami attorney Michael Diaz Jr. instructed him to contact the FBI about the extortion attempt.
The FBI directed him to play an undercover role in the sting operation, which played out in Roca’s Miami Lakes home over two days.
Source: Miami Herald, May 23, 2014
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