Federal prosecuters were busy in court this week claiming the former head of the DEA's Miami operations ordered the shredding of 550 pounds of documents in an effort to thwart an SEC investigation into his boss' business affairs.
Miami federal Judge Richard Goldberg wasn't buying it, and in a surprise move yesterday he stopped the jury from reaching a verdict and cleared ex-drug cop Tom Raffanello of conspiracy and obstruction of justice himself. Goldberg said the government's case was "deeply flawed" and failed altogether to prove Raffanello deliberately tried to aid disgraced Ponzi schemer Allen Stanford.
Raffanello, 61, spent more than three decades working on some of the government's most high-profile drug cases, including those against Panamanian military dictator Manuel Noriega and Medellín cartel kingpin Fabio Ochoa. In 2004, he left government work and joined Stanford's offshore banking empire as security chief.
He reported directly to Stanford, a flamboyant Texan with a title from Antigua and Barbuda, mistresses in multiple ports, and an $8 billion dollar banking empire that turned out to be a house of cards when an investigation began in early 2009. According to the Miami Herald, Raffanello's duties included background checks on prospective employees and flying around the globe responding to the company's internal crises.
The government's case for conspiracy and obstruction rested on an order in February of 2009 from Raffanello to shred documents at Stanford's Fort Lauderdale office more than a week after the SEC shut down the bank. A judge had ordered that all records be preserved; Raffanello and his lawyers maintain he merely destroyed extra copies of documents already being stored on a server, as was routinely done to keep the office paperless.
"Was that a mistake in judgment? Maybe. But it wasn't criminal intent,'' his lawyer, Richard Sharpstein, said. "He's charged with -- at best -- an error in management.''
A who's who of high profile character witnesses testified for Raffanello, including federal prosecutor Pat Sullivan and former U.S. attorneys Guy Lewis and James McAdams. According to an anonymous juror, it worked -- and acquittal was all but a formality anyway.
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"It would have been a good day for [him]," she said.
