Extradition

A Japanese businessman charged in the 1981 slaying of his wife in downtown Los Angeles has dropped his attempts to halt his extradition from the U.S. territory of Saipan, one of his attorneys said Monday. Kazuyoshi Miura, 61, could be escorted by police to Los Angeles as soon as this week, said attorney Bruce Berline. An LAPD spokeswoman said Monday that a detective has been sent to Saipan. Berline said Miura decided to drop his opposition to extradition after a Los Angeles judge ruled Friday that prosecutors could charge him with conspiracy even though a Japanese high court acquitted him of murder in 1998.

Former Sherman Oaks money manager Bruce Fred Friedman has died in French custody while awaiting extradition to Los Angeles on charges related to an alleged $228-million investment scam. An official at the U.S. Embassy in Paris confirmed Friedman's death Monday but declined to say when or how he died. Friedman, 62, had been in a French prison since his arrest there in 2010. Federal prosecutors in Los Angeles had accused Friedman of defrauding hundreds of people by promising to invest in real estate but instead spending it on luxury cars, expensive homes, jewelry and travel for himself.

The government approved the extradition of a Bosnian Serb war crimes suspect to the United Nations tribunal at The Hague. Ivana Ramic, a spokeswoman for Serbia's war crimes court, said a court in Belgrade, the capital, rejected former Bosnian Serb police chief Stojan Zupljanin's final appeal. Hours later, a brief statement said the Cabinet had also approved the extradition. The government's decision cleared the final hurdle for Zupljanin's transfer. The U.N. tribunal has indicted Zupljanin on charges of overseeing prison camps where thousands of Muslims and Croats were killed during the 1992-95 Balkans war. He was arrested in the Serbian town of Pancevo last week after nine years on the run.

This post has been updated. See note at the bottom for details.  A retired British businessman was expected to make his first appearance in a federal court in El Paso on Monday after he was extradited last week on charges that he tried to sell missile batteries to Iran in 2006. Christopher Tappin, 65, turned himself in Friday after fighting extradition for two years and was taken to El Paso by federal marshals. Daryl Fields, spokesman for the U.S. attorney for the Western District of Texas, told The Times that Tappin was scheduled to have an initial hearing on Monday afternoon before U.S. Magistrate Judge Robert Castañeda.

A Greek banking tycoon who has touched off the worst political scandal in his country's modern history is expected to argue in court papers today that he should not be extradited to Athens because the government there wants him killed. George Koskotas, a former chairman of the Bank of Crete who fled Greece last November, said in a petition prepared by his lawyers that he has "strong reason to believe that he would be killed" if U.S. authorities return him to Athens. Greek authorities have accused Koskotas, 35, of embezzling more than $200 million from his own bank.

A Colombian woman accused of running a female-dominated drug trafficking ring that distributed thousands of kilograms of cocaine in the United States since 1986 has been extradited from Brazil to face federal charges in New York and Los Angeles. Known among her associates as La Senora, Mery Valencia, 44, operated a sophisticated crime organization from her home base in Cali, Colombia, U.S. authorities said.

A former prison guard pleaded guilty Monday to helping a prisoner convicted of murder escape from a maximum-security facility. Cindy Coglietti said she hid Jeanette Lynn Hughes in a prison van and smuggled her out the front gate of the California Institution for Women at Frontera on March 25, 1990. The two women were captured eight days later in El Paso, Tex. At a preliminary hearing Monday, Hughes was ordered to stand trial on charges of prison escape.

The Swiss government's decision Monday to free Roman Polanski outraged Los Angeles prosecutors and U.S. officials but effectively ended a legal odyssey that has lurched along with periodic eruptions of public furor since 1977, when the famed director was accused of raping a 13-year-old girl. Polanski will not be extradited to the United States to face sentencing for having unlawful sex with the girl , allowing him to live freely in Switzerland and France, where he has resided since he fled the United States 32 years ago. Swiss justice officials said the U.S. failed to turn over documents they had requested.

In your Aug. 13 editorial, "Judicial Reversal, Political Problem," you suggest that the United States could request the formal extradition of Dr. Humberto Alvarez Machain, who has been indicted in connection with the torture-murder of Drug Enforcement Special Agent Enrique Camarena. Although the U.S. and Mexico have entered into an extradition treaty, that agreement does not upset Mexican law or the historic interpretation of that law by Mexican officials. The greatest problem in our extradition relations with Mexico is that Mexico does not extradite its citizens to face criminal charges brought in the U.S. Pursuant to Mexican law, extradition of its citizens is barred except in "exceptional cases."

The extradition of alleged Russian arms trafficker Viktor Bout from Thailand to the United States on Tuesday drew sharp protests from Russian officials, who insist the so-called merchant of death is an innocent businessman. Bout, a former Soviet air force officer who reportedly maintains strong ties to Russian intelligence, had been put aboard a chartered plane under tight security in Bangkok and arrived in suburban New York in manacles late Tuesday. He faces four federal terrorism charges, U.S. officials said.

The Los Angeles County district attorney's office chose not to seek the extradition of a substitute teacher wanted for sex crimes, even after prosecutors learned of his whereabouts in Mexico, court records show. The records contradict statements made this week by a deputy district attorney, who said the teacher would be extradited as soon as authorities could locate him. The teacher, George Hernandez, was arrested by Huntington Park police in September 2010 for allegedly exposing himself to a girl outside a middle school.

For months, authorities scoured West Hollywood, carrying a photo of a squat, green-eyed woman through a bustling hive of Russian-language social clubs and cafes selling borscht and vareniki dumplings. She was Dorothee Burkhart, a fugitive wanted on a host of fraud charges in Germany. Dorothee Burkhart was eventually arrested here and, last Thursday, she was in a courtroom for a hearing to extradite her to Frankfurt to face the charges. Within hours, an arsonist began setting fires across a wide, significant portion of Los Angeles in a four-day assault that caused millions of dollars in damage and left many residents on edge.

The former "Survivor" producer accused of killing his wife during a family vacation in Cancun will not fight extradition to Mexico, his attorneys said Tuesday. Bruce Beresford-Redman's lawyers said in a statement Tuesday that their client, who maintains his innocence, will not appeal a judge's ruling that there is enough evidence to extradite him and instead will prepare to defend himself at trial. The body of his wife, Monica Burgos Beresford-Redman, 41, was found in a sewer at the resort hotel where the couple was vacationing with their two young children in April 2010.

Investors cheered when they learned French police had arrested accused Southern California con man Bruce Fred Friedman in the seaside resort town of Cannes. But more than one year later, Friedman remains in France and the hundreds of investors in his alleged Ponzi scheme — authorities pegged it at $228 million — are beginning to wonder whether they'll ever see him in a U.S. courtroom. For more than 13 months, Friedman has opposed efforts to stand trial in Los Angeles. French courts have authorized his extradition to the United States, but the matter now awaits a final decision by the French government, said Thom Mrozek, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney's office in Los Angeles.

Manuel Noriega, the onetime military dictator of Panama who also moonlighted as a CIA spy and successful drug-trafficking money launderer, was flown home Sunday after two decades in U.S. and French prisons and faced yet more jail time in Panama. Noriega, 77, was extradited from France, where he was convicted of laundering several million dollars through Paris real estate, and placed under heavy guard on a flight to Panama City. Television footage from a Panama airport Sunday evening showed a stooped man covered in a hooded parka arriving and being loaded onto a wheelchair for transport to the Renacer ("Rebirth")

Julian Assange, founder of the WikiLeaks website, is free to ask Britain's highest court to decide whether he should be extradited to Sweden on allegations of sexual assault, judges ruled Monday. The 40-year-old Australian has been battling extradition to Stockholm, the Swedish capital, since a judge ruled in February that he should be sent there to face accusations of raping and molesting two women. Assange and his lawyers have 14 days to file a request for review by the Supreme Court.

Colombia's Supreme Court has blocked the extradition to the United States of a notorious former paramilitary leader and alleged drug trafficker arrested last year, citing the importance of his testimony in bringing justice to victims of decades of violence in the South American country. Daniel Rendon Herrera, known as Don Mario, has been indicted in the Southern District of New York federal court on charges of smuggling 100 tons of cocaine. But Rendon, 44, is cooperating with authorities in Colombia investigating mass killings and forced displacements of thousands of poor farmers, a factor cited by the court Wednesday in barring extradition.

Investors cheered when they learned French police had arrested accused Southern California con man Bruce Fred Friedman in the seaside resort town of Cannes. But more than one year later, Friedman remains in France and the hundreds of investors in his alleged Ponzi scheme — authorities pegged it at $228 million — are beginning to wonder whether they'll ever see him in a U.S. courtroom. For more than 13 months, Friedman has opposed efforts to stand trial in Los Angeles. French courts have authorized his extradition to the United States, but the matter now awaits a final decision by the French government, said Thom Mrozek, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney's office in Los Angeles.

A Chilean judge is seeking the extradition of a former U.S. military officer to face murder charges in the 1973 slaying of freelance journalist and filmmaker Charles Horman, a case dramatized in the Oscar-winning film "Missing," court sources confirmed Tuesday. Judge Jorge Zepeda wants former U.S. Navy Capt. Ray E. Davis, whose whereabouts were not immediately clear Tuesday, to face trial in Chile for his alleged involvement in the deaths of Horman and U.S. student Frank Teruggi.

The last time he was in Panama, former dictator Manuel Noriega was being bombarded around the clock with deafening pop and heavy metal music as American troops tried to flush him out of the Vatican diplomatic mission where he had taken refuge. Now, after more than two decades in prison in the United States and in France, the ex-general who ran the strategic Central American state with an iron fist between 1983 and 1989 is likely to be back home for Christmas after a Paris court on Wednesday approved his extradition.