Admitted Trafficker Free After Apparent Abduction

BREA —  An admitted cocaine dealer who was purportedly abducted at gunpoint from his Yorba Linda business on Sunday was released unharmed Monday, but police are raising questions about his curious story.

Investigators said they are still treating Juan Escobar’s abduction as a kidnaping, which might be related to his guilty plea in a cocaine case in New York.

But his disappearance and mysterious reappearance have sparked a list of questions, according to Lt. Bill Lentini of the Brea Police Department, which also serves Yorba Linda.

“It’s fair to say that parts of his story leave us with more questions than answers,” Lentini said.

For instance, police took note of the time lag, 5 1/2 hours, from Escobar’s 11 a.m. release in the Mission Hills area of Los Angeles until he called police at 4:30 p.m.

“That wasn’t lost on us,” Lentini said.

He apparently told police that he was “disoriented,” so it took him several hours to get to a phone to arrange to come to Orange County.

Investigators are also intrigued that Escobar, after his release, went first to his lawyer’s office in Santa Ana, Lentini said.

In an interview with Brea detectives, Escobar, 29, said he did not know his captors, and that he was bound and blindfolded much of the time, police said. No ransom demands were made.

Lentini said investigators do not know whether Escobar agreed to testify against anyone in the New York drug case, which could produce a motive for kidnaping. But they still think the two elements might be linked.

The unusual incident began about 2 p.m. Sunday, when seven people leaped out of a white Toyota van at Escobar’s car-detailing business in the 22600 block of La Palma Avenue in Yorba Linda.

Several captors, flashing chrome-plated guns, gagged and tied two of Escobar’s employees, then shoved Escobar into the van and fled, police said. The two employees freed themselves and called police.

Escobar has pleaded guilty to conspiracy in a major cocaine-trafficking operation, according to John Dowd, a Drug Enforcement Administration spokesman in New York. He is scheduled to be sentenced Jan. 6 in U.S. District Court there.

Escobar and his wife, Gloria, were arrested in Yorba Linda on Dec. 18, 1990, one week after two purported associates were stopped on a highway in Springfield, Mo., with 313 kilograms of cocaine in their truck, Dowd said.

Investigators suspected that the Escobars were the “organizers and managers” of a drug ring that transported up to 1,200 kilograms of cocaine each month to New York from the Los Angeles/San Diego area, Dowd said.

“They were bringing it across the country in tractor-trailers and vans,” Dowd said. “It wasn’t a small operation.”