Magistrate Denies Bail to Four Suspected Drug-Ring Members

A U.S. magistrate in San Diego denied bail for four defendants in an international drug bust that authorities say was aimed at the financial bases of Colombian cocaine cartels and the Italian Mafia.

During the federal court hearing Thursday, prosecutors alleged that one defendant had aided an unsuccessful assassination plot by a Colombian drug cartel and helped a cartel money manager flee the United States.

Those were some of the allegations used to persuade U.S. Magistrate Louisa Porter that accountant Jose Urda Jr., 45, of Spring Valley, should remain jailed without bail.

Porter also denied bail for Colombian government banking official Carlos Rodrigo Polania Camargo, 42, of Bogota; reputed cartel money manager Silvia Velez Agudelo, 43, of Bogota and Joseph Cox, 49, of San Diego, an alleged courier for Urda.

They are among 43 people indicted in San Diego after an international investigation dubbed Operation Green Ice, which targeted financial operations of the Colombian and Italian drug underworlds.

The probe began three years ago when U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agents based in San Diego opened a dummy investment firm in La Jolla that officials say was used to launder $54 million in cartel money from Europe and the United States to accounts in Colombia and Panama.

Federal grand juries in San Diego and Los Angeles have indicted 107 people.

Assistant U.S. AttyJ. O’Neale told the magistrate that Urda, indicted on charges of laundering $1.5 million in cartel cash, had a history of such activity.

The prosecutor also contended that Urda helped in a failed assassination attempt last year by passing information to drug lords about where they could find a Los Angeles man believed to have withheld money from cartel figures.

Urda’s court-appointed attorney, Martha Hall, denied the allegations made in court as well as those for which her client was indicted.

O’Neale told the magistrate that Urda had delivered to a cartel operative in the United States a fax message from Colombia that detailed how to track down the Los Angeles man targeted for assassination.

The plot was thwarted, O’Neale said, when federal agents intercepted a four-man cartel hit team on June 19, 1991. Their car was stopped at an immigration checkpoint on Interstate 5.

Cox worked at Urda’s accounting business in Chula Vista. He was denied bail after O’Neale said that Cox was a heavily armed courier for Urda.