By Denise Lavoie
Associated Press Writer
BOSTON, Mass. — A police officer ran criminal rackets and agreed with FBI agents posing as drug dealers to protect shipments of cocaine into the city, prosecutors said as his federal drug trial began Tuesday.
Prosecutors told jurors that they would hear recordings of Roberto Pulido discussing plans to help the drug dealers with the shipments. They said two other Boston police officers also protected the drugs.
Pulido’s lawyer, Rudolph Miller, told the jury Pulido, 42, had been entrapped by the agents. Miller said agents used a career criminal who was a boyhood friend of Pulido’s to lure him into a phony drug operation.
“This entire case was manufactured by the government,” Miller said.
Pulido, Nelson Carrasquillo and Carlos Pizarro were arrested in July 2006 after they went to Miami to collect a $35,000 payment for a shipment of 100 kilograms of cocaine they had protected a month earlier and to celebrate with the men they thought were dealers.
Carrasquillo, 36, and Pizarro, 37, have pleaded guilty to drug trafficking and conspiracy. Authorities described Pulido as the ringleader.
Prosecutors claim Pulido was involved in a broad range of illegal activities, including buying and selling fraudulent gift cards from Home Depot and Best Buy, and selling to an identity-theft ring the names, birth dates and Social Security numbers of people he stopped or arrested.
Pulido is not criminally charged in any of those activities, but prosecutors were allowed to present a detailed account of his suspected role in those ventures to argue he was predisposed to commit a crime.
U.S. District Judge William Young, in explaining the law on entrapment, told jurors it is legal for the government to offer someone the opportunity to commit a crime if authorities have evidence that the person is corrupt or willing to commit a crime.
But, he said, the government cannot induce or pressure someone to act in a way he wasn’t already inclined to act.
FBI agent Kevin Constantine testified that the investigation began in 2003 after Troy Lozano, a childhood friend of Pulido’s, was arrested in Philadelphia and began providing authorities with information about Pulido’s suspected role in the fraudulent gift card operation.
Lozano then began wearing a wire to record his conversations with Pulido, Constantine said.
On the recordings, Pulido can be heard discussing various illegal ventures.
Authorities said Pulido threatened to kill the children of associates who betrayed other members of the group.
“And if something goes bad, and they’re at fault, somebody is going to pay, either with their life or their children’s lives,” Pulido said, according to a transcript of the recorded conversation.