15-year jail term for drug offence

Press, 2 May 1984, Page 3

15-year jail term for drug offence

NZPA staff correspondent Washington A New Zealander, Calum lan Innes, received a maximum 15-year sentence — and lifetime parole — in Los Angeles yesterday for importing cocaine into the United States. On his release he will be liable to extradition to france, where he was sentenced in absentia several years ago to 25 years imprisonment on drug charges, or deportation to New Zealand, the prosecutor, Daniel Gonzales, told NZPA yesterday. Innes, aged 29, pleaded guilty in a plea-bargaining arrangement, which meant lesser charges were dropped, and the sentence was imposed without a trial. Mr Gonzales said Innes could earn up to a third off his sentence for good behaviour, but would have to serve five years before being considered for parole, which meant he was likely to serve between five and 10 years. Innes, who is a fluent Spanish speaker, is married to a Peruvian. He is being held at Terminal Island. His record includes a 10year jail sentence in Iran, imposed in 1978, when Shah Muhammad Reza Pahlavi still ruled the country.

Innes was “well connected” in Central America, the Los Angeles police told NZPA, and went by a number of aliases. What he did not know was that under-cover agents from the United States Drug Enforcement Agency had infiltrated the ring flying cocaine from Peru to Van Nuys airport, near Los angeles, where Innes had been living. In December, 1982, Innes, then in Peru, delivered a SUSI 6 million ($24 million) consignment of high-grade cocaine to Americans who flew into a remote airstrip 225 km north of Lima. That was a set-up. Armed Peruvian police had staked out the strip, two of the “gang” on board the plane were D.E.A. agents and another was a “co-operating individual.” The Peruvian police opened fire — it was described at the time as “a hail of bullets” — but Innes escaped. He remained at large until early this year, in spite of an all-country bulletin put out for his apprehension, and he casually visited an old school from New Zealand in Los Angeles some months ago. Mr Gonzales said yesterday that Innes appeared to have had the ability to slip in and out of the United States at will. Innes’s co-conspirators were arrested last year