[Ppnews] Avelino Gonzalez Claudio moved easily in and out of Puerto Rico

[Political Prisoner News]

courant.com/news/local/hc-fargo0416.artapr16,0,7092872.story


Courant.com




Suspected Wells Fargo Robber Imprisoned, Denied Bail

By EDMUND H. MAHONY

Courant Staff Writer

April 16, 2008


Over the more than two decades that he was the 
subject of an FBI manhunt, suspected Wells Fargo 
robber and militant nationalist Avelino Gonzalez 
Claudio moved easily in ­ and out ­ of Puerto Rico.

Using an assumed name, he acquired a U.S. 
passport and traveled on it twice to Mexico. He 
obtained a driver's license and registered an automobile.

The doctrinaire Marxist, a leader of the 
clandestine Puerto Rican pro-independence group 
Los Macheteros, carried an American Express card. 
He shopped with store charge cards at Costco and 
Sam's Club. He had a Puerto Rico voter identification card.

His FBI wanted poster was filed in a Puerto Rican 
court as part of a dispute over the settlement of 
a family estate. He petitioned the U.S. 
Immigration and Naturalization Service in an 
effort to make his ex-wife, a Dominican, a 
permanent resident alien of the United States.

Remarkably, he ventured repeatedly into the seat 
of federal power in Puerto Rico ­ the U.S. 
District Court. For about 15 years of his two 
decades as a fugitive, Gonzalez was employed as 
an instructor at a computer training institute. 
His duties required him to teach computer skills to federal court judges.

Gonzalez's luck ran out on Feb. 6, when the FBI 
learned that he was living in the Puerto Rican 
north coast town of Manati under the alias Jose Ortega Morales.

He had been missing since 1985, after he was 
indicted ­ but before he could be arrested ­ for 
what at the time was the largest cash robbery in 
U.S. history, the armed robbery by Los Macheteros 
of more than $7 million from a Wells Fargo depot in West Hartford in 1983.

Los Macheteros pulled off the robbery, the most 
sensational of a series of "expropriations" and 
armed attacks on federal installations during the 
1970s and '80s, with Cuban support.

Evidence produced previously in court suggests 
that the organization's leadership, of which 
Gonzalez was a member, planned to use the money 
to finance an armed struggle for Puerto Rican independence.

On Tuesday, federal prosecutors turned Gonzalez's 
elusiveness against him. At the conclusion of a 
contentious, two-day detention hearing in federal 
court in Hartford, U.S. Magistrate Judge Thomas 
P. Smith adopted prosecution arguments that 
Gonzalez is a flight risk and ordered that he be 
denied bail and imprisoned while awaiting trial 
on 15 charges related to the robbery.

"For me, this isn't a case about Los Macheteros," 
Smith said. "It is not about the alleged 
antipathy between the FBI and Los Macheteros. 
It's not about Puerto Rican independence. To me, 
it's a case about a man who was indicted for bank 
robbery about 25 years ago, and in the 
intervening time has lived under a false name. 
That he did it supports the argument that he could do it again."

Gonzalez's arrival and imprisonment in 
Connecticut promise to revive one of the most 
complicated and protracted legal dramas ever in 
the state. About a dozen of his co-defendants in 
the Wells Fargo robbery were tried and all but 
one was convicted after two trials in the late 1980s and early '90s.

During four years of legal maneuvering leading to 
the first trial, 1,500 motions were argued and 17 
appeals were taken to the U.S. 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals.

It took the U.S. Supreme Court to ultimately 
decide that prosecutors could introduce as 
evidence 50 disputed reels of secret FBI 
recordings, just a fraction of what the FBI recorded.

Although the Wells Fargo case was about a bank 
robbery, there was peripheral evidence of armed 
conflict that, at the time, paralleled insurgencies elsewhere in Latin America.

Members of Los Macheteros were tied to the 
destruction in Puerto Rico of nine National Guard 
jets, the ambush slayings of two U.S. Navy 
sailors and rocket attacks on federal buildings 
with U.S. weapons abandoned in Vietnam and 
acquired by Cuba. One of those rocket attacks targeted FBI offices in San Juan.

Gonzalez then, at least as portrayed on his FBI 
wanted posters, was a robust man approaching 
middle age. Now, at 65, his hair has receded, he 
wears spectacles and looks far thinner in an 
oversize, bright orange prison jumpsuit.

During the past 20 years, the secret membership 
of Los Macheteros has not been tied to any 
violence. Mostly, the group has limited itself to 
radical political commentary delivered to Puerto Rican news organizations.

However, Assistant U.S. Attorney Henry K. Kopel 
argued during the detention hearing Tuesday that 
Gonzalez's past association with the group's 
violent acts should be enough to deny him bond.

He said Gonzalez was tied by his fingerprints to 
two rocket attacks and that FBI agents found 
weapons and military tactical manuals in his home 
after his arrest in Feburary. That is evidence, 
Kopel said, that Gonzalez has not disavowed violence.

Defense lawyer James W. Bergenn argued that the 
FBI would have arrested Gonzalez if it could link him to armed attacks.

What's more, he said, weapons manuals ­ the 
possession of which is not a crime ­ were a small 
part of Gonzalez's home library, which included 
"Faust," books on conflict resolution, Latin 
American geopolitics and a work called "No to Violence."

If Gonzalez is to be judged by his literature, 
perhaps it should be on his copy of the Bible, Bergenn said.

"Before you is St. Avelino," Bergenn argued. "He 
has read the Bible. He believes it. And he acts in accordance with it."

Smith said he did not consider detaining Gonzalez 
because he is a threat to public safety. Rather, 
he said Gonzalez's clandestine life, his "skill" 
and "craft" at hiding, made it impossble to guarantee his presence at a trial.

A trial that re-creates Connecticut's best-known robbery now seems likely.

Contact Edmund H. Mahony at <mailto:emahony at courant.com>emahony at courant.com.

Copyright © 2008, <http://www.courant.com/>The Hartford Courant




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