Puerto Rico Nationalist, Long A Fugitive, Faces Sentence For 1983 Wells Fargo Robbery
Nov 13, 2012 (Menafn - The Hartford Courant - McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via COMTEX) --Norberto Gonzalez-Claudio, a leader in the underground movement for Puerto Rican independence, faces a five-year prison sentence Wednesday for planning a notorious, 7 million armored car robbery in West Hartford and eluding authorities for nearly three decades.
When the FBI captured Gonzalez in Puerto Rico last year, he was one of two fugitive members of the militant group Los Macheteros still wanted for the 1983 Wells Fargo robbery. The other, Victor Gerena of Hartford, remains at large.
The Wells Fargo robbery, once the largest cash robbery in U.S. history, is one of a string of violent acts attributed to Los Macheteros in the 1970s and 80s. The clandestine group, long a target of the FBI, claims to be fighting a war for the independence of Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory referred to as a Commonwealth.
A succession of popular votes in Puerto Rico on the island's political status shows that more than 90 percent of voters are roughly split between remaining a territory and trying to become a state, while fewer than five percent support independence.
Documents seized from Los Macheteros by the FBI in the mid-1980s show that Gonzalez, 66, was an influential member of the leadership committees that set policy and planned operations for the organization in the months before and after the robbery.
The records reflect the recruitment of Gerena as the inside man in the robbery and how the organization later modified motor homes to smuggle Gerena and the money to Mexico and, ultimately, to Cuba. The government of Cuba, which provided money, training and weapons to Los Macheteros in the 1970s and 1980s, kept about half the money and provided refuge to Gerena, according to Cuban sources and material collected by the FBI.
Federal prosecutors are expected to ask Senior U.S. District Judge Alfred Covello to impose the five-year sentence it has negotiated with Gonzalez, saying the sentence is comparable to those imposed on others previously convicted of planning the robbery. Prosecutors also said it would have been difficult to try a case that has lain dormant for 29 years.
Gonzalez has pleaded guilty to federal charges related to a conspiracy to steal the money and smuggle it out of the country. He pleaded guilty as well to illegal possession of a machine gun.
The FBI discovered the weapon during a search of Gonzalez's home at the time of his capture in the central Puerto Rico town of Cayey on May 10, 2011. With the machine gun were two revolvers, a variety of ammunition, two bullet-proof vests, a bomb-making manual and documents entitled "Our military strategy and tactics"; "military preparedness," "recruitment policy," and "communications security."
In a sentencing memo filed in court, federal prosecutors said they would have argued, had the case gone to trial, that Gonzalez helped plan, but not carry out, the Wells Fargo robbery. The prosecutors said a typewriter ribbon seized during an unsuccessful effort to arrest Gonzalez in 1985 shows that he was responsible for the series of press communiques in which the group claimed credit of the robbery.
The prosecution memo lists other attacks the FBI attributes to Los Macheteros, including an armed assault on a U.S. Navy bus in Puerto Rico that killed two sailors and wounded ten, a bombing of nine National Guard airplanes at an airport in Puerto Rico, and separate rocket attacks on federal courthouses in Puerto Rico.
Military investigators determined that one of the courthouse attacks was carried out with a weapon abandoned by the U.S. in Vietnam and provided to Los Macheteros by Cuba.
Supporters of Gonzalez and of an independent Puerto Rico, were planning a protest Wednesday at the federal building in the Hato Rey district of San Juan to coincide with his sentencing in Hartford. In a press release, the supports asserted that the U.S. "pursues, imprisons, tortures and kills" those who, like Gonzalez, fight for an independent Puerto Rico.
Gonzales has been imprisoned without bail since his arrest. His attorney could not be reached.
Federal prosecutors asked Covello to require Gonzalez to submit to five years of court supervision upon his release from prison in an effort to prevent him from becoming active again in the violent wing of the independence movement.
"To be clear, the government does not regard the defendant as likely to engage in armed robbery or other violent crimes, given his advanced age," the prosecutors said in a written sentencing argument. "Los Macheteros not only remains active in Puerto Rico, but continues to issue communiques calling for armed struggle against the commonwealth of Puerto Rico and the federal government. Continued association with Los Macheteros therefore presents an ongoing public safety concern."
The government believes that there were 19 participants in the Wells Fargo conspiracy. Only Gerena has not been apprehended.
___ (c)2012 The Hartford Courant (Hartford, Conn.) Visit The Hartford Courant
(Hartford, Conn.) at www.courant.com Distributed by MCT Information Services
Copyright (C) 2012, The Hartford Courant
