A federal judge has ordered a cocaine trafficker accused of running drugs from Colombia and Mexico to the United States and Europe for more than 20 years to remain in D.C.’s jail despite efforts by his attorneys to have him released for medical reasons.
Gregory Joel Sitzmann was indicted on drug trafficking charges in August 2008. At the time, he was transferred to D.C. from a French jail. In 2004, he was convicted of trying to carry 18 pounds of cocaine from France to Italy. The drugs were hidden in leather cases and an altered compartment in his car’s gas tank. According to prosecutors, that was a smuggling method employed by Sitzmann and his co-conspirators as they carried cocaine and cash around the world.
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Sitzmann’s record of drug smuggling goes back to the mid-1980s, court records show. In May 1985 he was arrested by police in the Bahamas when he stepped out of a twin engine Cessna that was loaded with 360 pounds of cocaine.
He was convicted of drug trafficking in the Bahamas in July 1985, only to escape prison in August 1986, court documents said. Later that year, prosecutors say he arranged for two co-conspirators to fly from the U.S. to Colombia to pick up 750 pounds of cocaine that would eventually be smuggled into the U.S. But the plane crashed off Colombia’s coast. Before Sitzmann could get the scheme off the ground again, he was arrested in Florida in March 1987.
He eventually served out his sentence in the Bahamas and was released in 1994, court documents said. By 1997 Sitzmann was driving across the U.S. borders with Mexico and Canada in a truck with an altered gas tank that could conceal drugs and cash, prosecutors said. In 2002, two of his co-conspirators were arrested in Bogota as they tried to smuggle 18 pounds of cocaine from Colombia to Spain.
Sitzmann’s attorneys argued that he should be allowed out on bail so he could receive proper care for an injured shoulder. His lack of passport will keep him from running, they said.
But, prosecutors countered, Sitzmann has millions of dollars stashed away in foreign bank accounts and contacts around the world who would help him hide.
“The defendant’s claim that he is not a flight risk is ludicrous,” prosecutors wrote. The judge agreed.
