By Celia Ampel, From Daily Business Review

Coral Gables attorney Eduardo Palmer won an unusual ruling for a client facing extradition to Italy on nearly 20-year-old charges.

Orlando pizza maker Giovanni Ferriolo was freed Sept. 2 after five months in jail on drug-trafficking charges. A federal magistrate dismissed the extradition request with prejudice, finding Italy’s documents were not properly translated and the government failed to prove conversational references to “sweets,” “nougat” and “restaurant furniture” referred to cocaine.

Palmer said it’s “exceedingly rare” to win an extradition case and even rarer for a judge to permanently dismiss the government’s complaint.

“That is truly astounding,” he said. “I have never seen that before, and my limited research this week on that issue has failed to uncover any reported decision in the history of the U.S. where an international extradition complaint has been dismissed with prejudice.”

Ferriolo made two or three trips a year from Italy to New York in the early 1990s before moving to the U.S. in 1994. The restaurant owner said he was making the trips to visit his son, but the Italian government contended he was trafficking cocaine from the U.S. to Italy.

Ferriolo hired a defense lawyer but did not attend his trial in Italy, where he was convicted in absentia in 1998 of criminal association and international drug trafficking. He was sentenced to 17 years in prison.

A final judgment was issued in 2001, an arrest warrant was issued in 2012, and the extradition request was filed in November 2013.

The defendant argued the complaint should be dismissed because it did not include all the relevant statutes in both Italian and English and failed to show probable cause. Palmer also claimed the government violated Ferriolo’s right to due process by waiting nearly 20 years to extradite him.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Thomas B. Smith in Orlando found that the extradition request did not fulfill the requirements of the law, as parts of the documents were missing. An extradition package comes with ribbons and seals, which are part of the requirements under the authentication statute.

An assistant U.S. attorney tried to mend the problem by providing Google translations of the missing parts of the Italian statutes, but the judge ruled that wasn’t enough since it wasn’t an option under the extradition treaty.

“Very unorthodox but creative, worth a shot,” Palmer said. “I applaud him for resourcefulness and creativity, but we had to object to the admission of that because it did not meet the evidentiary requirements” of the U.S. code section governing the authentication of extradition papers.

For the parts of the law that were presented in full, Smith found the facts were insufficient to establish probable cause.

The Italian government tapped the phone calls of suspected drug dealers, who talked about Ferriolo’s trips to New York to get “sweets” or “nougat” and plans to meet with him to discuss “restaurant furniture.”

Prosecutors did not present adequate proof that those phrases referred to cocaine, Smith found.

The judge decided not to rule on the due process claim but decided Ferriolo made no attempt to hide from the Italian government during his two decades running an Orlando pizza restaurant. He was released from custody immediately after the ruling.

“It’s one of those moments that makes being a lawyer very special,” said Palmer, who was assisted by associate Omar Ibrahem. “When you can give a client his freedom, it’s the closest thing to a doctor curing a patient of what was thought to be a terminal illness and giving him his life back.”

Assistant U.S. Attorney Shawn P. Napier in Orlando, who handled the case for the U.S. government, did not respond to a request for comment by deadline.

IMAGE: Eduardo Palmer, of Eduardo Palmer P.A. AM Holt

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