Colombian drug lord gets 11 years prison in New Jersey

By Jonathan Stempel (Reuters) - A septuagenarian Colombian drug lord who has admitted to conspiring to traffic cocaine sold in the United States was ordered on Wednesday to spend 11 years in a U.S. prison, federal prosecutors in New Jersey said. Salomon Camacho Mora, 71, was sentenced by U.S. District Judge William Walls in Newark, New Jersey, 15 months after pleading guilty. The defendant was also ordered to forfeit $1.6 million and eight Colombian properties. A lawyer for Camacho did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Known to associates as "Papa Grande," meaning Big Daddy, and "El Viejo," meaning Old Man, Camacho was originally indicted in 2002 but remained a fugitive until he was captured in Venezuela in January 2010. The U.S. Department of State has said Camacho was responsible for the shipping of as much as nine metric tons (10 tons) of cocaine to the United States in 1999 and 2000 alone. The State Department once offered a $5 million reward for information leading to his arrest, a sum typically reserved for major traffickers or senior cartel leaders. In his guilty plea, Camacho admitted to buying multi-kilogram quantities of cocaine from processing labs in Colombia, and arranging for their transport through Venezuela for later sale in the United States, Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, prosecutors said. Camacho had worked with multiple cartels, as well as with the late drug lord Pablo Escobar, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration has said. The case is U.S. v. Camacho Mora, U.S. District Court, District of New Jersey, No. 02-cr-00714. (Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; Editing by Tom Brown)