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NEWS
CRIMINAL JUSTICE
FIU couple
heading to jail
A federal judge slammed two former FIU employees with maximum prison
sentences for their roles in an intelligence-gathering network for the
Cuban government.
BY JAY WEAVER
jweaver@MiamiHerald.com
THE MIAMI HERALD
Convicted ex-Florida International University academics Carlos and Elsa
Alvarez apologized Tuesday as a pair of tearful defendants, expressing
regret for a secret life of informing on Miami's exile community for
Cuba.
''Please accept my heartfelt apologies for all the wounds and pain
caused by my actions,'' Carlos Alvarez, 62, said to a packed federal
courtroom in Miami.
''I broke the law,'' said his wife, Elsa, 56. ``I take full
responsibility. I'm very sorry.''
The judge didn't buy any of it.
U.S. District Judge K. Michael Moore slammed Carlos Alvarez with the
maximum five-year prison sentence for conspiring to act as an
unregistered Cuban agent and Elsa Alvarez with the maximum three years'
imprisonment for harboring her husband's illicit intelligence work and
failing to report it to authorities.
The harsh sentences marked the closing chapter to the Alvarezes' life as
once-accomplished Cuban exiles who are now viewed by many as ''spies''
for Cuban leader Fidel Castro.
The case shook Miami's exile community to its foundation because the
couple's targets included their former boss, FIU president Modesto
''Mitch'' Maidique, and other Cuban-American leaders.
The Alvarezes entered guilty pleas to lesser charges in December, when
the U.S. attorney's office agreed to drop allegations that the couple
were unregistered Cuban agents -- offenses that could have carried up to
10 years in prison had they been convicted at trial. On Tuesday,
prosecutors had recommended five years for Carlos Alvarez but only 21
months for Elsa Alvarez.
`FAMILY DEVASTATED'
''The family is absolutely devastated,'' attorney Steven Chaykin, who
represented Carlos Alvarez, told reporters outside the courthouse.
Elsa's lawyer, Jane Moscowitz, said their sentences were ``all too
high.''
The couple's five children, including a 13-year-old, told the judge how
much the family has ''suffered'' since the Alvarezes' arrests early last
year.
In sentencing them, Moore acknowledged the couple's supporters who
testified about their honesty, integrity and spirituality as Catholics,
but he condemned them for breaking federal law with their ``personal
foreign policy.''
''For all these years, they were in a sense leading a double life,''
Moore said, calling their crime a ''deceit and betrayal'' of the exile
community.
He ordered the Alvarezes to surrender on April 27. Carlos Alvarez, a
longtime FIU professor who resigned last year, has been in custody at
the Federal Detention Center in downtown Miami since his arrest in
January 2006. Elsa Alvarez, an FIU counselor on unpaid leave, was in
custody through June, when the judge released her on a $400,000 bond.
During Tuesday's hearing, their attorneys tried to portray them as
sympathetic exile figures who tried to bridge the Cold War chasm between
Cuba and the United States through a dialogue of educational and
cultural exchanges involving the Cuban Intelligence Service.
But the Alvarezes and their lawyers kept insisting the information
passed along to Cuban agents was ''innocuous'' and ''harmless gossip,''
causing ''no harm'' to the United States or the exile community.
''I reached out to people with power or who had access to power,''
Carlos Alvarez said in court Tuesday. ``It would require innocuous
information . . . The method that I used was unfortunately wrong.''
Elsa Alvarez said her husband's goal was to ''help Cubans to become
unified'' on both sides of the Florida Straits. ''I believe Carlos acted
in good faith at all times,'' she added.
TALE OF BETRAYAL
Chaykin said Carlos Alvarez was betrayed by Cuban agents and FBI agents
who coaxed a confession from him during three interviews in 2005. That
was the basis for the indictment against him and his wife.
But prosecutors portrayed the couple's work as ``classic
intelligence-gathering activity.''
''They worked for the directorate of the Cuban Intelligence Services and
provided ``sensitive information on the exile community's leaders,''
said U.S. Attorney R. Alexander Acosta. ``That is far from innocuous.''
At sentencing, prosecutor Matthew Axelrod said Carlos Alvarez began
gathering intelligence for Cuba in 1977 and that Elsa Alvarez became
aware of it in 1982, making some contacts with Cuban agents herself.
He said they both relied on shortwave radios, computers and encrypted
information to correspond with their Cuban intelligence handlers and
also traveled to Cuba and other countries to meet them.
Axelrod noted that Alvarezes' home computer contained files on:
• FIU president Modesto Maidique's personal finances and private
business ventures.
• A ''redacted'' U.S. government study on the ``status of
telecommunications in Cuba.''
• Brothers to the Rescue leader José Basulto, including that ''an
investigation should continue'' into ``the ties he has to the CIA, the
Cuban American [National] Foundation and financial interests such as
Bacardi.''
• A personal contact who had met with Richard Nuccio, then-President
Bill Clinton's special advisor for Cuba, who ''was very depressed'' by
Cuba's shootdown of two Brothers to the Rescue planes killing three
Cuban-American men and a Cuban exile and the subsequent Helms Burton law
toughening the U.S. embargo against Cuba.
• Lula Rodriguez, a Miami-Dade Democrat who later became personal
assistant to then-Attorney General Janet Reno and eventually deputy
assistant secretary of state for public affairs in the Clinton
administration.
ANOTHER REVELATION
Axelrod also revealed that Carlos Alvarez had informed two academic
colleagues, Fordham University professor Orlando Rodriguez and Spaniard
Miguel Escotet.
He had asked both men to write letters of support for leniency.
''He knows he's betrayed them, yet he's calling on them to support
him,'' Axelrod said, adding that such a betrayal was ``astounding.''
A moment later, Chaykin questioned Rodriguez in the courtroom, asking
him if he wanted to withdraw his supportive letter as well his live
statement to the court. ''Nothing at all,'' Rodriguez said.
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