When we last checked in with pizzeria owner and former marijuana smuggler David Mendoza, he was stuck in prison in Fort Dix, New Jersey, trying to get transferred to a prison in Spain. That was in April of 2014, roughly five years after he’d been arrested in Guernica, extradited to the US, and sentenced in Seattle—and he wasn’t having much luck.
Even though Mendoza has dual US and Spanish citizenship, and even though Spanish courts had authorized his extradition back in 2008 with an explicit condition that he serve his sentence in Spain, the Department of Justice seemed immovable.
“The extradition treaty between the US and Spain does not allow Spain to demand or decide where a defendant serves his imprisonment,” a spokesperson for then-US Attorney Jenny Durkan wrote in an email at the time.
But Mendoza—and, more importantly, Spanish courts—didn’t share that opinion.
Mendoza says he wants to serve his time in Spain both for his family’s sake (he has two children, one with Down syndrome, and Spanish prisons tend to put much more emphasis on keeping prisoners connected with their families, including longer and more frequent visits) and his own (he hopes Spanish judges will shave some time off his 14-year sentence). Once Mendoza touched US soil, however, the federal government seemed intent on keeping him.
But now, after a series diplomatic moves and Spanish court rulings, the DOJ has finally approved his transfer to Spain. It was his third.
Correlation is not causation, as people at dinner parties and in internet comments threads never tire of pointing out. We don’t know whether the actions of Spanish courts and diplomats had anything to do with the DOJ’s decision—and even if they did, the DOJ would never admit it. (A department spokesperson categorically declined to comment on Mendoza’s case, writing in a recent email: “We are not able to discuss publicly specific matters involving the international transfer of prisoners.”)
But the timing is interesting for two reasons.
First: Just before the DOJ’s decision, the Spanish Supreme Court excoriated Spain’s executive branch—for the second time—regarding what it described as “inactivity” in the matter and failure to “carry out diplomatic, coercive, and legal actions, whichever may be necessary” to return Mendoza to Spain.
“This could have been resolved a long time ago if the Spanish executive would have exhausted the remedies available to them,” Gómez-Jara Díez, a law professor in Madrid and one of Mendoza’s former lawyers, wrote in an email. “The key issue here is politics: Spain did not want to take a strong position against the US. They did as little as they could. The Spanish Supreme Court decision deals precisely with that.” (A few weeks ago, the Spanish Supreme Court accused the executive branch of “damaging” Mendoza’s rights by being so sluggish—which may indicate that Mendoza has grounds for a lawsuit.)
Second: The US has been trying to convince the Spanish government to extradite some bigger-fish suspects, including former JP Morgan Chase banker Javier Martín-Artajo, who is wanted in the $6.2 billion “London Whale” trading scandal. Mendoza’s lawyers said the US’s refusal to return Mendoza was being used in the legal strategies of those cases. (Spain recently declined to extradite Martín-Artajo.)
Mendoza’s story is complicated, and you can read much more about it here. I doubt either party would characterize it this way, but it boils down to (1) a clever smuggler and the formidable legal brains at the DOJ trying to outfox each other and (2) an internal Spanish squabble between the courts, which wanted their original extradition conditions honored, and the Spanish executive branch, which was reluctant to push the US on the subject.
To summarize the original story: Mendoza grew up in Seattle but spent chunks of his childhood with family in Spain. By the early aughts, he owned Pazzo’s pizzeria and was managing an international marijuana-smuggling consortium that shipped pot from Canada to Washington via helicopter, dropping its caches in remote Washington forestland. In 2006, he realized the feds were onto him when a US mail truck rear-ended his car, dislodging a GPS device. Mendoza fled to Spain and got his citizenship.
A month later, he was arrested by Spanish authorities at the request of the US and began to fight his extradition.
That fight ended when Mendoza and his attorneys thought they’d reached a deal whereby he would stand trial in the US but serve his sentence in Spain.
The deal hinged on a single piece of paper, the acta de entrega—or “deed of surrender”—Mendoza signed, along with representatives from the US and Spanish governments, on April 30, 2009, at an airport in Madrid. (Mendoza recalls the US official being reluctant to sign the document, but she eventually did.)
Mendoza and his attorneys see that as a binding agreement—particularly the part about “in accordance with what was previously stipulated by Section Two of the National Criminal Court,” which had insisted on the condition of Mendoza’s return to Spain after his trial.
The Department of Justice disagreed. “The ‘Deed of Surrender’ …is not an agreement between the United States and Spain,” Assistant US Attorney David R. East wrote in an October court motion to dismiss a lawsuit Mendoza had filed agains the US government. “It is akin to a receipt showing that United States law enforcement received a prisoner… and does not give [Mendoza] a right of action to enforce any aspect of Spain’s decision to extradite him.”
British attorney Ben Cooper, another one of Mendoza’s lawyers, said the US has recently earned an international “no deals, no discussions” reputation in extradition disputes. He characterized the Mendoza situation as “Americans on the international stage before a sovereign court making promises in bad faith. They won’t be trusted again. They’re undermining their own credibility in a dangerous way… They have a big responsibility to get this case right for everybody else. If they’re interested in the return of truly dangerous criminals, they’ve got to play straight.”
For whatever reason—diplomatic pressure, a change of heart, plain exhaustion with the whole issue—the US has decided to send Mendoza back.
Given their past experience with the DOJ, however, Mendoza’s lawyers are cautious. “Great news,” Gómez-Jara wrote when he heard Mendoza’s transfer had been approved. “But when I see it, I’ll be a true believer.”
Mendoza says he’ll be happy to leave but sorry to leave some “good people” at Fort Dix behind: Calvin Treiber from Billings, Montana, serving a 30-year marijuana sentence; Autry Lee “Sweets” Jones, who is serving serving two life sentences for conspiracy to distribute crack cocaine; and a Jamaican named “Birdie” who, Mendoza wrote in an email, was “convicted to 20 years in prison for an amount of marijuana that most Seattle marijuana dispensaries will sell on a weekend.”
