When foreign criminals commit serious crimes in the United States, and particularly if they are leaders of violent transnational organizations who orchestrate the execution of heinous crimes in the United States, it has long been Justice Department policy to seek the arrest and prosecution of those criminals, including by extradition.
Sometimes our government has to make compromises the carry out this objective. As a young prosecutor in the 1980s, I was part of the Pizza Connection case team that agreed to cap the potential sentence of Gaetano Badalamenti, the head of the Sicilian mafia. Under Italian law, he’d have faced no more than 30 years for the drug trafficking and money laundering conduct we’d charged. To convince Rome to extradite him, we had to accept that as a ceiling even though many of our other defendants faced life sentences if convicted on the same charges. The Justice Department made such deals, though, to make certain that dangerous foreign criminals got significant incarceration sentences for harming Americans. That can’t be ensured unless they are prosecuted in the United States.
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