Manuel Felipe Salazar-Espinosa smuggled tons of cocaine into the U.S. and laundered tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars in drug proceeds, U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan said. Salazar-Espinosa was ordered to forfeit $50 million.
Salazar-Espinosa, 58, could have faced life in prison, Kaplan said, but U.S. prosecutors honored Colombia's request not to seek the maximum sentence. Prosecutors requested a term of 40 to 60 years.
The judge said it was difficult to sympathize with Salazar-Espinosa, who was raised in an upper-middle-class family, attended college and then chose drug dealing as “an economic proposition, a way to make even more money, vast amounts of money.”
Salazar-Espinosa was convicted last year of drug importation conspiracy, cocaine distribution and money laundering conspiracy charges. 
At his trial, Salazar-Espinosa admitted through his lawyer that he was a drug dealer but said there was no evidence that the drugs were meant to go to the United States. Before he was sentenced, Salazar-Espinosa was defiant, asking “for what is fair” and reiterating his claim he hadn't broken U.S. laws.
Salazar-Espinosa was arrested in May 2005 after he helped hide 1.3 tons of cocaine in the arm of a crane being shipped from Panama to Mexico. Authorities said they found the drugs in about 1,300 bags in the crane in a warehouse outside Panama City two months after his arrest.
Prosecutors said much of the 5,000 kilograms – or 11,000 pounds – of cocaine that they believed Salazar-Espinosa shipped from Colombia to the U.S. ended up in New York. The drugs were worth more than $100 million, they said.
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