NEW YORK TIMES
Wednesday, 3 November 1999
 

Prosecuters Say Colonel's Wife Sent Heroin From Colombia

An American Army colonel's wife who has charged with mailing illegal drugs from the United States Embassy in Colombia to New York City smuggled heroin, and not, as originally thought, cocaine, according to Federal prosecutors.

The woman, Laurie Ann Hiett, is at the center of a highly sensitive case during efforts by the United States and Colombia to combat drug trafficking from that country. She was charged in August with mailing six packages from the embassy earlier this year that Federal authorities at first said contained a total of nearly 16 pounds of pure cocaine.

Mrs. Hiett, who admitted sending the packages but insisted that she did not know their contents, is the wife of Col. James C. Hiett, who at the time was in charge of United States military operations in Colombia. The colonel has left that post because of the accusations against his wife, but Army investigators have said they found no evidence that he was involved in the alleged drug trafficking.

In a letter that a Federal prosecutor in Brooklyn sent recently to Mrs. Hiett's lawyer and that became public yesterday, the Government said that while initial field tests showed that the drug in two of the packages was cocaine, more thorough laboratory tests showed it was heroin.

Those two packages were the only ones of the six that law enforcement agents intercepted, but the United States attorney's office in Brooklyn, which is prosecuting the case, has charged that all six packages contained the same drug.

If the content of the packages, which Mrs. Hiett is accused of mailing to co-conspirators in New York, was heroin, Mrs. Hiett would face a somewhat longer prison term if tried and convicted-as much as 12 to 15 years-than the 10 to 12 for cocaine trafficking. That is because the value of heroin is considerably higher than that of cocaine, and the value is one factor in sentencing.

At the time the drugs were sent, according to the original prosecution papers in the case, the total quantity of what was then deemed cocaine had a wholesale value of about $180,000. The wholesale value of heroin is about five times as much, experts said yesterday.

Mrs. Hiett's lawyer, Paul D. Lazarus, of Miami, said yesterday that the discovery that the drug was heroin rather than cocaine did not affect his client's position of not knowingly sending drugs. Investigators say that Mrs. Hiett, 36, told them she had been unaware of the true contents of the packages, which she said she had mailed at the behest of her husband's chauffeur, Jorge Alfonso Ayala, a Colombian national. He has also been charged in the case and is a fugitive.

In a letter to Mr. Lazarus dated Oct. 21, Lee G. Dunst, an assistant United States attorney in Brooklyn who is prosecuting the case, said the fact that the contents were heroin rather than cocaine did not affect the pending federal charges because the laws "only require that a defendant be aware that she possesses some controlled substance and that she need not know the exact nature." 
 

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