- Faces 20 years in US prison
Fugitive Senator Buruji Kashamu’s latest efforts to defeat the U.S. government’s attempts to bring him from Lagos to face justice in a Chicago courtroom were defeated late Monday, when the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower court’s decision to toss out his lawsuit against the American government.
Kashamu, indicted in a heroin case alongside money launderer turned “Orange Is the New Black” writer Piper Kerman in 1998, sued the Department of Justice in 2015. He hoped to convince a judge to stop U.S. law enforcement from what he alleged was an imminent plan to team up with his political rivals and “abduct” him in Nigeria.
This newspaper gathered that U.S Drug Enforcement Administration agents teamed up with the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency, NDLEA, to lay siege on his Lagos home for six days in a 2015 abduction attempt, before a court ordered them to leave.
U.S. Appellate Court Judge Richard Posner on Monday wrote that nothing in the law prevents U.S. agents from “being present when foreign officers are effecting an arrest or from assisting foreign officers who are effecting an arrest.”
Kashamu, who is the basis for the character Kubra Balik in the Netflix show, has always insisted that U.S. prosecutors confused him with his dead brother.
He previously beat attempts to extradite him from Britain.
The Ogun state senator faces up to 20 years in U.S prison.
According to reports in Chicago, given the glacial progress of the case and endemic corruption in Nigeria, it’s hard to foresee that Kashamu will be in the U.S. before the fifth, sixth and seventh seasons of “Orange Is the New Black” announced last year are released — if he ever comes.
A previous request to extradite him from Britain failed in 2003. Kashamu spent five years in a British jail before he was freed over uncertainty about his identity. He was carrying $230,000 when he was arrested there.
A dozen people long ago pleaded guilty in the case including American Piper Kerman, whose memoir was adapted for the Netflix hit “Orange Is The New Black.”
Kerman’s book never identified Kashamu by name, only citing a West African drug kingpin.
The battle to arrest Kashamu caused a stir in 2015 as Former President Olusegun Obasanjo chastised Jonathan for his perceived protection of Kashamu and warned that “drug barons … will buy candidates, parties and eventually buy power or be in power themselves.”
Kashamu has said that Obasanjo did not call him a drug baron when they were allies and while he spent some $20 million ensuring their party’s success at 2011 elections.