Florida man sentenced for smuggling LA Dodgers' Yasiel Puig out of Cuba

[Eugene]

Source: Associated Press

Florida man sentenced for smuggling LA Dodgers' Yasiel Puig out of Cuba

Associated Press in Miami
Friday 6 March 2015 16.06 GMT

A south Florida businessman has been sentenced to a month in prison plus five months’ house arrest for his role in smuggling Los Angeles Dodgers star Yasiel Puig out of Cuba.

US district judge Robert Scola on Friday gave Gilberto Suarez less than the one-year maximum sentence, partly because his smuggling role was limited to getting Puig to the Mexico-Texas border in 2012.

Suarez was one of the Miami-based financiers of the venture, in which Puig was taken by boat from Cuba to Mexico. The financiers were to receive a cut of the seven-year, $42m contract Puig later signed with the Dodgers.

Court documents show Suarez got $2.5m from Puig’s contract, but he has now agreed to forfeit a house, a condominium and a Mercedes-Benz.

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/mar/06/florida-gilberto-suarez-sentenced-smuggling-dodgers-yasiel-puig-cuba

[Judi Lynn]

1. Awwww, poor Gilberto Suarez. What will he do without his house, condominium and Mercedes-Benz?

Getting Cuban baseball stars to the US has been a big time money maker for sleazy entrepreneurs like Joe Cubas, who was thrown out of association with baseball for his sleazy exploitation of unsuspecting players.

Baseball Smuggling Case Features Fastballs, Fast Boats
Fri Apr 06, 2007

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The Sporting News reports that Juan Ignacio Hernandez Nodar, a cousin and onetime partner to controversial sports agent Joe Cubas, was sentenced to 15 years in a Cuban prison when he was caught trying to help players defect.

It can be an unforgiving business.

Cubas was suspended from representing Major League Baseball players after an incident in the Dominican Republic with former New York Mets pitcher Alay Soler.

Soler partnered with Cubas in an attempt to defect from Cuba by coming into the United States via the Dominican Republic in 2004, according to the New York Daily News. When Soler got to the Dominican Republic, Cubas tried to get him to sign a contract that would give Cubas 15 percent of the player's contract exorbitantly higher than the more standard 5 percent agent fee.

When Soler balked, Cubas reportedly withheld his passport, severely complicating the player's attempts to get a U.S. visa. Soler eventually made it to Shea Stadium, but was dropped from the team last month.

More:
http://www.hightimes.com/read/baseball-smuggling-case-features-fastballs-fast-boats

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04.18.14

MLB’s Next Headache: Cartels, Gangsters, and Their Cuban Superstars

Peter C. Bjarkman

The baseball world has been stunned by reports the Dodgers’ Yasiel Puig was smuggled from his homeland by a drug cartel, and a Miami gangster allegedly now owns 20% of his astronomical contract.

~ snip ~

..... By the early ‘90s, Cuban players were beginning to “defect” in mere trickles from a Cuban system that for many decades had produced dominant squads on the international amateur baseball tournament scene, yet didn’t allow its loftiest stars to abandon the homeland for the free-agent riches offered by North American professional leagues. Early escapees from the island nation’s hidden communist baseball scene were promptly and perhaps inaccurately labeled by a North American press as “defectors” because they could only reach U.S. shores and thus big-league ballparks by sneaking off under the most mysterious circumstances, abandoning the system and government that had nurtured and trained them, and tossing away any immediate hopes of revisiting families, friends, and possessions left behind on native soil.

The very term “defector” was probably always misplaced, although from the beginning it seemed irresistible to a North American press corps enamored of the idea of political overtones buried in every Cuba-related story. Here were abused hero-athletes striking a blow at an oppressive Castro dictatorship at one of its proudest and most vulnerable corners. Baseball “defector” was a popular line that played well for most communist-hating Americans, especially those residing in South Florida. Nonetheless a “defector” is properly defined as someone “disowning allegiance to his/her own country,” and former Cuban stars turned big-leaguers repeatedly denied that label by often speaking proudly of their Cuban identity and ironically praising the baseball system back home that had fostered and trained them.

Like any other craftsman or artisan, the Cuban ballplayer making his way north is only trying to turn unique skills to full profit, and perhaps also test himself against the highest competition level his sport has to offer. The reasons for flight from the peso-poor Cuban League to the dollar-rich big leagues have always been indisputably economic—never political in nature. In some senses, those ballplayers might be better compared to Mexican farm laborers or Canadian autoworkers who cross borders into Texas or Michigan in search of elevated salaries and better opportunities to sustain struggling families back home. Only an increasingly absurd six-decade Cold War defining U.S.-Cuba relations renders their cases so much more complex. And of course both risks and potential rewards are stratospherically higher when it comes to multimillion-dollar athletes. In the light of this week’s stunning revelations about Yasiel Puig, we are now suddenly finding out just how much higher.

The first glimpse of a hidden backstory came some 15-plus years ago with the unfolding saga of Orlando “El Duque” Hernandez, a star Havana pitcher who had been suddenly suspended from league play and from his national team slot when half-brother Liván “defected” to join the Florida Marlins and emerged as a 1997 postseason MVP sensation. Orlando’s own flight took place in late 1997, and once the big right-hander turned up with the New York Yankees he did little to discredit the glamorous fictions swirling through the media about breathtaking ordeals on a flimsy wooden raft trapped in shark-infested Caribbean waters. But the inspired tale that almost earned El Duque a top-dollar Hollywood film deal alongside his fat Yankees contract turned out to be something other than first reported. Jon Wertheim and Don Yaeger—an intrepid pair of Sports Illustrated investigative journalists—eventually exposed a far-different escape scenario that found Castro-hating Miami-based sports agent Joe Cubas spiriting away his prize prospect (and potential meal ticket) with the aid of Florida-funded lancheros (skilled smugglers equipped with a high-speed powerboat bound for the Bahamas). The smuggling game was already on.

More:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/04/18/mlb-s-next-headache-cartels-gangsters-and-their-cuban-superstars.html

On edit:

My emphasis.