Three of Colombia's cocaine kingpins -- the Rodriguez Orejuela brothers and Diego Montoya Sanchez -- were extradited to Miami, pleaded guilty to trafficking charges and paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees to their private attorneys.

When drug lord Fabio Ochoa was brought to Miami, he elected to fight, paying more than $5 million to his defense team. He was convicted at trial.

Even though all four longtime narcotraffickers paid their counsel, the Justice Department singled out Ochoa's case for tougher treatment. The prosecution of Miami attorney Ben Kuehne, charged with laundering drug profits used for Ochoa's fees, symbolizes the legal struggle between a defendant's right to a lawyer and the U.S. government's power to limit it.

The closely watched case against the prominent attorney -- likely to go to trial next year -- challenges a federal law that allows defense lawyers to accept tainted money from their clients without being prosecuted themselves.

``This is the Scopes Monkey trial of money laundering cases,'' said former federal prosecutor Joseph DeMaria, referring to the historic 1925 test case in Tennessee over the teaching of evolution in school.

``If the government wins a conviction against somebody like Ben Kuehne, it will send the defense bar into a deep freeze,'' said DeMaria, who has represented several white-collar defendants in civil forfeiture cases. ``This isn't just about drug dealing; it affects the entire spectrum of law enforcement.''

Last year, Kuehne was charged with conspiring to launder Ochoa's money with an accountant and a lawyer from Colombia. They are accused of falsely asserting that Ochoa, the one-time Medellín cartel boss, used legitimate funds to pay his defense attorney, Roy Black.

`DIRTY ASSETS'

Black, who had hired Kuehne to scrutinize Ochoa's assets, was not charged because Kuehne advised him that the defendant's payments were legitimate. To vet the fees, Black paid about $200,000 to Kuehne, one of Al Gore's lawyers in the 2000 presidential election dispute.

In the drug case, Kuehne asserted the legal fees came from Ochoa's sale of prized Pasofino horses, cattle and other property that had been in his family before he got into narcotrafficking. But prosecutors countered that Ochoa's assets were dirty, Kuehne knew it and that the lawyer used the tainted ``black market peso exchange'' to convert Ochoa's pesos to U.S. dollars.

Last December, U.S. District Judge Marcia Cooke found that the 1988 money-laundering statute allowed payment of attorney's fees, knocking out the government's main charge against Kuehne. Cooke ruled the ability for a defendant to pay those fees is central to the constitutional right to counsel.

SENDING A MESSAGE

Last week, a federal appeals court seemed to share Cooke's view. Appellate Judge Rosemary Barkett suggested that the Justice Department was overreaching in its case against Kuehne.

Justice Department appellate lawyer Vijay Shanker disagreed. He argued that a 1989 U.S. Supreme Court ruling allows the government to confiscate not only an attorney's tainted legal fees, but also bring criminal charges if the lawyer knows the payments are from drug proceeds. ``You're entitled to a lawyer under certain parameters,'' Shanker said.

The last and only time the government tested the money-laundering statute as it relates to lawyers was a decade ago. Former Miami attorney Donald Ferguson -- accused of accepting drug money from Miami trafficker Sal Magluta to represent his friend in a murder case -- pleaded guilty. Ferguson's Miami attorney, Neal Sonnett, said the government has not stopped pressuring defense lawyers who represent narcotraffickers, especially if they go to trial. ``I think they feel emboldened here [in Kuehne's prosecution] because it was a high-profile case with very substantial fees and it was one step removed from the lawyer who received the payments,'' Sonnett said. ``I think they are trying to send a message to the criminal defense bar to stay away from these big drug cases.''