Ex-Colombian politician who helped DEA in bathroom bribery sting faces deportation

The final chapter has been written in the bizarre case of a former Colombian governor who helped U.S. investigators target a former Colombian anti-corruption chief in a bribery sting that took place in a Miami-Dade mall bathroom.

Alejandro Lyons Muskus, the former governor of Cordoba, was arrested Thursday in Miami and now faces deportation to Colombia. Lyons played a key undercover role for federal agents in their bribery case against Luis Gustavo Moreno Rivera, the former national director of anti-corruption in the Colombian attorney general’s office.

As the main case witness here, Lyons was allowed to stay in Miami by U.S. authorities. But his status changed when Colombian officials sought Lyons’ return to face his own corruption charges there. Lyons is being held by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which declined to comment about his pending deportation.

Moreno was sentenced to four years in U.S. prison in January after admitting he took thousands of dollars in bribes from Lyons, who had been under investigation back home and was seeking insider evidence from the one-time top Colombian official. Moreno, along with a private attorney who assisted him, each pleaded guilty a year ago to a money-laundering conspiracy charge involving a foreign bribery scheme that climaxed at the Dolphin Mall in Sweetwater.

Moreno admitted that he traveled in June 2017 to Miami on an official trip and pocketed thousands of dollars from the ex-Colombian politician, Lyons, who was under investigation by Moreno’s office.

Lyons had left Colombia after he was charged with taking bribes from Colombian contractors during his term as governor of Cordoba between 2012 and 2015. Lyons eventually agreed to give back some of that bribery money — $1.35 million, according to a letter from the Colombian government that was filed in Miami federal court. He still faces a prison term of more than five years.

In Miami, Lyons was recruited as a confidential source by federal agents in 2017. He was not prosecuted in the United States, mainly because he did not commit a crime here — only in Colombia. But exactly how Lyons became involved in the Drug Enforcement Administration’s undercover bribery operation targeting Moreno is murky.

Moreno and the fellow attorney acting as his middleman, Leonardo Luis Pinilla Gomez, met with Lyons in the Miami area in June 2017. They met again in a Dolphin Mall bathroom, where Moreno and Pinilla collected $10,000 in cash stuffed in a large manila envelope from Lyons, according to court records. Moreno kept $7,000; Pinilla, $3,000.

The bribe was in exchange for giving Lyons confidential information about the politician’s corruption probe in Colombia, including the identities of cooperating witnesses who were testifying against him.

While working undercover for the DEA, Lyons recorded conversations with Moreno and Pinilla in which they discussed the anti-corruption official’s authority to control the probe into Lyons’ corruption activity in Colombia.

In exchange, Moreno and Pinilla asked for a bribe payment of 400 million Colombian pesos ($132,000) with an additional $30,000 to be paid before Moreno left Miami for Colombia, according to an indictment.

Moreno’s shakedown of the former Colombian politician led to the high-ranking Colombian official’s arrest in Bogotá in June 2017. Before his extradition to Miami a year later, Moreno pleaded guilty in Colombia to a similar extortion scheme, including testifying about a corrupt Supreme Court justice and other members of the judiciary in that country. Moreno was sentenced to almost five years in prison.

This story was originally published August 2, 2019 at 4:44 PM.