Will Isern

wisern@pnj.com

A Royal Spanish Navy training vessel, which has been welcomed to Pensacola twice in recent years, was used to traffic cocaine and heroin from Colombia to New York City, according to New York prosecutors.

Bridget Brennan, special narcotics prosecutor for the city of New York, announced the arrests late last month of two Colombian drug traffickers that, in 2014, bribed midshipmen aboard the Juan Sebastian de Elcano to traffic drugs to New York City.

The Elcano made stops in Pensacola in May 2015 and in 2009.

Pensacola’s honorary Spanish Vice Consul Maria Davis said that the drug trafficking scandal had been a black eye for the Spanish Navy, but that the wrongdoers had been caught and the incident is well in the past.

“I’m sorry to say it did happen. I know the Spanish Navy was very upset,” Davis said. “But that was two years ago, and they caught them, and now they’re working together with the U.S.”

There’s no direct evidence the Elcano had drugs on board while in Pensacola in 2009, but Spanish midshipmen aboard the Elcano told Spanish authorities that drug trafficking and drug use were frequent on the training ship.

“From the moment we started training, everybody knew that the Elcano was used for trafficking drugs,” another crew member, Jose Cascallar, told the Spanish news outlet El Pais.

According to the New York prosecutor, Colombian traffickers Jorge Luis Hoayeck and Jorge Alberto Siado-Alvarez bribed midshipmen $32,000 to conceal 4 kilograms each of heroin and cocaine on board and deliver them to distributors in the Bronx, New York City between April and May 2014.

The midshipmen received the drugs while docked in Cartagena, Colombia, in April 2014, and delivered them to New York traffickers in May. Drug Enforcement Agency special agents and New York police tracked and seized the shipment and the New York traffickers in Hartford, Conn., days after the Elcano’s departure from New York.

When the Elcano returned to Spain later that summer, Spanish authorities discovered 127 kilograms of cocaine worth $2.5 million stashed in a storeroom for reserve sails.

The Colombians were arrested late last month as part of a wiretap investigation and will be extradited to New York to face charges that could carry a life sentence. The two midshipmen cited in the New York case, Francisco Martinez and Manuel Fontoa, spent a year in jail upon their return to Spain, but were released on bail last month.