Ex-Federal Officials Named In Cocaine Plot Indictment

In what officials said was a striking demonstration of the corrupting influence of drugs on the legal system, a former senior Justice Department official who once led efforts to extradite leaders of the Cali cocaine cartel in Colombia was indicted Monday on charges of helping the cartel in a criminal conspiracy.

Michael Abbell, who was one of 62 people accused in a Miami indictment of participating in a cocainesmuggling conspiracy, was a section chief in the Justice Department’s criminal division during the Reagan administration’s war on drugs in the early 1980s. Five other lawyers, including two other former Justice Department officials, were named in the indictment.

Kendall B. Coffey, the U.S. attorney for southern Florida, called the case “the single most significant prosecution in history against the Cali cartel,” which he said had been responsible for 80 percent of the cocaine imported to the United States since 1984.

Coffey said Abbell and the other lawyers named in the indictment were part of a “network of protection the cartel had engineered.” Two of the lawyers who were charged on Monday, Joel Rosenthal and Donald Ferguson, are former federal prosecutors in Florida.