Cuban players: We paid thousands for journey to US baseball
MIAMI — Two Cuban baseball players told a federal jury Tuesday that they paid tens of thousands of dollars from signing bonuses with Major League Baseball teams to a smuggling network that prosecutors say was overseen by a Florida sports agent and his trainer associate.
The players, Jorge Padron and Reinier Roibal, described how they were spirited off the communist-run island on speedboats bound for Cancun, Mexico, where they trained while awaiting documents necessary to go to the U.S. to sign lucrative free-agent contracts.
They told jurors about payments the smugglers made to a Mexican criminal organization, which prosecutors have identified as the Zetas drug cartel, and the violent disappearance of one of the smuggling ring’s leaders, Joan (YO-ahn) “Nacho” Garcia. The testimony came in the trial of agent Bartolo Hernandez and trainer Julio Estrada, who face lengthy prison sentences if convicted of conspiracy and alien- smuggling charges.
Roibal is a pitcher who signed with the San Francisco Giants for $425,000 in 2010 but is now with the Los Angeles Dodgers. He said Garcia met him in Cancun in late 2009 and took him to meet with Hernandez. In Cuba, he was making about $20 a month playing baseball.