There had been testimony about Colombian terrorists, drug shipment flights from South America to West Africa and a government sting that featured the covert participation of the Liberian president’s son.
If that was not enough, the jurors in Courtroom 14B of Federal District Court in Manhattan also had to consider a novel legal defenseused by three of the four defendants, whose lawyers acknowledged that their clients were part of the global drug trade but said they were not part of any plot that involved sending cocaine to the United States — the element of the conspiracy that would violate American law.
On Thursday, the third day of deliberations, the jurors returned a split verdict. They convicted two defendants of conspiring to distribute cocaine from a base inLiberia but acquitted two others of the same crime.
The men found guilty were Chigbo Peter Umeh, a Nigerian whom prosecutors described as a broker specializing in shipping narcotics; and a Russian pilot, Konstantin Yaroshenko, who the government said had planned to fly cocaine to Liberia and Ghana from South America knowing that some of it would end up in the United States.
The two who were acquitted, Nathaniel French and Kudufia Mawuko, both Ghanaians, had been described by prosecutors as providing Mr. Umeh with logistical support for the scheme, which was never carried out.
Evidence was provided by an undercover informant and by Liberian officials who pretended to be corrupt while working behind the scenes with American authorities. During the trial, prosecutors played secretly recorded conversations in which aspects of the cocaine-trafficking plan were discussed.
Mr. Mawuko’s lawyer, Jeremy Gutman, said he thought the government’s recordings had helped exonerate his client, who he said was present only during two meetings at which the idea of importing cocaine to the United States arose.
“Both Mr. Mawuko and Mr. French expressed doubts, concerns, questions,” Mr. Gutman said.
An indictment naming the four defendants was unsealed in May after a sting operation run by the Drug Enforcement Administration and the United States attorney’s office in Manhattan. The operation was aimed, the authorities said, at stopping an ambitious scheme to use Liberia as a safe haven and a hub from which to distribute thousands of kilograms of cocaine worth millions of dollars.
The plan involved cocaine from Colombia and Venezuela, prosecutors said, with some of it supplied by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, a rebel group the United States government has designated as a terrorist organization.
According to the indictment, the defendants agreed to pay bribes to high-ranking Liberian officials in exchange for government protection. That strategy backfired because one of the officials, Fumbah Sirleaf — the son of Liberia’s president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, and the director of the country’s national security agency — was secretly assisting American agents.
Mr. Sirleaf introduced Mr. Umeh to Spyros Enotiades, an undercover informant working for the D.E.A. who went by the name Nabil Hage. In return for Mr. Enotiades’s participation in the scheme, the indictment said, Mr. Umeh agreed to give him large amounts of cocaine.
Prosecutors said Mr. Enotiades stated clearly to the defendants that he planned to import cocaine from them to the United States.
But lawyers for Mr. Umeh, Mr. French and Mr. Mawuko said that while their clients might have wanted to sell drugs in other parts of the world, they considered America to be out of bounds.
