Jersey lawyer escapes a Peruvian nightmare

Star-Ledger, The (Newark, NJ)

Author: Russell Ben-Ali; Star-Ledger Staff

Baby-trafficking. The words, leveled in a charge by a Peruvian police commander, struck James Gagel like a death sentence.

And it nearly was. The Rutherford attorney and Rutgers law grad traveled to Peru on a Fulbright fellowship. In 1992, Gagel found himself facing a 20-year jail term and a death threat from Sendero Luminoso, the guerrilla organization known as the Shining Path. His name became synonymous with hysterical charges of kidnapping babies to sell their body parts.

But that was 1992. After a year in Lima's San Jorge prison and three more in which he was forbidden to leave Peru's capital city, Gagel returned to the U.S. two weeks ago, first to Florida and then home to Rutherford."It's so great to be back, great to not have to look over my shoulders, great to be once again in an atmosphere of freedom," Gagel, 40, said yesterday as he spoke by telephone from the office of his friend, Hackensack attorney Harold Springstead.

"It was about relief and kissing the tarmac when I got off the airplane," he continued. "Just a tremendous sense of relief and feeling of gratefulness, that my country really went out to support little ol' me."

Not that long ago, Gagel recalled, his nights were filled with inmates' screams, the thumping of prison guards' batons and being kept awake by guards who fired their shotguns from the rooftop.

Gagel flew to Peru in 1989 as a Fulbright fellow and was assigned to the Ministry of Justice, where he filed proposals to start a plea-bargain system and public defender's office. The fellowship ended and he stayed to translate for Americans seeking to adopt abandoned Peruvian children. He opted to remain in the country as an adoption attorney in January 1990.

But these were difficult times for foreigners who wanted to adopt Latin American children, particularly in Lima, Gagel said. Although many children went hungry and homeless, the courts were crowded with applications for adoptions of newborns and, according to Gagel, they were laden with corruption.

"There was so much corruption and congestion in Lima," Gagel said. "I started to charter planes and take my clients to a jungle area of Junin where these abandoned children lived."

In Junin, adoptions were processed much more efficiently, he said. But with legal services running up to $10,000 for American, Canadian and European couples who needed someone to walk them through the process, successful adoption attorneys stood out as targets for bribes and payoffs. Gagel said his firm arranged about 40 such adoptions in two years for about $7,000 each.

In February 1992, Gagel said, he began to receive visits from police who demanded he pay them if he wanted to remain in business. He said some attorneys were paying $1,000 a month for the privilege. Gagel refused.

Later that month, his office was raided and he was arrested.

"He was charged on 10 counts of different felony crimes, everything from kidnapping to trafficking in minors, exposing minors to danger, fraud, the falsification of documents, corruption - there was everything," said Grace Riggs, an American practicing law in Lima whom Gagel credits most with securing his acquittal. "They threw the book at him."

His chief accuser was a Lima police commander in charge of investigating rings of baby kidnappers as a panic of sorts was spreading through much of Latin America.

"It seemed to be occurring on a worldwide level," Riggs said by telephone from her Lima office yesterday. "There were stories of children being stolen and robbed and kidnapped all over the world by different mafias. Their organs were (reportedly) being taken out, their livers and eyes removed and sold as part of this illegal organs market."

The U.S. government tried to quell the stories, insisting they had no basis in fact.

"But in the scandal sheets here in Peru, the papers brought by people in the lower income brackets, which is mainly where the adopted children were coming from, it set off a panic at the time," Riggs explained.

The stories appear to have roots in Honduras, where rumors of the financial trade of children's organs was first reported in January 1987, according to published reports.

Three months later, the story was published in the Soviet newspaper Pravda with no mention that authorities had denied the reports. Tass, the Soviet news agency, apparently sent the story around the world. Reports of attacks on foreigners attempting to adopt Latin American babies began surfacing soon thereafter.

As a result, foreign adoptions of Peruvian children began to slow. Officials began to examine the process to make sure Peruvian women weren't being coerced by U.S. attorneys to give up their children. But arrests like Gagel's just seemed to add fuel to the baby organ suspicions.

About 20 others were arrested with Gagel, including workers from his law firm.

Gagel was assigned to Castro Castro, a prison on the outskirts of Lima. The Shining Path sent word that, should he arrive there, he would have to pay them $50,000 or face execution. He managed to get reassigned to San Jorge, a Lima jail for first-time offenders.

Under pressure from Assistant Secretary of State Bernard Aronson, U.S. Rep. Robert Torricelli (D-N.J.) and even Mother Teresa of Calcutta, for whom Gagel had done some volunteer work, Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori visited Gagel in jail in November 1992.

Fujimori later told reporters he was certain Gagel had broken no laws. But Fujimori, who had dissolved the National Congress and suspended parts of the constitution, refused to grant Gagel a pardon and insisted that his supporters simply allow the case to work its way through the courts.

Gagel was released from jail in February 1993. For the next several years he was not allowed to leave Lima and had to sign in with the police and courts every two weeks.

Gagel was acquitted in July 1996 and told he could leave the country in November. But as he tried Nov. 22, he was taken off the plane along with his wife, Pilar, and two children because his papers weren't in order. He left for good several days later.