Did Colombia's presidential front-runner help hook up a Colombian criminal and a Miami professor?
By Tim Padgett
June 3, 2026 at 11:12 AM EDT
After taking the most votes in Sunday's first round, right-wing candidate Abelardo De la Espriella is the front-runner in Colombia’s June 21 presidential run-off election.
Which means, as a result, from now until then he can likely expect a renewed tide of questions about his controversial past as the attorney for the Venezuelan regime's alleged corruption mastermind — including a shocking scandal in Miami.
It started in November 2019, when a respected University of Miami international studies professor, Bruce Bagley, was indicted on federal charges of laundering almost $3 million.
Bagley insisted he was innocent. "They've got it all wrong. Not guilty," he told CBS4 News in his only public response. But he later pleaded guilty to helping a shadowy figure named Alex Saab move the embezzled Venezuelan funds through Miami bank accounts.
As stunning as Bagley's indictment was, Saab’s involvement was especially jolting. As Dick Gregorie, a former U.S. prosecutor in Miami who had investigated Saab, told WLRN at that time: “[Saab] is the master of trade-based money laundering. And Venezuela has been robbed blind with every transaction that he does.”
Venezuela in fact recently extradited the Colombia-born Saab to the U.S. Here in Miami he faces federal charges alleging that, for almost two decades, he helped Venezuela’s socialist regime engineer hundreds of millions of dollars in fraud schemes — involving oil, housing and even subsidized food for the poor — and then laundered the dirty cash in countries as far flung as Iran and Bulgaria.
“Saab is well connected in political circles in parts of the world where you would not expect to see a great deal of trade with Venezuela,” Gregorie noted.
READ MORE: Venezuela's dark laundering loop: Saab nabbed, Bagley pleads guilty, Maduro sweats
A big question, though, was how Bagley got sucked into Saab's dark orbit. Court documents suggested a Colombian drug trafficker and U.S. informant, Jorge Luis Hernández, aka "Bolinche," played a key role.
Around 2010, Bagley — an expert, ironically, on Latin American crime — helped convince a U.S. judge not to deport Hernández back to Colombia, where he feared he’d be killed. In gratitude, Hernández helped introduce Bagley to Alex Saab, who later hired Bagley as a consultant, which led to Bagley’s money-laundering role staring in 2017.
But many people involved in Bagley’s case tell WLRN De la Espriella — who had a history of seeking out and hiring academic and other experts to speak on behalf of his Latin American clients before U.S. courts — also helped connect the UM professor with his most notorious client, Saab.
A person who asked not to be identified, because they’re not authorized to speak publicly about the case, says Bagley was recruited to help Saab by “wolves in sheep’s clothing,” including not just "Bolinche" but "also De la Espriella."
"Bruce Bagley was recruited to help Alex Saab by wolves in sheep’s clothing — including Abelardo De la Espriella."
De la Espriella has long claimed that while he did meet Bagley once, he knew nothing of Bagley’s relationship with Saab.
Still, De la Espriella and "Bolinche," who are both from Barranquilla, Colombia, knew each other well — and had a mutual connection with Saab, who also hails from Barranquilla.
What's more, says Florida International University Latin America expert Eduardo Gamarra, "It’s not just that [De la Espriella] had that relationship with Saab — it’s when he had the relationship with him.”
Gamarra points out that De la Espriella was Saab’s personal attorney from 2013 to 2018. During that period, Saab was allegedly engaged in the lion’s share of his criminal activity for the Venezuelan regime and then President-Dictator Nicolás Maduro, whom the U.S. military removed from the country this year to face drug-trafficking charges in New York.
That included a government food import program for low-income Venezuelans, known as CLAP.
Robbing from Venezuela's poor
Saab allegedly used one of his shell companies to rob CLAP by bribing Venezuelan officials to look the other way as he charged it inflated prices for diluted, tainted or non-existent products, then pocketed the proceeds with them and laundered the money around the globe — including through U.S.-related banks, leading to his U.S. indictments.
"Every bad guy needs a defense attorney, certainly," said Gamarra. "But De la Espriella was more than likely aware of all of the shenanigans that Saab was involved in” at that time.
Bruce Bagley (1200x674, AR: 1.7804154302670623)
So while De la Espriella, as Saab’s attorney, may not have helped bring Bagley to Saab directly for the purpose of moving corrupt money around, sources close to Bagley’s case say he did help present Bagley to Saab as a consultant on Latin America-U.S. (especially Venezuela-U.S.) relations — a service that devolved into criminality.
Saab had originally been extradited to the U.S. in 2021 by Cape Verde, where he was arrested after his private jet stopped there for refueling. But the Biden administration pardoned him and returned him to Venezuela in 2023 in exchange for American prisoners being held in Venezuela.
Bagley ended up serving six months in federal prison.
For his own part, De la Espriella has in the past publicly acknowledged, "I am a personal friend of Alex [Saab]. I hold him in high regard."
Still, De la Espriella argues that being Saab’s attorney did not make him Saab’s accomplice. And he emphasizes that it was he who brokered a deal to have Saab provide information to U.S. officials on drug-trafficking activities inside the Venezuelan regime — and arrangement that wasn't known publicly until 2022.
“People know the difference between being a criminal attorney and being a criminal.”
Most De la Espriella supporters agree that his hard right platform to crack down severely on Colombia's violent criminal groups — many of whom are holdovers from the country's half-century-long civil war that ended a decade ago — matters more than his past relationship with Saab.
“People know the difference between being a criminal attorney and being a criminal,” Colombian expat Fabio Andrade, a Weston city commissioner who plans to vote for De la Espriella on June 21, told WLRN this week.
De la Espriella will face a left-wing candidate, Senator Iván Cepeda, an ally of current and controversial leftist President Gustavo Petro, in that run-off vote.
That raises a paradox for De la Espriella's right-wing — even reactionary — candidacy and his support, which includes the endorsement of U.S. Republicans like Miami Congresswoman María Elvira Salazar and, as of Tuesday night, of President Donald Trump. That is: that conservatives seem unusually willing to overlook De la Espriella's ties to an internationally wanted corrupto who allegedly helped socialists bankrupt Venezuela and plunge it into the worst humanitarian crisis in modern South American history.
Either way, Colombian voters will be the final judge later this month.
(1509x275, AR: 5.487272727272727)
Which means, as a result, from now until then he can likely expect a renewed tide of questions about his controversial past as the attorney for the Venezuelan regime's alleged corruption mastermind — including a shocking scandal in Miami.
It started in November 2019, when a respected University of Miami international studies professor, Bruce Bagley, was indicted on federal charges of laundering almost $3 million.
Bagley insisted he was innocent. "They've got it all wrong. Not guilty," he told CBS4 News in his only public response. But he later pleaded guilty to helping a shadowy figure named Alex Saab move the embezzled Venezuelan funds through Miami bank accounts.
As stunning as Bagley's indictment was, Saab’s involvement was especially jolting. As Dick Gregorie, a former U.S. prosecutor in Miami who had investigated Saab, told WLRN at that time: “[Saab] is the master of trade-based money laundering. And Venezuela has been robbed blind with every transaction that he does.”
Venezuela in fact recently extradited the Colombia-born Saab to the U.S. Here in Miami he faces federal charges alleging that, for almost two decades, he helped Venezuela’s socialist regime engineer hundreds of millions of dollars in fraud schemes — involving oil, housing and even subsidized food for the poor — and then laundered the dirty cash in countries as far flung as Iran and Bulgaria.
“Saab is well connected in political circles in parts of the world where you would not expect to see a great deal of trade with Venezuela,” Gregorie noted.
READ MORE: Venezuela's dark laundering loop: Saab nabbed, Bagley pleads guilty, Maduro sweats
A big question, though, was how Bagley got sucked into Saab's dark orbit. Court documents suggested a Colombian drug trafficker and U.S. informant, Jorge Luis Hernández, aka "Bolinche," played a key role.
Around 2010, Bagley — an expert, ironically, on Latin American crime — helped convince a U.S. judge not to deport Hernández back to Colombia, where he feared he’d be killed. In gratitude, Hernández helped introduce Bagley to Alex Saab, who later hired Bagley as a consultant, which led to Bagley’s money-laundering role staring in 2017.
But many people involved in Bagley’s case tell WLRN De la Espriella — who had a history of seeking out and hiring academic and other experts to speak on behalf of his Latin American clients before U.S. courts — also helped connect the UM professor with his most notorious client, Saab.
A person who asked not to be identified, because they’re not authorized to speak publicly about the case, says Bagley was recruited to help Saab by “wolves in sheep’s clothing,” including not just "Bolinche" but "also De la Espriella."
"Bruce Bagley was recruited to help Alex Saab by wolves in sheep’s clothing — including Abelardo De la Espriella."
De la Espriella has long claimed that while he did meet Bagley once, he knew nothing of Bagley’s relationship with Saab.
Still, De la Espriella and "Bolinche," who are both from Barranquilla, Colombia, knew each other well — and had a mutual connection with Saab, who also hails from Barranquilla.
What's more, says Florida International University Latin America expert Eduardo Gamarra, "It’s not just that [De la Espriella] had that relationship with Saab — it’s when he had the relationship with him.”
Gamarra points out that De la Espriella was Saab’s personal attorney from 2013 to 2018. During that period, Saab was allegedly engaged in the lion’s share of his criminal activity for the Venezuelan regime and then President-Dictator Nicolás Maduro, whom the U.S. military removed from the country this year to face drug-trafficking charges in New York.
That included a government food import program for low-income Venezuelans, known as CLAP.
Robbing from Venezuela's poor
Saab allegedly used one of his shell companies to rob CLAP by bribing Venezuelan officials to look the other way as he charged it inflated prices for diluted, tainted or non-existent products, then pocketed the proceeds with them and laundered the money around the globe — including through U.S.-related banks, leading to his U.S. indictments.
"Every bad guy needs a defense attorney, certainly," said Gamarra. "But De la Espriella was more than likely aware of all of the shenanigans that Saab was involved in” at that time.
Bruce Bagley (1200x674, AR: 1.7804154302670623)
So while De la Espriella, as Saab’s attorney, may not have helped bring Bagley to Saab directly for the purpose of moving corrupt money around, sources close to Bagley’s case say he did help present Bagley to Saab as a consultant on Latin America-U.S. (especially Venezuela-U.S.) relations — a service that devolved into criminality.
Saab had originally been extradited to the U.S. in 2021 by Cape Verde, where he was arrested after his private jet stopped there for refueling. But the Biden administration pardoned him and returned him to Venezuela in 2023 in exchange for American prisoners being held in Venezuela.
Bagley ended up serving six months in federal prison.
For his own part, De la Espriella has in the past publicly acknowledged, "I am a personal friend of Alex [Saab]. I hold him in high regard."
Still, De la Espriella argues that being Saab’s attorney did not make him Saab’s accomplice. And he emphasizes that it was he who brokered a deal to have Saab provide information to U.S. officials on drug-trafficking activities inside the Venezuelan regime — and arrangement that wasn't known publicly until 2022.
“People know the difference between being a criminal attorney and being a criminal.”
Most De la Espriella supporters agree that his hard right platform to crack down severely on Colombia's violent criminal groups — many of whom are holdovers from the country's half-century-long civil war that ended a decade ago — matters more than his past relationship with Saab.
“People know the difference between being a criminal attorney and being a criminal,” Colombian expat Fabio Andrade, a Weston city commissioner who plans to vote for De la Espriella on June 21, told WLRN this week.
De la Espriella will face a left-wing candidate, Senator Iván Cepeda, an ally of current and controversial leftist President Gustavo Petro, in that run-off vote.
That raises a paradox for De la Espriella's right-wing — even reactionary — candidacy and his support, which includes the endorsement of U.S. Republicans like Miami Congresswoman María Elvira Salazar and, as of Tuesday night, of President Donald Trump. That is: that conservatives seem unusually willing to overlook De la Espriella's ties to an internationally wanted corrupto who allegedly helped socialists bankrupt Venezuela and plunge it into the worst humanitarian crisis in modern South American history.
Either way, Colombian voters will be the final judge later this month.
(1509x275, AR: 5.487272727272727)