Small faces federal magistrate today

LANCE SMALL spent a peaceful night at the Miami Detention Centre on Wednesday after his extradition from Trinidad hours before. Today, Small, 70, makes his first appearance before a federal magistrate at the United States Court house in Fort Lauderdale. Today, US assistant attorney Roger Powell will seek a date for the trial of the Jamaat Al Muslimeen member. Small was escorted by two deputy United States marshals as he arrived Wednesday evening on an American Airlines flight at Miami International Airport, US.

Spokesman for the US marshal Barry Golden said. Small left on AA flight 1668 at 4.25 pm and arrived in Miami less than four hours later. Since he landed in Miami, security was tightened around the cell block where he was kept. Small is considered to be the most high-profile prisoner ever extradited from Trinidad to face trial in the United States. Also known as Olive Enyahooma-El, Small faces a 2002 grand jury indictment that charges him with conspiring to possess and possession of machine guns and firearm silencers. The charges arose from an alleged 2001 plot to export 60 AK-47 assault rifles and ten Mac-ten machine guns with silencers from the United States to Trinidad.

Small was the primary target of federal agents investigating an arms deal that stretched from a Hooters parking lot in Fort Lauderdale to Trinidad. Federal prosecutors are relying on evidence from Small’s alleged accomplice, Trinidadian Keith Andre Glaude, who was arrested in a sting operation at a warehouse in Fort Lauderdale on May 30, 2001. Glaude who migrated to the United States in the late 1980s, pleaded guilty in 2002 to possession of a machine gun.
 
He got two years in prison. He has since been released and is one of the two key witnesses for the US government. The other is referred to as John Doe by federal prosecutors, although he was once a member of the Muslimeen in Trinidad in the 1980s. ATF Special Agent Steven McKean, posing as an arms dealer, taped more than 50 conversations with Small between April 2000 and May 2001 as the sale progressed. While the arms sting was over well before the September 11 attacks, some  intelligence experts have speculated about a possible link between the Caribbean Islamic extremists and Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda.