# Fugitive caught 20 years later



## kwflatbed (Dec 29, 2004)

Ex-skipper allegedly smuggled 20 tons of marijuana into city

By ROB MARGETTA, Standard-Times staff writer

Accused drug smuggler Jerome J. Wedge's two decades as a fugitive came to an end last week, when federal officers and Los Angeles police arrested him on a warrant. 
Details were scant last night, but Los Angeles police said the U.S. Marshal's Task Force that works out of their department had been looking for Mr. Wedge, a former fishing boat skipper who was charged in 1983 with smuggling tons of marijuana into New Bedford. He disappeared Aug. 28, 1986, before his trial began. 
Officers captured Mr. Wedge, now 60, at about 7:15 a.m. Sept. 22. He is being held without bail at the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department's central facility. Police said they were unsure as to when the rendition process to bring Mr. Wedge back to Massachusetts would begin. 
"That's going to be up to Massachusetts," department spokesman Mike Lopez said. "They have to get ahold of us to work it out." 
Bristol County District Attorney Paul F. Walsh Jr. could not be reached for comment last night on the arrest or the rendition process. 
Mr. Wedge was indicted on drug trafficking charges in July 22, 1983, when police raided the Southern Star, the 75-foot swordfishing vessel he captained, at New Bedford's South Terminal. 
Detectives who had been watching the waterfront for illegal activity interrupted a group of men who were unloading bales of the drug from the boat into a rented truck. They arrested 10 men, who fled along the docks and dove into the harbor to escape capture. 
When they weighed the drugs, police realized that they'd confiscated 20 tons of marijuana, worth an estimated $32 million. The huge bales had been concealed behind a false wall in the Southern Star's stern, investigators said. Eventually, state police officials destroyed the pot. 
Days after the raid, New Bedford police boarded another fishing vessel, The Four of Us, confiscating about 15 tons of marijuana. That boat's skipper, James J. Pauline, was sentenced to 10 years behind bars. 
Mr. Wedge, a Fairhaven resident at the time of the raids, wasn't at the South Terminal when the Southern Star was raided. He turned himself in days later, after a warrant was issued for him on charges of trafficking marijuana in excess of 10,000 pounds and conspiracy to violate drug laws. 
For the next three years, much of the skipper's life revolved around court appearances, including several bail arguments and his lawyer's repeated attempts to separate his trial from those of the 10 men charged with unloading the marijuana off the Southern Star. 
In a 1996 interview, his wife, Sonia Wedge, told the Standard-Times she fell asleep with Mr. Wedge in the house the night of Aug. 27, 1986. But when she awoke, she was alone. 
"I got up that day and he was gone," she said. "No note. Nothing. I just need to know what happened to him." 
During the interview, Mrs. Wedge said she waited three months without word of her husband before moving back to her native Switzerland, taking their son with her. 
At the time, she said she just wanted to know if she was divorced, or if Mr. Wedge had died. Swiss officials had placed an ad in the Boston Globe for her, seeking anyone with information on her husband's whereabouts. 
Authorities didn't believe Mr. Wedge was missing, though - they thought he was on the lam. There has been an active warrant out for his arrest on file at Taunton Superior Court since 1988. 
In the early 1990s, the warrant was somehow removed from the national crime index computers, an action officials blamed on the routine purging of old records. It was restored in 1996, after a Standard-Times story about its elimination.

Contact Rob Margetta 
at [email protected] 
Date of Publication: September 27, 2006 on Page A05


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