Some legal experts said the arrest on foreign grounds appeared unusual for white-collar offenses; defendants often negotiate their surrender in advance. Rarely do U.S. prosecutors have American citizens locked up overseas if they can devise another way to bring a defendant home, said Jens David Ohlin, a professor of international law at Cornell Law School.

“I’ve never encountered anything like this situation before,” Ohlin said in a telephone interview. “It’s a rare situation where someone is fighting with the U.S. on how quickly they can get back here to stand trial.”


Emerging Markets


Isaza Tuzman spent more than four years at Goldman Sachs Group Inc., working in emerging markets arbitrage. In 1998, while still at the bank, he co-founded govWorks.com, a website that promised to link people to local municipalities. In the 2001 documentary “Startup.com,” he could be seen pitching venture capitalists and chatting with Bill Clinton at a summit about the Internet.

After govWorks collapsed in bankruptcy in 2001, Isaza Tuzman went on to head at least three tech startup firms, including one that eventually was renamed KIT Digital. He left the company in April 2012, a year before it declared bankruptcy.

In August, federal prosecutors in New York returned a sealed indictment against Isaza Tuzman. Prosecutors say that while at KIT Digital, he engaged in an elaborate scheme to mislead investors and regulators about the financial health of the company for at least three years. He’s also accused of secretly operating a hedge fund that artificially inflated the company’s share price and of using funds from KIT Digital to secretly invest in his hedge fund.


‘In Danger’


Isaza Tuzman, who holds dual U.S.-Colombian citizenship, was arrested Sept. 7, just days before he was to return to Philadelphia for the Jewish holidays, his lawyers said.

“His life is in danger,” his mother, Ani Tuzman, said in an interview. “He’s sick. There is violence and assaults that are part of everyday life at La Picota. Every day I wake and I don’t know if he’s still alive. This is beyond anything I could imagine.”

According to lawyers Brodsky and Weitzman, he has developed a respiratory ailment, suffered an infected and swollen eye, lost 20 pounds and “lives in a constant state of fear.” Details of a prison incident cited in their legal brief are blacked out from the public version to protect Isaza Tuzman’s privacy.