Alleged Drug Baron Who Inspired OITNB Elected Senator in Nigeria

Orange Is the New Black’s season three is nearly upon us and in the real world, the alleged drug lord that Piper Chapman and Alex Vause smuggled drugs for was just elected senator in Nigeria.

On Wednesday, according to the Associated Press, Buruji Kashamu won his new senate seat in Nigeria’s southwest Ogun state despite detractors who say the election was rigged.

Kashamu is the man the real Piper, named Piper Kerman, and the real Alex, named Catherine Cleary Wolters, testified against nearly a decade ago. From Cleary Wolters’ 2014 interview with Vanity Fair:

They had picked the first round of us up two years prior to Piper’s somewhat congenial visit from the Feds,” Wolters says of the ring’s undoing. “So, yes, I named her, she named me, and we all named each other. Fact was, we all thought we were doing the right thing, confessing, getting protection, and saving ourselves from certain death at the hands of a Nigerian drug lord who we knew would soon find we had all been arrested.”

On the matter of his 1998 federal indictment in Chicago for “conspiracy to import and distribute heroin in the United States,” Kashamu says it’s all just a big misunderstanding. What the feds really have, he says, is a case of mistaken identity and they’re actually are looking for his late brother.

The United States tried to extradite Kashamu from England in 2003 unsuccessfully but a Chicago judge refused to dismiss the case last year, so the OITNB villain is still a wanted man in America. And then there’s this:

A Nigerian federal court last year ordered Kashamu’s extradition, an order upheld by an appeals court. But Nigeria’s government has not extradited him.

That failure caused Olusegun Obasanjo, a former president, to warn that “drug barons … will buy candidates, parties and eventually buy power or be in power themselves.”

Kahsamu contributed financially to the outgoing Nigerian leader President Goodluck Jonathan and his regime; however new President Muhammadu Buhari has pledged to root out corruption in his country. He has his work cut out for him.