Word: bogota
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Samples of all these varieties can be found in Bogota's dope marketplace, just behind the Bogota Hilton. One of the traders, known only as Ricardo, touts a red hashish from the Llanos area. He waves a smoldering lump of it on the tip of a needle in front of his clients. As the smoke does its magic, he smiles and exhorts the potential buyers, "Just taste the quality...
Cocaine too is carried on mother ships and lumbering old planes, but since it is so much more compact than marijuana, and worth almost six times its weight in gold, there are simpler methods of shipment. A commercial air traveler flying from Bogota can make $10,000 tax free by carrying a pound about the size of a paperback book. Many passengers do. They carry the white powder on their bodies, inside candy bars or toothpaste tubes, under slightly askew wigs, sewn into leather saddles...
Braniff Flight 922 from Bogota to Los Angeles is nicknamed "the cocaine special." One scam is for a passenger to hide the powder somewhere on the plane, clear customs in Los Angeles, reboard the plane for the continuation to San Francisco, then collect his hidden coke. Panel bolts in many planes are visibly worn from smugglers' screwdrivers. Four unclaimed kilos were found last month in one jet's nose cone...
...young entrepreneur from Chicago who went to Colombia last year on vacation. Like many vacationing students, he happened to stumble across someone in the "snow" business. Nervous but eager, he went one night to see his new friend Rafael at a house on a back street of Bogota's barrio. He had to bring $3,000. Rafael was holding a .38-cal. automatic when he opened the door, but he was ready to deal. For two hours they packaged 18-gram portions of cocaine in cellophane, attached them to greeting cards with flypaper and placed the cards in business envelopes...
Although Jackson Heights is a quiet neighborhood, the cocaine dealing is dangerous. At least 14 murders there last year were related to the drug trade. Oscar Toro was part of the coke-smuggling gang of Alberto Bravo, in charge of laundering money and sending it from Jackson Heights to Bogota. One day, perhaps because it was suspected that he had skimmed some of the cash or cooperated with the police, Toro returned home to find his five-year-old daughter hanged from a rafter in the basement. The bodies of his ten-year-old son and the family's babysitter...