Word: calied
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...these setbacks have not impeded the cartel's steady growth. Cali's leaders have carefully compartmentalized their organization, so that individual losses do not threaten to bring down the whole enterprise. The Cali management style is cerebral, calculating and guileful. In the tradition of the great Mediterranean trading dynasties, the major families have a patriarchal, authoritarian structure that demands absolute discipline and loyalty yet encourages creativity...
...Cali imagination shines when it comes to the art of smuggling. Medellin brazenly shipped cocaine across borders in fast boats or light planes with extra fuel bladders. Calenos prefer the slow but safe merchant marine. The cartel has devised endless ways to hide contraband in commercial cargo and launder it through third countries. U.S. Customs can check perhaps 3% of the 9 million shipping containers that enter U.S. ports annually, making the odds very favorable for Cali...
When U.S. agents do uncover a shipment, the cartel adopts new shippers, different routes and more ingenious deceptions. Federal agents took nine years to crack a Santacruz-designed lumber scheme. In 1979, a Cali operative was arrested with the name of a Baltimore lumberyard in his pocket. There, agents saw piles of mahogany boards sliced end to end, with pockets hollowed out and the tops veneered on. A few more clues popped up over the years, but nothing to pinpoint which planks, among the tons of lumber imported from South America, contained contraband...
...destination code, "Baby I." The same marking had been found on an 18,000-kg seizure near Los Angeles two months earlier. Baby I turned out to be a Santacruz protege in New York, Luis ("Leto") Delio Lopez, 28. His style, according to DEA agents, embodied the typical Cali cartel executive: businesslike, resourceful, hard- working and discreet...
...Cali families are conservative managers, much like other big corporate heads. In the home office sit the chief executive officer and his senior vice presidents for acquisition, production, transportation, sales, finance and enforcement. The logistics of importing, storing and delivering the product to wholesalers are handled by dozens of overseas branches, or cells, overseen by the home office through daily, often hourly, phone calls...