Word: calied
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...rival cocaine refiners in Cali and elsewhere have stepped in to fill the void. Raw coca from Bolivia and Peru is plentiful and will remain so. Leaders of the Andean governments have rejected U.S. State Department plans for wholesale eradication, arguing that such an approach would starve and radicalize hundreds of thousands of peasants for whom coca leaves are a valuable cash crop. Moreover, heroin is making a frightening comeback in some areas. Thanks to bumper crops of opium in insurgent-controlled northeastern Burma, Southeast Asian heroin traffickers are flooding New York and New Jersey with moderately priced, high-quality...
...Bennett's view, forming a partnership with Colombia's Cali cartel was a lucrative business opportunity. His main supplier, a drug lord known to him only as "Oscar," was in effect the chairman of the board of a multinational enterprise. Bennett saw himself as chief executive officer of the California subsidiary. He had an associate, Mario Villabona, who had moved from Colombia to California in 1983. Villabona, a protege of Oscar's, amounted to the California president...
Villabona somehow selected Bennett to become the Cali group's first connection with black street gangs in the U.S. With Villabona, he swiftly built an empire that by 1988 was moving one ton of cocaine a week and pulling in gross income of up to $4 million a month...
...largesse added to Bennett's overhead, but he could afford it. In 1987, when cocaine prices were at an all-time low, Oscar in Cali was charging Villabona about $10,000 for a kilo. Out of that, Oscar paid Colombian growers and refiners about $3,000 and Mexican smugglers $2,000. He kept $5,000 for himself. In the U.S., Villabona and Bennett charged $12,000 for a kilo and split the profits. Some weeks Bo pocketed $1 million...
Will the capture of Escobar end the drug trade? No. Escobar may be Public Enemy No. 1, but he is not the only drug boss. A ring in Cali, thought to control the flow of cocaine to New York City, functions with almost no police hindrance because the group has refrained from using terrorist tactics. It also provides police with information about its Medellin rivals...