Word: cartelized
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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...
...cartel has also buried cocaine in toxic chemicals. In 1989 Customs agents and New York policemen found almost 5,000 kg of the drug inside 252 drums of powdered lye. No sane inspector would poke around in lye, which can inflict severe eye, skin and lung burns. Luckily, someone had tipped off the authorities...
...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...
...infiltrating a Cali family. Calenos sell only to people they know, meaning other Colombians. A prospective wholesale buyer must establish his bona fides at an audience with top management in Cali. If he is approved, he is not required to pay cash up front. He will send the cartel payment after he resells the drugs to middlemen. The wholesale buyer must put up collateral, cash or deeds to real property as insurance if he is caught. He must also provide human collateral in the form of his family in Colombia, who will pay with their lives if he ever turns...
...cartel's need for goods, services and go-betweens has spawned a thriving network of cottage industries. Front companies acquire mobile phones by the dozen and "sublet" them to the cells. The traffickers know investigators need four or five days to get a court-ordered wiretap, so they use a phone for two days and discard it. If a mobile phone is eventually traced, the trail stops at the front company...