Word: deas
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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These tales filter back to the DEA. Possibly, Don Chepe wants it that way. "He's toying with us," says William Mockler Jr., chief of the New York task force investigating the Cali cartel. He and Kenneth Robinson, a retired New York City policeman who is now a DEA intelligence analyst, have been a step or two behind Santacruz since 1978, when they found out that he was building an air fleet and setting up businesses along the East Coast. Thanks to their efforts, Santacruz was indicted for drug-trafficking conspiracy in 1980, but he fled the country...
Then in April 1988, a load of Brazilian cedar boards arrived in Tarpon Springs, Fla., aboard the freighter Amazon Sky. DEA alerted Tampa Customs that an informer had reported drugs were aboard. Inspectors drilled holes in stacks of lumber planks, but found nothing. At the last moment, a Customs man saw a crew member drop a plank and glance about nervously. The inspector drilled into the board and hit white powder. The seizure was a record 3,270 kg of cocaine, but just 700 of the 9,000 planks held any drugs...
...were marked with a 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...
After the highly publicized Baby I bust, Leto stayed away from his house and offices, which DEA agents were watching. One day in March 1990, he happened to drive past a DEA team running another surveillance in Queens. As the agents started tailing him, he whipped his Acura into a fast U-turn and melted into the traffic. The next thing the agents knew, Leto was back in Colombia -- where his luck ran out. At the request of the U.S. government, police arrested...
...both drivers alert the cell head in code from a mobile phone or beeper. He telephones a desk officer in Cali, then sends confirmation by fax. Detailed ledgers are maintained in both countries. The ledgers have proved the system's main vulnerability, providing a rich lode of data to DEA analysts when seized...