Word: kg
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Cali families are now focusing their efforts on cornering the market in Europe and Japan. Last year Dutch officials seized 2,658 kg of coke packed in drums of passion-fruit juice from Cali, the biggest single bust in Europe. Santacruz bank accounts have been found across Western Europe and as far afield as Hungary and Israel. DEA informants report that Cali is looking for sales representatives to man branch offices in Japan, where the going wholesale price for cocaine is as high as $65,000 per kg. "If the Cali cartel makes an alliance with the yakuza ((Japan...
...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...
Other scams are just as difficult to uncover. In 1988 Customs officers found 2,270 kg of cocaine encased in 1,200 blocks of chocolate shipped from Ecuador. The cocaine bricks had been wrapped in lead to thwart X-rays, but the lead set off metal detectors. The next time, Customs found, the smugglers had switched to heavy plastic wrapping...
...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...
...cocaine bricks unearthed from the lye 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...