Word: rosso
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Drug Enforcement Administration head TOM CONSTANTINE made a quiet trip to Bogota last week to say gracias to Colombian National Police chief GENERAL ROSSO JOSE SERRANO for his work rounding up the Cali dons. Since the CNP-DEA crackdown, says Constantine, the coke business has atomized, and the many small- and medium-size organizations now operating have neither the political sophistication nor the immense concentration of wealth of the old Cali guard. "That type of clout and power to intimidate doesn't exist anymore," says Constantine, who calls CNP boss Serrano "an honest guy who is determined to make...
...first cop novels to come out of Sarajevo's agony, The Monkey House (Crown; 384 pages; $25). Author John Fullerton, a British reporter who covered Sarajevo during the war, has patterned his story after Gorky Park, Martin Cruz Smith's shadowy 1981 tale of cold war Moscow. Rosso, Fullerton's cop, is a Croat chief inspector of detectives investigating a murder that may be tied to the city's metastasizing drug trade...
Fullerton gets a lot right, or so it seems to a safely distant observer. He writes about pervasive dread, the fear of small-arms fire whipping through glassless windows, mortar rounds going off as one walks up a city street. After an attack by Serbs, Rosso feels a brief adrenaline high at being alive while others have died. Then shame. He recognizes this and sees that guilt may be what drives him to pursue the swaggering gang leader Luka, who poses as a resistance hero, and may, in some perverted way, actually...
...author knows this killing ground well, but too often his writing is fast and sloppy. A burning department store is "engulfed in its death throes," and streets are "rivers of flame." Rosso, at a difficult moment, thinks "the buck stops here." No, the reader reflects, it was Harry Truman who thought that. Rosso needs a dialogue coach, and his author, alas for what otherwise is an effective novel, needs treatment for tin-ear disease...
...months Botero, who was in charge of both the military and the national police, had been decimating the Cali cartel's formidable drug hierarchy. Behind bars after 15 years of activity were billionaire Cali kingpins Gilberto Rodriguez Orejuela and Jose Santacruz Londono. Botero's national police director, General Jose Rosso Serrano, is said to be on the trail of the two remaining major Cali mobsters, Rodriguez's younger brother Miguel and Helmer "Pacho" Herrera...