Word: santacruz
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...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. "He is my Professor Moriarty," Mockler says...
...Federal narcotics trafficking and conspiracy charges, which form the basis for extradition requests, have been lodged against Cali's reputed financiers Gilberto and Miguel Rodriguez, their four Orjuela Caballero cousins and dozens of other senior figures. U.S. Attorney General Dick Thornburgh has asked the Colombian government to extradite them. Santacruz's half-brother and confidant, Luis Santacruz Echeverri, has been convicted on conspiracy charges in Miami, and his personal financial adviser, Edgar Alberto Garcia Montilla, has been jailed in Luxembourg for money laundering...
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...
...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...
Many cells now ship the money in bulk to Cali, where some is invested, some converted into pesos and some wired back to banks in the U.S. or Europe under a relative's name. In January 1989 New York agents seized a Santacruz truck loaded with $19 million as it was departing for Mexico. Last October agents found an additional $14 million inside heavy cable spools on Long Island, along with records showing shipments of $100 million more over the previous nine months...