Medellin's New Generation
Adams, James Ring
James Ring Adams MEDELLIN'S NEW GENERATION Colombia's largest cocaine syndicate hasn't been daunted by the arrest of its leaders and American investigations of its favorite money-launderers. Now...
...His hometown revered him for donating a bullring, but officials in Bogota called him a psychopath...
...True or not, the story made an unmistakable point...
...take a bribe or a bullet...
...In 1983, investigative reporters on Bogota's second-largest newspaper, El Espectador, dug up the story of the almost-forgotten 1976 case against Escobar...
...A detailed picture was emerging of cartel heavyweight Pablo Emilio Escobar Gaviria...
...Starting as a bodyguard and enforcer for a smuggler of stereos, he had made the transition to cocaine by 1976...
...By the mid-1980s, federal prosecutors were learning the same thing as they followed the money trail...
...He received his "advanced education," as he put it, at a federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut, where he did time for a marijuana conviction...
...Short, soft, and puffy-cheeked, Escobar didn't impress much physically, but he did have a mind for business...
...The prosecutors and agents who had caught the scent of Don Chepe in Operation C-Chase are convinced that Gerardo Moncada is the most likely heir to the drug lords' throne...
...She was convicted and sentenced to eighteen years...
...In a completely unexpected bonus it exposed the money-laundering of BCCI...
...The sting, code-named Operation C-Chase after 'Pampa's Calibre Chase condos, where it was headquartered, uncovered drug rings in four cities...
...The cartel simply hires more workers, puts up more tin-roofed labs, and imports more ether...
...Each cocale produces 15-20,000 plants and can be harvested three times a year, for an annual yield of a pound of coca paste, which can be processed into about 150 grams of pure cocaine...
...On German television, for instance, he bragged that he owned more airplanes than the Colombian Air Force...
...You can smell it...
...As "drug czar," William Bennett pushed hard for a National Drug Intelligence Center, which would analyze the mounds of raw data turned up by the half-dozen agencies fighting drugs...
...As each murder went unpunished, the cartel grew bolder...
...Agents should be asking why they didn't...
...Contributions to congressional candidates bought support on issues like the extradition treaty with the U.S., which was permanently voided by the constitutional convention last summer...
...By one account, the eldest, Jorge, started in drugs to support the family's riding habit...
...The DEA ignores him publicly, perhaps embarrassed that its intelligence didn't notice him earlier...
...It's a fact that, in February 1987, someone tipped the Colombian police off to Lehder's hiding place, and he was hustled off to the U.S...
...The former pig farmer's hometown mourned its benefactor, but the rest of the country rejoiced...
...It was the last straw...
...The son of a schoolteacher, Escobar came from a middle-class home, not the squalid slums he would later identify with...
...The Mounties followed the load to Quebec and snapped up Don Chepe's New York distributor...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1991 25...
...In more grandiose moments he tried to work up a political movement synthesizing the two into an ultra-nationalist, populist defense of selling drugs to the gringos...
...It wasn't clear, the DEA noted, just how his organization managed to set the terms of sale...
...Like other druggers, Escobar bought thousands of acres in the country...
...Another car boxed him in from behind and a gunman opened fire, killing Leithman with five shots at pointblank range...
...It has been pushing to spray the fields with a coca-killing herbicide called Spike and to pay the Andean peasants to grow something else...
...Pablo Escobar beat one rap in 1976 by murdering all of the witnesses...
...He trained and refined his technique in shorter runs...
...The gunship cut him down as he clutched his submachine gun...
...High-rise office buildings were sprouting along its pleasant boulevards...
...But, as leaderless gangs returned to common street crime, it was clear in Medellin that the top level of the cartel was in disarray...
...Dogstrained to sniff for drugs often pick out suitcases of cash as well...
...Don Chepe made the list, in the august company of Pablo Escobar and the Ochoa boys, but where the other files displayed a mug shot, Don Chepe's said "No Photo Available...
...Jose Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha, a former pig farmer from the Andean town of Pacho, inherited Escobar's role as enforcer...
...After a certain point, the cartel money men would pour forth gossip, as a way of showing their bona fides and promoting business...
...By last year, even the Medellin cartel could see that terrorism was taking it nowhere...
...The smell of the cartel is the smell of blood, excrement, and cordite, the smell of violent death...
...Some agents think they drove the price down in the mid-1980s, as part of a brilliant strategy to increase demand...
...Cali got less ink, possibly because the names of its leaders, jawbreakers like Rodriguez Orejuela and Arizabaleta, were harder to spell, and possibly because Cali ran a kinder, gentler operation...
...It takes money to bribe an entire country, and Escobar had to buy off four or five...
...In late summer 1989, he sent a team of heavily armed Colombians to New Brunswick to break his pilots out of jail...
...He is Gerardo Moncada, a university graduate and an industrial engineer, and his organization privately claims to pump more than four tons of cocaine a month into New York City alone...
...Another said: No, it's a loose collection of separate groups that work together loadby-load...
...Judges who heard drug cases would get a one-sided message: silver or lead...
...As the Roman emperor Vespasian said, "Money doesn't stink...
...Don Fabio claimed not to be involved himself...
...G ringo intelligence exaggerated the importance of some characters and underestimated others...
...Leithman assured her he could get her off, and she turned it down...
...His date of birth read "xx/xx," with the improbable year of 1966...
...That, at least, is the story French police in Guadeloupe heard from a mid-level cartel figure who claimed to have attended Escobar's meeting...
...In 1986, editor-in-chief Guillermo Cano Isaza published another major series on the cartel...
...On April 3, 1989, one of Don Chepe's Gulfstream Commanders crash-landed in a snowdrift in Fredericton, New Brunswick...
...T he drug lords aren't big backers of I occupational safety, and the lot of the lab workers is a hard one...
...State maintains an air force of crop-spraying Thrush planes in Peru, which can't fly safely over the coca-growing region for whole months of the year, due to the dense smoke from the burning forests...
...The registry records for the lab named a certain Don Ramiro, who vanished after the raid, just as Don Chepe emerged...
...choa, Escobar, Rodriguez Gacha —these were the big names of the cartel when Robert Mazur launched Operation C-Chase...
...The smell of the cartel is the smell of nail-polish remover and hospital anesthetic, the smell of acetone and ether...
...Short, wiry, and charismatic, Lehder was born in 1943 to a Colombian woman and an expatriate German hotelier whom American diplomats suspected of running a Nazi spy ring...
...A helicopter force descended on the farmhouse where he was holed up...
...S o where do the field agents go to find out how marriages and blood relations bind together members of the drug cartels, or to reconstruct balance sheets for drug transactions, or to understand the economics of illicit money transfers...
...Earlier this year, Canadian courts tried the pilots, the distribution team, and Moncada's head of operations in New York City...
...Who is Don Chepe...
...Moncada evaded not only the Colombian government's campaign against the more publicly violent cartel leaders, but also the two-year U.S...
...The hometown hero surrendered to do time in his native Envigado, in a prison built to his own design, complete with his mother's cooking...
...Colombian soldiers had been raiding the mansions and ranches of the Medellin druggers, and the nation had gawked at their opulence...
...operation for Mora and let it run until October 1988...
...When Escobar went to court, he took along a squad of young toughs brandishing submachine guns...
...Carlos Leh-der Rivas, the first of the cocaine stars, was overestimated...
...Only one of Moncada's men even stood trial, a German-Colombian medical-student-turned-drug-pilot named Rudolf Armbrecht, who was convicted of money-laundering and is now serving a 13-year sentence in a federal prison in New Orleans...
...In a bravura display of financial tracking, agents for Customs, the IRS, and the FBI were able to show that Armbrecht had paid for the plane with drug money laundered through C-Chase and BCCI...
...Customs Service sting that brought down the Bank of Credit and Commerce International...
...His farm featured a private zoo with camels, giraffes, hippopotamuses, and an elephant that picked pockets...
...The Medellin cartel is regrouping under younger, more sophisticated, and more dangerous leadership...
...When Cali leaders answered a summons, they went with a squad of lawyers...
...On August 16 of this year, Justice Minister Jaime Giraldo and several other justice officials were forced to resign when it was disclosed that Pablo Escobar had received over two hundred guests, several of them wanted felons, and that dozens of unauthorized cars had been allowed inside the compound...
...The murdered lawyer may have committed a great legal blunder: a female client in the case had been offered a fairly light plea bargain...
...But Vespasian was wrong...
...Television might show a raid on a cocaine lab or a drug dealer's farm, and the cartel kingpins might take sanctuary in the jungle or neighboring Panama...
...An octogenarian television priest, the country's best-known cleric, acted as go-between and prayed for Escobar's redemption...
...The Drug Enforcement Agency still calls the Cali cartel the main New York supplier, and DEA leaks refer to Cali as the new menace, but the yuppified second generation in Medellin, with Moncada on top, may be more effective and even deadlier...
...For instance, is there even a drug "cartel...
...Anyone who could run such a fully integrated drug ring without having his picture taken was a force to be reckoned with...
...The plane carried more than 500 kilograms of cocaine, destined for New York...
...Possibly the Bolivian and Peruvian growers would set up their own processing labs and expand into the downstream market...
...The only important piece of information was his name: Gerardo Moncada...
...The cartel uses 80 percent of the ether 22 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1991 imported into Colombia...
...O f course, Moncada was doing his best to prevent an accurate reading...
...Sometimes the volatile ether ignites, blowing up lab and workers...
...Cali, further south, was smaller and quieter, and so were its hoodlums...
...Don Chepe...
...Discovering Don Chepe was the drug-war equivalent of finding a new planet between Jupiter and Saturn, but even though three federal grand juries have now indicted him, no one talks about it...
...By one recent count, forty-two journalists have been killed by the cartel, a close second to forty-five murdered judges...
...The big boys never touch drugs," they said, "but they always touch the money...
...Drug lords, most conspicuously Pablo Escobar in his hometown of Envigado, built low-cost housing for slum-dwellers, who made capable and faithful assassins...
...Pablo Escobar, now a hunted fugitive, retaliated by offering his Medellin followers a bounty for each policeman killed...
...In spite of Lehder's flash, Escobar and the Antioquians ran things...
...But it never succeeded in capturing Mora's main client—Don Chepe...
...If they turned themselves in and served a jail term, they wouldn't be handed over to the U.S...
...The thugs from Medellin grabbed most of the headlines because of their violence, and names like Escobar, Ochoa, and Rodriguez Gacha were becoming notorious...
...An informant told DEA agents in New York that Don Chepe kept his cocaine distribution strictly separate from his money laundering...
...Mazur also heard the name "Chucho," 24 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1991 but he wasn't sure for months whether it was a reference to Don Chepe or an aide...
...The DEA was preoccupied with a Colombian ex-whore named Griselda Blanco, who was slaughtering her competitors and creditors by the dozens...
...Shortly before meeting in Paris with a delegation from Medellin, Mazur confronted Mora directly...
...A few years ago one Senate investigator interviewed three Miami DEA agents, each of whom had served a high-risk tour in Colombia...
...Humans have a stormy relationship with alkaloids: the family includes caffeine and nicotine...
...The noxious fumes turn their faces gray and the alkaloids stain their skins, earning them their nickname verdemanos ("green-hands...
...The world's most important drug bank, the notorious BCCI, has gone largely out of business, dropping skeletons from every closet...
...In 1980, the cartel was a mystery, and lawmen were busy just counting the bodies from the "cocaine wars...
...He kept a working gallows on his farm, along with a collection of porcelain cats, and liked to carve his initials into the bullets he fired from his silver-plated automatic pistol...
...Their car got lost in the Maritime backwoods and wandered across the U.S...
...After each atrocity, the Colombian cabinet would order a major crackdown, but, until the cartel's declaration of war, they all petered out...
...The inky, sweaty, alkaloid smell of money is the most pungent smell of the cartel, and its most potent perfume...
...As Mazur moved more and more money for Gustavo Mora, Jr., the ambitious Colombian kept telling him about a major new contact in Medellin, one of the "heavy ones" in the cartel...
...It's a loaded question, one guaranteed to fuel the unending feud between Customs and the DEA, but theintelligence failure isn't the fault of the field agents...
...They rely on information from their own agencies—information usually directed solely toward making a case in court—or call friends at other agencies when their supervisors aren't watching...
...His place of birth: "Colombia...
...As he rode his favorite horse, Rescate, with his huge belly flopped over the saddle horn, spectators pitied the sway-backed beast...
...The term "cartel" was first used in a 1980 memo produced by Operation Banco, the first FBI/DEA task force targeting money-laundering...
...These estimates failed to account for expenses, which in Escobar's case must have been enormous...
...One or two expendable druggers might be brought to justice, which, given the state of the Colombian judiciary, meant brought to the United States...
...At the same time, amid rumors of a Medellin threat to President Bush's family, the Secret Service rushed to Portland to protect the President's daughter...
...their experiment in "downstreaming" ended in their death...
...C ome of Colombia's biggest drug 13 lords—including kingpins Pablo Escobar and the Ochoa family—have surrendered and gone to jail, claiming they've retired...
...Death squads calling themselves the "Robo-cops" roamed the north Medellin slums, killing dope dealers, addicts, and any young man who looked like he could ride a motorcycle...
...The arrests brought out Don Chepe's ruthless side...
...The bills smell of sweaty palms, old wallets—and cocaine...
...When they wandered back, the Mounties picked them up and found their car crammed with grenades, machine guns, pistols, 2,000 rounds of ammunition, a rubber boat, and inflatable life vests...
...By local legend, the craft had flown Escobar's first load of cocaine...
...The rest of the government didn't know much more, as the Department of Justice proved in September 1989 when it updated its list of the "dozen most wanted" cartel members...
...The cartel made it official with an August 24, 1989 statement to a Medellin radio station declaring "total and absolute war" against virtually all of Colombian society...
...Do they even want to...
...Bribes to police bought advance warning of drug raids...
...A helicopter full of British mercenaries crashed in central Colombia...
...Every kingpin wanted his own professional soccer team, and the drug lords owned a majority of Colombia's national league...
...he asked bluntly...
...Her feuds littered the Miami streets with corpses, but the real drug power was forming elsewhere...
...Moncada maintained a fleet of airplanes, long-range Gulfstream Commanders worth over a million dollars apiece...
...The peasants, no fools, gladly pocket the payments and clear new cocales in the jungle—three new acres for every acre the State Department sprays and pays out of production...
...The few drug cases that did go to trial often ended in strange acquittals...
...hundreds of thugs had already died in Miami and Medellin...
...Only Don Chepe and Chucho, his chief lieutenant, had the whole picture...
...Likewise, the cocaine smugglers knew how much to deliver, but had no idea what their contact owed...
...All the defendants were convicted...
...And a smell would surround the paralyzed government, the smell that marked the cartel above all others —the smell of money...
...But last year the Senate Appropriations Committee voted not to fund it...
...But in the third and most probable scenario, Medellin's second generation would emerge to pick up the pieces...
...The killings of presidential candidates cleared away any lingering notion that the cartel was a problem only for the United States...
...But agents don't want to niggle over definitions when lives are at stake...
...Along with the horses, Big Fabio raised three sons who shared his animal interests and who became, with Escobar, the core of the Medellin cartel...
...The sheet continued: HEIGHT: Unknown WEIGHT: Unknown HAIR: Unknown EYES: Unknown The backgrounder even placed him in the wrong cartel, Cali instead of Medellin...
...The undercover money-laundering operations were turning up a wealth of intelligence...
...It may yet happen that the former Medellin heads pass up the chance to retire as the world's richest horse trainers, and that the government has copped out again...
...The crossfire left nearly a hundred people dead—guerrillas, soldiers, office workers, and most of the Supreme Court justices...
...Colombia had a new president—who had managed to stay alive through the elections—and he offered the drug lords a deal...
...The minister died within the hour...
...They traced the plane's registration to an airplane broker in Tennessee, who had sold it to Rudi Armbrecht, the Operation C-Chase defendant...
...The planes took the cover of a charter airline, incorporated under the name Aviel...
...By 1989, Moncada was clearly a rising star within the cartel, perhaps even the equal of Escobar and the Ochoas...
...What would replace it...
...This hit-or-miss approach not only has led to huge oversights in intelligence, such as the failure to spot Moncada, but also leaves drug enforcement personnel unable to grapple with surprisingly basic questions...
...He and his bodyguards fought back with grenades and then scattered...
...Griselda Blanco even named her son Michael Corleone...
...As he gained power, he took on the nickname el padrino: the Godfather...
...The government received a much-needed boost...
...Medellin, the country's second-largest city, was busily imitating the Chicago of the 1920s...
...He hit instead on someone else, a Medellin heavyweight almost totally unknown to the American government...
...they hired toughs from Medellin to do the job...
...The coca leaf yields an alkaloid of carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen...
...Most of Colombia suspected, but could not prove, that the druggers paid for the takeover of the Supreme Court by the M-19 guerrilla group in 1985, on the day the court was to begin debating Colombia's extradition policy...
...But six months later business would be back to normal and the cartel would be stronger than ever...
...He emerged in 1976 with a plan to provide a bridge to the U.S...
...But there was no ambiguity in the bombing of El Espectador in September 1989, the continued murders of judges, police, and reporters, and the assassination of three major candidates for the 1990 presidential election...
...Moncada remained a mystery right up to the end of Operation C-Chase...
...The money side of his operation knew how much a distributor owed, but not how much cocaine he was moving...
...He organized hit squads for Medellin jobs and Israeli-trained paramilitary guards for the jungle labs...
...When, in November 1989, an Avianca airliner exploded in mid-air, killing all 107 passengers, police blamed Escobar and Rodriguez Gacha...
...He controlled transportation capable of reaching Canada...
...border...
...The government's big break came in mid-December 1989...
...The passenger on the bike took a Georgia-made Ingram MAC-10 machine pistol from under his coat and emptied a clip through the rear window...
...He quickly earned enough for four huge ranches and a private zoo, with free-running herds of buffalo and giraffes...
...And he could put together cocaine loads that would have made Carlos Lehder drool...
...State Department wants to fight the drug war through crop eradication...
...In the course of C-Chase, he would move some money for the big names and catch sight of large parts of their financial structure...
...For years, Mazur had planned a long-range money laundering sting that would bring him within striking distance of the big boys...
...One said: Yeah, it's tightly controlled, from the top down...
...Lehder grew up with his mother in the United States...
...Customs gloats privately that it spotted Moncada first, but plays him down for tactical reasons...
...He fell for the wife of one of Pablo Escobar's bodyguards and took the direct approach to the husband: he went to the man's house and shot him dead...
...The youngest, Little Fabio, looked like a college hippie, but ran the Miami side of the business with life-anddeath power over hundreds of dealers...
...Later he added Che Guevara to his pantheon...
...Lehder bowled over a lot of ladies, but chose badly...
...Now reorganizing and just as ruthless as ever, the resilient cartel is learning from its mistakes...
...By the mid-1980s, Escobar had garnered fabulous wealth, although probably not the $2 billion Forbes estimated in putting him on its list of world billionaires...
...He had the capacity to launder millions of dollars...
...Fabio Ochoa Vasquez, the patriarch, bred and trained Colombian walking horses, and had more breeding himself than most of the slum-life in the dope trade...
...Some counters wear surgical masks for protection against the lead...
...The Ochoa boys decided to try it out...
...The Mounties later heard that she was the girlfriend of a cartel bigshot, possibly even of Escobar himself...
...An agent named Robert Mazur, a genius at undercover work, set up an entire phony money-laundering James Ring Adams is author, with Doug Frantz, of a book on BCCI, A Full-Service Bank, to be published in January by Simon and Schuster...
...The U.S...
...Several Bolivian growers once tried to set up their own lab complex...
...Medellin had trouble with the government, too, and this time it was serious...
...Cali men didn't like to kill...
...But the police staged abrutal retaliation...
...His discovery may have more lasting importance than his missed connection with the cartel stars...
...The cartel's August declaration of war ushered in a spate of random bombings...
...Sometimes topping 400 pounds on a five-foot-six frame, he frequently displayed his incredible girth at local horse shows...
...A second indictment early last September brought Rico charges against Moncada and senior BCCI officials...
...More likely, some thought, the Cali cartel would move into the vacuum...
...Pablo summoned the other cartel leaders to a meeting and ten days later delivered Lehder to the DEA...
...No one thought there would be an end to the slash-and-burn clearing of cocales in Peru, or that the cocaine labs would shut down, or that the incredible money flow from North America would dry up...
...The downfall of BCCI began in late 1986, when the Customs office in Tampa, Florida, heard that a mid-level Colombian money launderer, Gustavo Mora, Jr., had come to town to set up a new network...
...Sightseers could drive through, passing under a portal supporting a single-engine airplane...
...for the budding Medellin cocaine trade...
...It was Rodriguez Gacha, venturing far from his central Colombian holdings to supervise a drug shipment...
...For all the political talk of a "war" on drugs, Congress has slighted one of the most elemental aspects of a military campaign: adequate intelligence...
...But Lehder was an outsider, not even a native of Medellin or its surrounding Antioquia province...
...The druggers laugh at Brian DePalma's cocaine morality play Scar-face, but they love Francis Ford Coppola's Godfather movies...
...That was too much even for Escobar...
...And police raids on the labs make the druggers really mad...
...In March 1984, Colombian forces trashed the vast Tranquilandia complex, the "Silicon Valley of drugs...
...T he most courageous response to I the onslaught came from the press...
...The government had conspicuously exempted Cali from its crackdown, indicating that it was fighting the narco-terrorism of Medellin, not the apolitical trafficking of others...
...T he plane in the New Brunswick I snowdrift revealed more about Moncada than a certain impatience with lawyers...
...In the furor over BCCI, nearly everyone has forgotten that Moncada was the ultimate target of the American agents who infiltrated the bank...
...agents to pick up the scent...
...Escobar waited for the results of Colombia's constitutional convention, called to end the country's decades-old guerrilla problem...
...The drug lord had just been elected to the Colombian congress, and the scandal ended his political career...
...This was the cartel's first big-time political assassination, but motorcycle shootings were already routine...
...The cartel treasures its hold on processing...
...It took a while for U.S...
...The money trail led to other cartel leaders, next to whom Escobar looked charming...
...it survives only because the House kept it as a morsel for the pork barrel, with a quarter of the funding envisioned...
...Street-worn tens and twenties passed around in drug deals do stink...
...But there was enough left for the extravagant consumption that became a cartel hallmark...
...The Ochoa family had more pretensions...
...The petty assassins responded with enthusiasm, murdering more than 400 Colombian officers...
...the truth is somewhere in between...
...Others don't even think there is central control...
...A thousand people, most of them youths, died in the slaughter...
...In revenge, the cartel ordered the assassination of Justice Minister Rodrigo Lara Bonilla...
...The gunship started firing...
...When money launderers count a million or more in a windowless room, their thumbs turn a greasy green and the whiff of heavy, lead-based ink rises in the air...
...Some thought the two cartels were fighting for control of Jackson Heights, the Colombian neighborhood in Queens...
...Instead he wrote public letters anguishing over his wayward sons, and spent their money on his horses...
...Cartel or confederation, something sits in the main cities of Colombia directing a flood of drugs into the U.S...
...Rodriguez Gacha ditched the truck and sprinted for cover...
...Lawyers, realtors, and financial advisers were raking in big fees, and no one asked where the money came from...
...they said they had been sent by Cali to assassinate Pablo Escobar...
...The man most likely to emerge as the new cartel boss, the shadowy "Don Chepe," has covered his tracks so successfully that almost no one in the American public has heard his name...
...Rodriguez Gacha grabbed a truck and sped across open fields as a helicopter gunship whirred behind him...
...The Feds still hadn't figured out the key players, but the money trail pointed to a handful of families in Medellin and Cali, the two cities that controlled 80 percent of the cocaine flooding into the United States...
...One side of the outfit, however, was hard to hide, even for someone so obsessively secretive that he wouldn't even reveal the price of his product...
...He had spotted one of the kingpins and wanted to claim the $625,000 reward that had been offered by the government...
...In mid-1989, tensions between Medellin and Cali burst into open warfare...
...If the jungle doesn't get them down, the chemicals do...
...The smell of the cartel is the acrid smell of burning forest...
...Mora only smiled...
...Can the drug lords control production of the drug to drive up the price...
...But he never came within arm's length of Escobar or the Ochoas...
...to stand trial...
...Then a boatman from the country's north coast called in a tip...
...As Cano's car idled in a traffic jam, a motorcycle rider emptied a MAC-10 through his window...
...The day after the last trial, in early June, one of their defense lawyers, Sidney Leithman, was driving to work when a car blocked the road in front...
...He showed up in the indictment as "John Doe, a.k.a...
...Add a whiff of sulfuric acid and potassium permanganate, and you have the lethal brew that extracts cocaine crystal from coca paste...
...He snorted coke himself, and other cartel leaders began to worry about his antics...
...Previously obscure figures were spreading around great wealth...
...Manuel Antonio Noriega, who turned Panama into a narcotics way-station, is now standing trial in Miami on drug conspiracy charges...
...Often he met the Colombians' agents, and he heard some of the cartel gossip coming out of other operations...
...Those were the useful entries...
...In the backlands of Peru and Bolivia, near the headwaters of the Amazon, peasants slash and burn rain forest and plant the coca bush in terraced cocales of two to three acres each...
...But planes leave a paper trail, and sometimes a lot more than paper...
...They sound like big victories in the "war on drugs," but, despite the headlines, the Medellin cartel is regrouping under younger, more sophisticated, and more dangerous leadership...
...Paste from the leaves comes north to vast, ramshackle laboratories hidden in the Colombian jungle, where chemicals from the industrial world transform it into a salt, cocaine hydrochloride, in which form the bitter, shiny crystals make their final passage to the streets of the world...
...In the early 1980s, he pioneered bulk smuggling into Georgia and Florida, bring-ing in 200 kilos at a time on Cessnas, Beechcraft Bonanzas, Swearigen Merlin Ills, Piper Navajos, and practically every other type of small jet on the market...
...The third said: You're both wrong...
...Colombian journalists speculate that he might have been the mysterious "fourth partner" in the Tranquilandia laboratory complex...
...Six weeks after the Tranquilandia bust, as the justice minister's white Mercedes slowed in the north Bogota rush hour, two riders kept pace on its tail...
...Royal Canadian Mounted Police were waiting for it, disguised as off-loaders...
...When the convention, urged on by lawyers who ran fmancial errands for the cartel, voted to end extradition, Escobar also took the deal...
...Throughout his youth, Carlos had the off-putting habit of claiming THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1991 23 Adolf Hitler as his hero...
...But Mom would never divulge the name, referring to him only as "Kiko" or "Don Chepe...
Vol. 24 • December 1991 • No. 12
