To their admirers, they are Horatio Alger heroes, poor boys who worked their way out of the slums and backwaters of the Cauca Valley. Onetime delinquent Jose Santacruz Londono studied engineering, went into construction and emerged as Don Chepe, a billionaire whose marble citadel looms high above the sugarcane fields of Cali, the country's third largest city.
Down the road, in the new-rich suburb of Ciudad Jardin, is the modern compound of Gilberto Rodriguez Orejuela. Nicknamed the "Chess Player" because he runs his business -- and life -- with cold calculation, he parlayed youthful jobs as a drugstore clerk by day and a kidnapper by night into a vast network of enterprises, including a pharmacy chain, office and apartment buildings, banks, car dealerships, radio stations and Cali's talented America soccer team. His handsome younger brother Miguel is a fixture on the local social scene, and their children, educated in the U.S. or Europe, are often compared to young Rockefellers or Kennedys by Colombians.
Then there are Gilberto's cousin Jaime Raul Orjuela Caballero and his three brothers, who are prominent impresarios of concerts and sporting events in ! Cali, travel frequently to New York City and have offices in Los Angeles. Ivan Urdinola Grajales and his younger brother Fabio, cattlemen and landowners from the northern Cauca Valley, are said to be exploring a regional television network. Pacho Herrera, believed to be the son of Benjamin Herrera Zuleta, an Afro-Colombian smuggler known as the "Black Pope," is a wealthy valley rancher with business interests in New York.
They are among the richest families in Colombia, but to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, they are the new kings of cocaine, patriarchs of a criminal consortium more disciplined and protected from prosecution than the Sicilian Mafia and now bigger than the Medellin cartel.
The Cali combine produces 70% of the coke reaching the U.S. today, according to the DEA, and 90% of the drug sold in Europe. The Cali godfathers have a virtual lock on the global wholesale market in the most lucrative commodity ever conceived by organized crime. The cartel is the best and brightest of the modern underworld: professional, intelligent, efficient, imaginative and nearly impenetrable. Says Robert Bonner, administrator of the DEA: "The Cali cartel is the most powerful criminal organization in the world. No drug organization rivals them today or perhaps any time in history."
Most people think the narcotics trade belongs to Medellin. It did in the 1980s, when that city's cartel did more than anyone to put cocaine on the street corners of America. But Medellin's drug power has been shattered by its long and vicious war on the Colombian government. A 22-month counterattack by the authorities has killed drug boss Jose Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha, forced the surrender of his fellow cocaine barons, the brothers Jorge, Juan David and Fabio Ochoa, destroyed dozens of labs and airstrips and scattered lesser capos abroad. In the most stunning blow yet to the cartel, Medellin chief Pablo Escobar Gaviria surrendered last week under a plea-bargaining program that promises he will not be extradited to stand trial in the U.S.