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These tales filter back to the DEA. Possibly, Don 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. "He's the one I'll never get."
Investigators in New York, Los Angeles, Louisiana and Florida have won some battles against the cartel. They have dismantled a succession of distribution rings. 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.
Yet these setbacks have not impeded the cartel's steady growth. Cali's leaders have carefully compartmentalized their organization, so that individual losses do not threaten to bring down the whole enterprise. The Cali management style is cerebral, calculating and guileful. In the tradition of the great Mediterranean trading dynasties, the major families have a patriarchal, authoritarian structure that demands absolute discipline and loyalty yet encourages creativity.
The Cali imagination shines when it comes to the art of smuggling. Medellin brazenly shipped cocaine across borders in fast boats or light planes with extra fuel bladders. Calenos prefer the slow but safe merchant marine. The cartel has devised endless ways to hide contraband in commercial cargo and launder it through third countries. U.S. Customs can check perhaps 3% of the 9 million shipping containers that enter U.S. ports annually, making the odds very favorable for Cali.
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.
Then in April 1988, a load of Brazilian cedar boards arrived in Tarpon Springs, Fla., aboard the freighter Amazon Sky. DEA alerted Tampa Customs that an informer had reported 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.