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U.S. agents have almost no chance of infiltrating a Cali family. Calenos sell only to people they know, meaning other Colombians. A prospective wholesale buyer must establish his bona fides at an audience with top management in Cali. If he is approved, he is not required to pay cash up front. He will send the cartel payment after he resells the drugs to middlemen. The wholesale buyer must put up collateral, cash or deeds to real property as insurance if he is caught. He must also provide human collateral in the form of his family in Colombia, who will pay with their lives if he ever turns informer.
The system for transferring the drugs is dizzyingly complicated but well- orchestrated. When a load of drugs is shipped to the U.S., the home office faxes to the cell head a list of buyers, the amount of their purchases and their beeper numbers. The cell head signals each customer's beeper to arrange a delivery at a street corner or parking lot. After the customer sells the cocaine down the line, he fixes a second meeting to make payment. The deals take two minutes or less to consummate.
After each meeting, both drivers alert the cell head in code from a mobile phone or beeper. He telephones a desk officer in Cali, then sends confirmation by fax. Detailed ledgers are maintained in both countries. The ledgers have proved the system's main vulnerability, providing a rich lode of data to DEA analysts when seized.
If anyone involved in a deal fails to call in, or catches a whiff of the law, the cell is shut down. Last July, in a raid on a Leto Lopez front business in Queens, agents found a list of Calenos who had rented apartments around Manhattan. By the time agents reached the addresses, everyone was gone, leaving behind cocaine, ledgers, more than $1.5 million in cash, and two steamer trunks full of arms. "Whenever we get close to these people," says U.S. District Attorney Andrew Maloney, "they're on a plane back to Colombia, and we have to start all over again."
The cartel's need for goods, services and go-betweens has spawned a thriving network of cottage industries. Front companies acquire mobile phones by the dozen and "sublet" them to the cells. The traffickers know investigators need four or five days to get a court-ordered wiretap, so they use a phone for two days and discard it. If a mobile phone is eventually traced, the trail stops at the front company.
Document specialists obtain clean driver's licenses and car registrations. In 1989 the FBI and New York City prosecutors cracked a scheme in which employees of the state Department of Motor Vehicles were taking bribes of $100 to write phony registration papers. Hundreds of falsely documented cartel vehicles, fitted with hidden compartments, moved drugs north from Mexico and returned south with cash.
The cartel's second-biggest industry is money laundering. The monthly gross for some New York cells runs from $7 million to $12 million, all in $5, $10 and $20 bills. That translates into 1,000 to 3,000 pounds of bills a month, a logistical nightmare.