Eight
In the 1970s the illegal drug of choice was changing and the smuggling market adapted swiftly. Fortunately for the smugglers, interest was growing in another illicit drug that beat marijuana on every point—higher profits, lower bulk and fewer people. It was cocaine. Miami Herald reporters Guy Gugliotta and Jeff Leen in their book Kings of Cocaine described the transition: “The country’s tastes were changing from marijuana to cocaine, and surging demand sent the price sky high: a kilogram (2.2 pounds) of cocaine, the standard unit of measure in the trade, sold for $51,000 in Miami, up from $34,000 just a year earlier. And there were more kilos coming in than ever before. South Florida was a smuggler’s paradise. Miami was closer to Barranquilla, Colombia, than to Chicago and Florida had 8,246 miles of shoreline to patrol.”
The drug in its natural state was used for centuries by Native Americans in the Andes. They obtained its effects by chewing the leaves of the coca plant. It wasn’t until 1855 that European chemists were able to isolate the active ingredient and create a formula for its production. The chemists called it cocaine, and it became quite popular. Users included President Ulysses S. Grant, Popes Leo XIII and Saint Pius X and Queen Victoria of England (who, as mentioned in chapter seven, was also a fan of marijuana).
Sigmund Freud wrote in Über Coca (1884) that cocaine produces “exhilaration and lasting euphoria, which in no way differs from the normal euphoria of the healthy person…You perceive an increase of self-control and possess more vitality and capacity for work…In other words, you are simply normal, and it is soon hard to believe you are under the influence of any drug…Long intensive physical work is performed without any fatigue…This result is enjoyed without any of the unpleasant after-effects that follow exhilaration brought about by alcohol…Absolutely no craving for the further use of cocaine appears after the first, or even after repeated taking of the drug.”
Despite Dr. Freud’s conclusion, cocaine is seriously addictive. It was outlawed in 1922, only two years after Prohibition went into effect. The impact of the cocaine ban was immediate. “Federal narcotics agents based in Tampa added to the alarm,” wrote Michael Mundt in the November 1996 Journal of the Tampa Historical Society. “In 1923, they revealed to the press that drug prices were falling as Tampa’s dealers waged a ‘dope war,’ flooding the city’s streets with greater amounts of narcotics to maintain profits. These agents observed that Tampa was rapidly becoming a ‘notorious’ drug selling and smuggling center, drawing addicts from across the south.”
Four times, Tampa’s “federal narcotics agents” showed up in the Tampa press during the year following cocaine’s ban. In retrospect, considering the times, it seems like scaremongering by a new bureaucracy to get more money. As we’ll see, this tactic works as well now as it did then.
Some rumrunners emerged from Prohibition to create large organized crime industries embracing a number of vices. But cocaine smuggling remained an oddity until the late 1970s, when it emerged in a hail of gunfire and headlines. Then it was a real scare. Gugliotta and Leen covered it for the Miami Herald as on-the-scene reporters and then wrote in their book:
Metropolitan Dade County would become for a time the murder capital of the nation, and south Florida would see an unprecedented federal police effort against drug smuggling. Yet the cocaine trade would grow phenomenally, a deluge beyond prediction. In fiscal 1977, U.S. law enforcement seized 952 pounds of cocaine in the entire country, and estimated the total amount of imported cocaine at 19,000 pounds. Four years later, a single Miami drug importer working for the Colombians would bring in 38,000 pounds in seven months without suffering a single seizure. In 1986 federal law enforcement agents in the south Florida region alone would seize more than 50,000 pounds of cocaine. By the end of the decade any cocaine seizure under a ton barely rated a mention in The Miami Herald’s local news pages.
While Florida’s pot hauls were family-and-neighbor affairs, the cocaine smugglers were a more ruthless group. A saying began to circulate in the early 1980s: a pot deal is done with a handshake; a coke deal is done with a gun. In Miami, there was a lot of gunfire. Again, Gugliotta and Leen:
The Miami Herald detailed a series of drug executions the likes of which the locals had never seen. Colombians were dying in all sorts of interesting ways: stuffed in a cardboard box and dumped in the Everglades; delivered DOA to an emergency room in a white Cadillac; wrapped in plastic and dumped in a canal in Coral Gables; machine-gunned to death while sitting in noon-time traffic. ‘It’s Dodge City all over again,’ said a federal prosecutor. ‘A replay of Chicago in the 1920s,’ a county coroner called it. Colombians crowded the Dade County morgue—Dead County, the Colombians called it.
As the nation recoiled in horror, the president decided to send help. On January 28, 1982, President Ronald Reagan formed the South Florida Drug Task Force. More than two thousand agents of the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms and Customs deployed to Miami to fight the cocaine smugglers. And in a repeat of Colonel Nutt’s efforts sixty years earlier, navy ships and aircraft were assigned interception duty.
Heading up the task force was Vice President George H.W. Bush, who told the National Press Club on June 17, 1983: “In a very brief period of time we sent to South Florida additional federal judges, more prosecuting attorneys and hundreds of additional law enforcement personnel. We beefed up the Coast Guard, solicited and received help from the Defense Department including the Navy, the Army, the Air Force and the Marines. We intensified our diplomatic initiatives, which resulted in improved cooperation with the Bahamian Government and some of our Latin American friends. The results have been gratifying.”
Not everybody thought the effort was a success. “A year after the task force arrived, the price of a kilo of cocaine dropped from $55,000 to $13,000, a record low and [an] indication of a massive glut at the wholesale level,” Gugliotta and Lean wrote.
NEW TOYS, OLD TACTICS
In the beginning, cocaine smugglers used aircraft to ferry their cargo from Colombia to south Florida. They often landed at undeveloped subdivisions, which had paved streets but no residents. Proto-cities like North Port contained hundreds of miles of empty streets, paved by developers but lined with unsold lots. One Sarasota County sheriff’s deputy called the area “North Port International.” Other proto-cities like Cape Coral became clandestine airports as well. Police would often find abandoned aircraft parked in North Port, retired after one flight. The distinctive roar of low-flying DC-3s became a familiar nighttime sound in the Everglades and Ten Thousand Islands. For the pilots, the payoff was immense: $3,500 per kilo.
But with increased radar and aerial surveillance, the smugglers returned to the age-old, tried-and-true route—the sea. Again they used the mother ship for bulk and a go-fast speedboat for infiltration to shore. Often the mother ship would anchor in Bahamian waters for the rendezvous. Authorities moved to thwart the smugglers with intensified maritime patrols. And smugglers changed procedures to thwart the authorities.
As the surveillance intensified, the mother-ship system was abandoned, and a brand new technique was pioneered. Gugliotta and Leen used the testimony of a man who later came into the Federal Witness Protection Program to describe it.
Max [Mermelstein] had subcontracted with a group of American pilots and powerboaters to bring in tons of cocaine for the cartel. Beginning in September 1982, the smuggling group’s aircraft, a Piper Navajo, flew from Colombia and air-dropped cocaine into the waters off Long Cay in the Bahamas. The plane then continued on to Nassau, where it picked up ‘cover girls,’ women paid $2,000 to pose as tourists for the flight in south Florida. Meanwhile, the floating cocaine was retrieved by crews in speedboats who made the seventy-five mile run into Miami at speeds of up to 90 miles per hour—each run required a new $100,000 engine. A ‘spotter plane’ circled the drop site looking out for Customs planes. Under cover of darkness, the boats slipped into Biscayne Bay while a lookout with binoculars scanned the water from the eleventh floor of a nearby condominium. A communications center in Miami monitored law enforcement frequencies and provided the radio linkup for the planes and boats. Except for the cocaine getting wet, the system was foolproof. Load after load got through undetected.
Authorities had no idea how much cocaine was coming into the country. One indicator—the total annual seizures—showed the trade had swelled forty-fold. In 1981 a total of 4,000 pounds of cocaine was seized; in 1988, it was 150,000 pounds.
Commercial traffic was used to camouflage loads too. A cargo of streetlights was brought in from Colombia by freighter; cocaine was found inside the poles. Virtually every legitimate exportable commodity from Colombia—even flowers—was used to disguise the real cargo of cocaine.
As the business soared, the cocaine economy became vertically integrated, and cartels were created to manage the multibillion-dollar industry. The money came back to Colombia, either through money-laundering schemes or pure smuggling of bundles of cash. The cartels used the cash not only for their personal opulence, but also to build schools, athletic stadiums and other civic buildings in Colombia. Some of the profits were used to start legitimate businesses, which could be used to smuggle more cocaine or to accept laundered monies in return.
Halting cocaine smuggling at sea is now a cross-discipline, multinational effort. These bales of cocaine on the dock at Tampa were seized by a “tactical law enforcement team” working with a Dutch warship in the Antilles. More than a ton of cocaine was aboard the ship in the background. Courtesy U.S. Coast Guard.
For “muscle,” the cartels made alliances with Colombian revolutionaries to provide security for coca growers and jungle laboratories. The term “narco-terrorist” was born from this unholy alliance. The money distributed to both right- and left-wing insurgents was used to fund revolutionary cadres, purchase arms and hire mercenaries for training.
The Colombian partnership between the cartels and the rebels formed a model for other smugglers and insurgents across the globe. Heroin production and export, for example, funded the Taliban government of Afghanistan. After a short interlude following the Taliban’s expulsion by U.S.-led forces, heroin production now exceeds the pre-invasion levels. The cartels in Colombia proved that it may be cheaper for drug organizations to “outsource” their security requirements (either with suborned government forces or rebels) than to provide it internally.
Money was put into Colombia’s political and judicial systems. Cartel candidates openly ran for local, regional and national office. Law enforcement and military officials received largesse from the cartels. Colombian politicians who resisted the inducements faced intimidation and assassination. The objective of the cartel’s campaign was to block extradition of cartel leaders to the United States, and it worked. For years, cartel figures were either free or spent time in comfortable Colombian jail cells. Meanwhile the cocaine continued to flow into Florida.
In addition to fighting extradition, hiring rebels for protection and suborning Colombian officials, the cartels also tried to do what Al Capone did for the Chicago booze trade—intimidate or exterminate the opposition. By the late 1980s, it boiled down to the final two surviving competitors, named after their respective headquarters: the Cali Cartel and the Medellín Cartel. Although it took almost twenty years, when the smoke cleared both cartels lay in ruins.
The organizations had extensive connections in Florida, both as the destination of their illicit cargoes and the beneficiary of their investments. The end began in 1988 with the sentencing of Carlos Lehder—a flamboyant Medellín cocaine entrepreneur and prime target of U.S. drug agents—in federal court. U.S. District Judge Howell Melton gave Lehder 135 years in prison with no possibility of parole.
With Lehder out of circulation during his trial, the Cali Cartel was free to build up its importation and distribution business. But it had to muscle past the Medellín organization. The wake-up call came in January when a car bomb exploded in Medellín, outside the apartment building where cartel chief Pablo Escobar’s wife and son were living.
Murder rates in both cities escalated to all-time highs. “Homicide rates in the city of Cali, Colombia (1994 population: 1,776,436), increased fivefold from 1985 through 1992, reaching levels of 100 per 100,000 persons,” a government report stated. In other words, there was one chance in a thousand of being murdered in Cali in 1992. That’s more than five murders per day.
THE CUBAN CONNECTION AGAIN
The combination of drugs and politics reached from Colombia to Cuba in 1989, when four military officers were tried, convicted and executed for drug crimes by the Castro government. Among those found guilty was Major General Arnoldo Ochoa, a highly decorated military hero.
Speculation continues that Cuban President Fidel Castro used the drug charges to purge Ochoa, who had become critical of the communist government. Other speculation says Ochoa was sacrificed to protect the core of a secret: Cuba was involved deeply with the drug trade and had been for at least a decade.
Aircraft are used to interdict smugglers too. Although a “shoot down” rule was never approved, the “shot across the bow” has been part of maritime law for centuries. Here a coast guard MH-90 lays a machine-gun burst in front of a smuggler’s “go fast.” The MH-90 has no tail rotor and is much quieter than a conventional helicopter. In addition to the machine gun, it also carries a .50-caliber sniper rifle to disable engines. Courtesy U.S. Coast Guard.
On February 5, 1991, the PBS documentary Frontline aired “Cuba and Cocaine.” Four years before the trial of Ochoa, senior Cuban officials approved the use of Cuban waters and airspace by cocaine smugglers, Frontline reported. “In the western part of Cuba, we have 19 SAM missile sites and we have hundreds of radars and we have a regiment of MiG-23 interceptors. And it is completely impossible that a small airplane fly from Colombia to the United States without the knowledge and the permission of the Cuban authority,” said Cuban Air Force General Rafael del Pino, the highest ranking military officer to defect from Castro’s Cuba.
Aircraft would fly from Colombia with cargoes of cocaine, airdrop them to waiting high-speed powerboats and then return to Cuban airfields to refuel. U.S. Coast Guard boats, watching from outside the twelve-mile limit, saw it happen sixty-four times in a twelve-month period.
The “key man” was Reinaldo Ruiz. He was a cocaine smuggler with family connections inside Fidel Castro’s inner circle. He eventually was caught, convicted and began to talk of his Cuban connection. “Every time that I went over there, I was completely sure that I had a 100 percent backing, all the way to the top, otherwise I never, ever touch a thing out there,” he told Frontline. “When you go to a place, an office, and everything is resolved, everything is taken care and people play with cocaine like it was mangoes and oranges or whatever, you know—I mean, you know that everything is controlled.”
Cuba was taking a commission on every kilo passing above or around the island. It was providing escorts for drug-laden freighters, fuel for smugglers’ aircraft and even top-drawer rest and relaxation facilities for the smugglers themselves.
On July 26, 1989, Ambassador Melvin Levitsky, assistant secretary of state for international narcotics matters, testified to Congress: “There is no doubt that Cuba is a transit point in the illegal drug flow…We have made a major commitment to interdicting this traffic…Although it is difficult to gauge the amount of trafficking that takes place in Cuba, we note a marked increase in reported drug trafficking incidents in Cuban territory during the first half of 1989.”
With Ruiz talking to U.S. prosecutors about his Cuban connections, the Cuban government reacted quickly. The four military officers were arrested, led through a show trial and executed. Any link between Castro and cocaine was severed.
The arrest, trial, conviction and execution were widely covered in the Cuban press. It included a very rare televised speech by Raul Castro, Fidel’s brother, Cuban minister of defense and heir apparent. It was unusual because Raul Castro rarely spoke in public. His two-hour speech is still studied by “Cuba watchers.” In announcing the capture of the ringleaders, Fidel Castro mentioned Pablo Escobar several times in his speech.
Escobar started life as a small-time car thief and became one of the richest men in the world. His strategy was simple: “plata o plomo,” Spanish for “gold or lead,” take the bribe or the bullet. At its zenith, his Medellín Cartel was taking in $25 billion annually. Forbes magazine rated him the seventh-richest private individual on the planet in 1989.
CARTEL IMMOLATION
As the cartel wars escalated, Escobar developed a unique survival strategy. He built a luxurious wing on a prison in 1991, and then surrendered to Colombian authorities on the condition he stay in his home-built jail and not be extradited to the United States. Escobar remained in his prison-cum-fortress about one year and then “escaped” when authorities wanted to relocate him.
Escobar went into hiding with thousands of people on his trail. U.S. Navy SEALs and Delta Force operatives joined the hunt and trained a special Colombian law enforcement team call the Search Bloc. In addition, a paramilitary group called the PPES (People Persecuted by Escobar) launched an all-out vigilante war on the Medellín Cartel. It destroyed cartel properties and assassinated more than three hundred Escobar associates.
The relationship between the U.S. government, the Search Bloc and the PPES death squads remains elusive. Without question there was widespread sharing of intelligence, and there is some evidence Search Bloc members were associated with PPES activities.
It came to an end on December 2, 1993. Escobar was isolated in an apartment building in a middle-class neighborhood of Medellín, surrounded by the Search Bloc and killed by a bullet behind his ear. The Medellín Cartel and its leader were no more. While the Colombian government was one beneficiary of the shootout, the big winner was Escobar’s competition—the Cali Cartel.
The group in Cali operated with less flamboyance than Escobar’s Medellín crowd, preferring the bribe to the bullet. Once it became the dominant player, it was able to work in cooperation with smaller organizations to avoid open warfare. They were able, as Al Capone did decades before, to co-opt and integrate competitors into one large, smoothly operating smuggling machine.
By the mid-1990s, cocaine smuggling moved off the front pages and returned to being a covert trade. As the gunfire receded, control centralized and the trade increased. In 1999, for example, fifty-eight baggage handlers and food-service workers at Miami International Airport were arrested for using commercial airliners to smuggle cocaine. It was the power of “la plata.”
Like many continuing criminal enterprises, the Cali Cartel was a family affair with the Rodriguez-Orejuela clan. For nearly thirty years, the leader, Gilberto Rodriguez-Orejuela—nicknamed “the chess player”—was a pioneer in the drug trade. His brother Miguel ran the day-to-day operations.
Gilberto first came to the attention of serious law enforcement in 1978, when warrants for his arrest on drug trafficking charges were issued by authorities in New York and Los Angeles. He showed up again in 1984, when he was arrested in Spain at the height of the cartel quarrel. In his hotel room was a ledger detailing shipment of four metric tons of cocaine.
By February 1985, Gilberto was featured in Newsweek as one of the “Kings of Coke.” It took almost two years for the Colombian government to successfully extradite Gilberto from Spain for trial on drug trafficking charges. After a five-month trial in Cali, Gilberto was found not guilty.
Gilberto was rearrested almost a decade later in 1995 in a house surrounded by three thousand Colombian police and drug agents. They almost missed him, as he hid in a crawl space behind a moveable bookcase. His brother was captured the following year. Both were tried, found guilty and sentenced to Colombia’s La Picota prison. At that time, the DEA estimated annual profits for the Cali Cartel exceeded $8 billion, and the organization controlled 80 percent of the global cocaine market. Gilberto was released in 2002 for “good behavior,” but public outrage in Colombia led to his rearrest four months later.
The brothers were also indicted in the United States in 1995, along with fifty-four other people. Among them was a senior U.S. Department of Justice lawyer, who left the department in 1984 and took up Gilberto and Miguel as clients. American efforts to extradite the brothers succeeded in 2004, when Colombia agreed to extradite them to stand trial in the United States on drug trafficking charges. They appeared in Miami Federal Court on December 6, 2004. The indictment sought a forfeiture of more than $2 billion. The Associated Press reported at the time:
The cartel became renowned for its ingenious methods of hiding tons of cocaine in everything from hollow lumber and concrete fence posts to chlorine cylinders, frozen broccoli and okra. Investigators believe a 15-ton seizure of cocaine-stuffed fence posts in Miami in 1991 followed more than 20 similar shipments that passed through undetected. “The way the cocaine is concealed, it’s brilliant,” said Tom Cash, head of the Drug Enforcement Administration in Miami during the cartel’s heyday in the 1990s. “If you go back and think of all the major traffickers from certainly the ’90s and even into the 2000s, there’s nobody in their class. They’re in a class by themselves,” Cash said. “By magnitude, by money, by class of corruption.”
When Gilberto and Miguel went to prison in Colombia (and were subsequently extradited to the United States), the operation of the cartel fell to Miguel’s son, William Rodriguez-Abadia. In early 2006, William pled guilty to drug trafficking charges and agreed to cooperate with U.S. authorities by testifying against his father and uncle. A DEA press release on the guilty plea of William Rodriguez-Abadia on March 9, 2006 says:
According to the factual proffer read by an Assistant United States Attorney at the plea hearing, Rodriguez-Abadia—beginning in 1995, coinciding with the arrest of his father, Miguel Rodriguez-Orejuela, and at his father’s request—began to run various aspects of the Cali cartel, an international drug syndicate directed for many years by his father and his uncle, Gilberto Rodriguez-Orejuela. In particular, Rodriguez-Abadia was placed in charge of administering his father’s portion of the Rodriguez-Orejuela family business enterprises, including Drogas La Rebaja, S.A., a pharmacy chain of approximately 350 pharmacies in Colombia; Laboratorios Kressfor de Colombia, S.A., a pharmaceutical manufacturing company in Colombia; and various other entities in Colombia. Rodriguez-Abadia helped initiate, develop, implement and otherwise manage plans to launder and further conceal the Rodriguez-Orejuelas’ drug profits through a variety of schemes involving these business entities. In addition, according to the proffer, Rodriguez-Abadia was responsible for arranging and ensuring the payment of bribe monies and payoffs to incarcerated cartel employees and their families. These bribes and payoffs were made in an effort to prevent such cartel employees from becoming witnesses against Miguel Rodriguez-Orejuela and Gilberto Rodriguez-Orejuela.
William was for a decade the “political department” of the Cali Cartel, responsible for bribes, payoffs and money laundering. His plea and cooperation effectively will destroy the Cali organization. He received a twenty-two-year sentence, if he continues to cooperate with the authorities.
This map is from the 2006 Drug Threat Assessment Report of the Drug Enforcement Administration, based on 2004 data. It reflects the dramatic diversion of the Colombian cocaine trade from Florida to the southwestern United States, where today 90 percent of the country’s cocaine is smuggled through the border. Twenty years earlier, before the self-destruction of the Colombian cocaine cartels, 90 percent came through Florida. Courtesy Drug Enforcement Administration.
One week before William’s 2006 deal with prosecutors was announced, the U.S. Attorney’s office in New York unveiled indictments against fifty members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), a terrorist organization known to have worked with the cartel. The website moneylaundering.com reported:
Although the FARC initially confined its role to taxing narcotics manufacturers, distributors and traffickers in the Colombian territories it controls, the group eventually became directly involved in the cocaine production to cash in on increasing profits, according to the indictment. Among other things, it set the prices paid to Colombian farmers for cocaine paste, the raw material used to produce cocaine, and for transporting it to jungle laboratories under FARC control, where it was converted into tons of the narcotic and shipped to the United States and elsewhere. As a result, FARC supplies more than 50 percent of the world’s cocaine and more than 60 percent of the cocaine that enters the United States, the indictment states, and spent millions of dollars of its illicit proceeds to purchase weapons for terrorist activities against Colombia, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Manhattan. “From their jungle hideaway, the FARC uses the drug trade to bankroll terrorism in Colombia, finance attacks on innocent citizens, and poison Americans,” DEA Administrator Karen P. Tandy said.
The torch has passed. Leaders of the sole surviving Colombian cocaine cartel of the late twentieth century are now old men in federal custody or younger men helping authorities dismantle the organization. The bodies of others litter the historical landscape. But still the drugs flow. In fiscal year 2004, federal agents seized 242,000 pounds of cocaine at sea—an all-time high. More than 100 tons seized at sea and still the price didn’t go down.
The bulk of these seizures, however, did not come in the Gulf of Mexico. Florida was not their destination. A new cocaine smuggling organization supplanted the Colombian cartels and Florida is now a minor port of entry. The trade moved to Mexico.
The Drug Enforcement Agency’s “National Drug Threat Assessment 2006” states: “Cocaine transportation data indicate that most cocaine available in U.S. drug markets is smuggled into the country via the U.S.–Mexico border. As Mexican DTOs [Drug Trafficking Organizations] and criminal groups control an increasing percentage of the cocaine smuggled into the country, their influence over wholesale distribution will rise even in areas previously controlled by other groups, including areas of the Northeast and Florida/Caribbean Regions.”
The DEA estimates wholesale-level drug distribution in the United States generates between $13.6 billion and $48.4 billion annually. After performing a leading role in the cocaine drama for a quarter century, Florida is now a bit player, but the show goes on.