Prosecutors for the Eastern District
of New York handled most of the Task Force's cases, but according to
former New York prosecutor Jessica de Grazia, they shied away from what
they considered to be "kiddie dope" cases, even when a suspect was
charged with possessing a kilo of cocaine. The DEA's lack of interest
reflected the attitude of the government at all levels toward cocaine at
the time. A drug abuse task force established by President Gerald Ford
in September 1975 issued a report concluding that it was not a problem.
"Cocaine," the report declared, "is not physically addictive. . . and
usually does not result in serious social consequences, such as crime,
hospital emergency room admissions, or both." The task force recommended
that law enforcement focus on drugs such as heroin, amphetamines, and
mixed barbiturates, which posed more risk.
Official statistics painted a
different picture. By 1974, 5.4 million Americans had acknowledged that
they tried using the drug at least once. While law enforcement continued
to focus on heroin in the late 1970s, the statistics documenting cocaine
use shot up; by 1979, according to one estimate, at least 20 percent of
Americans had used cocaine in the past year and 7.3 percent had used it
during the previous month.
When President Jimmy Carter took
office in 1976, his administration also didn't view cocaine use and
abuse seriously. "Cocaine. . . is the most benign of illicit drugs
currently in widespread use," wrote Dr. Peter Bourne, drug advisor to
President Carter and his special assistant for health issues.
"Short acting, not physically addicting and acutely pleasurable, cocaine
has found increasing favor at all socio-economic levels."
The government's benign attitude set
the tone. "When the public heard government officials like Bourne
downplay cocaine, they thought, Hey, cocaine is a recreational drug. I
have nothing to worry about,' " said Michael Kuhlman, a DEA agent who
joined the agency in 1970.
From what he had seen on the street,
Ken Robinson concluded there couldn't be much of a cocaine problem in
Jackson Heights either. For two years prior to joining NYDETF, Robinson
had worked in Brooklyn, and he remembered how the cocaine arrived in the
Brooklyn Harbor aboard a shipping line, the Grancolombiana. The cocaine
would be thrown overboard and picked up by swimmers, Colombians, who
brought it ashore and sold it in the bars of Jackson Heights. That's not
the kind of distribution network that can cause a huge problem, Robinson
figured.
A few weeks passed and nothing much
happened with Group Five and its cocaine investigation. Then, in
September, a Colombian walked unannounced into the NYDETF office with
some important information. What he told the Task Force would make him
one of the most important confidential informants (CIs) in New York City
history. He described a big cocaine ring from Colombia that was
operating in Queens but had a distribution network in other parts of the
country. The ring, the CI elaborated, was well organized and had an
unlimited supply. They used beepers to communicate as they moved the
drugs.
Robinson was skeptical. He had
listened before to CIs who came to the Task Force and spun tall tales.
There was no way to corroborate his story. Besides, if the ring was so
big, how come the Task Force had not heard about it? "Let us know when
something is happening," Robinson told the CI.
A few days later, the CI called again
with an urgent message: A drug deal was going down at 5:30 p.m. that
afternoon on Queens Boulevard in Jackson Heights. The informant even
described the customer: a Colombian, 6'3", 170 pounds, black hair,
mustache, and wearing sunglasses. And, oh yes, the CI added, the dealer
would drive a red Chevrolet and the customer would drive a white car.
Robinson rounded up three other Task
Force investigators and headed for Queens. It was rush hour; the traffic
was heavy, but the investigators made it to Queens Boulevard a few
minutes before the deal was supposed to go down. Yes, a man fitting the
CI's description pulled up in a red Chevy Impala close to where the
investigators were parked. Then the white car pulled up about 100 yards
away. A man stepped out of the white car with a leather jacket slung
over his arm and looked around nervously. He fit the description for the
customer that the CI gave. It's a warm sunny day, so why is he carrying
a jacket? Robinson wondered.
The man passed Robinson's car, walked
over to the driver side of the white car, took a package from inside and
stuck it in his jacket. He looked around and walked quickly back toward
Robinson's car. The investigators stepped out of their cars and walked
slowly toward the man, hoping they wouldn't have to chase him. But he
realized they were cops. Turning around quickly, the suspect bolted in
the opposite direction. The agents gave chase and caught him. They
opened the man's jacket and found a brown paper bag with a one-kilo
brick of cocaine bound tight with masking tape. They arrested the man,
whose name was Nelson Gomez, and hauled him back to the Task Force
office for questioning. Meanwhile, the dealer in the red Impala fled.
The CI called again and told Robinson
that the dealer had ditched his Impala. "Don't look for it," the CI
advised. "You'll never find it." The dealer had escaped, but Robinson
had alertly taken down the Impala's license number during the stakeout.
A check of the state motor vehicle records revealed that the car's owner
lived on Long Island. Robinson went to the address, but found it to be
bogus. In the coming months, Group Five learned that much of what they
uncovered during the course of the investigation names, license
plates, addresses would be bogus.
Robinson was a tenacious cop, who
loved the hunt as much as the catch. He never gave up on a case so long
as he had a lead. In describing Robinson's relentless pursuit of
criminals, one DEA agent who worked with Robinson said, "I'd hate to be
a criminal and have Kenny after me." He checked the records at the
Parking Violations Bureau in Manhattan to see if any summonses had been
issued for the vehicle. Sure enough, there were over 50 parking
violations. Robinson began to check out the places where the Chevy had
been parked.
Robinson couldn't find the red Chevy,
but a blue Buick parked in one of the spots where the red Chevy had been
ticketed caught his attention. It, too, was parked illegally, and a
stack of tickets was tucked under one of the windshield wipers. Robinson
looked around. Across the street was a six-story brick building. He had
a hunch and walked over to see the building superintendent.
When the superintendent came to the
door, Robinson showed him his identification. Using his Irish charm, he
smiled and asked in a casual manner, "Would you know who owns that blue
Buick on the street?"
"Sure do," said the superintendent.
"A couple of Colombians. They keep another car in the basement."
Robinson followed up. "What kind is
it?"
"A red Chevy," the super said.
"Do you mind if we take a look at
it?" asked Robinson the adrenalin starting to pump.
The car was a red Chevy all right,
but something didn't fit. The license plate on the Chevy in the garage
belonged to the Buick in front of the building. Robinson looked at the
Chevy's VIN, the unique identification number affixed to the dashboard,
and got on the phone. He found out that the blue Buick was associated
with the license of the red Chevy that had delivered the cocaine on
September 28.
Robinson ran checks on the license
plates of the blue car on the street and the red Chevy in the garage.
Bingo! It all fit now. The Chevy's plates were registered to the blue
Buick in the street, and the Buick's plates belonged to a third, unknown
car. The red Chevy had not been abandoned as the CI had said. Rather,
the driver had gotten rid of its plates and replaced them with the Buick
plates.
The investigation began in earnest.
For several months, Group Five conducted round-the-clock surveillance on
the red Chevy and blue Buick. Robinson began to spend much of his time
in Queens, and he could see the cocaine problem that the Jackson Heights
citizen's committee had written about. Dealers prowled the streets, and
showed no fear of being busted. Indeed, many sold cocaine directly from
their cars.
Despite the problem, the Task Force's
brass was still unwilling to allocate resources to the case, and the
investigators had to work on it on their own time. They didn't complain
because they felt they were on to something big. Finally the long hours
and chilly nights spent on stakeout began to pay off. In October, Group
Five seized six pounds of cocaine and some financial ledgers. The
investigators had their first inkling of the size of the trafficking
organization they were up against. It was pulling in at least a $1
million a month. The investigators were stunned. Criminals made that
kind of money trafficking heroin, not cocaine.
Group Five continued its
surveillance. In January 1979 they identified a man named Jose Patino as
a major player in the organization, and tailed him out to John F.
Kennedy International Airport. There, he met a stocky man with thick
black hair and flaky patches of skin on his face, who had arrived on a
flight from Colombia. The well-dressed man left the airport and the
detectives stopped him in the parking lot. He produced a passport. His
name was Jose Santacruz Londono. The detectives let him go.
The investigators followed the two
men to a penthouse apartment in Queens and staked it out for several
days. They tailed Patino and his associate to the airport in
Farmingdale, Long Island, where Santacruz took a private plane to
Philadelphia.
In July Robinson identified one of
the apartments Patino was using on Union Street in Flushing, Queens. He
befriended the superintendent, an Eastern European immigrant, who let
him use the empty apartment facing Patino's for surveillance. The blinds
on the apartment's windows were shuttered noon and night and Patino
never appeared. Robinson continued to stake out the place, but he had
other work to do. He left his card with the superintendent and asked him
to call if Patino showed.
One day, Robinson's phone rang. "The
man you're looking for is in the apartment right now," said the
superintendent. Robinson and Mockler rushed over to Patino's place and
stopped him as he was leaving the apartment. The two investigators
showed Patino their badges and asked for his identification. "What you
got in the bag?" Robinson asked. The bag was black leather and slung
over Patino's shoulder.
"Could we search your apartment?"
Mockler asked. Incredibly, Patino shrugged his shoulders to indicate,
why not? Ignorant of his First Amendment rights, Patino didn't even ask
if the investigators had a search warrant. Inside the apartment, the
detectives opened the bag. "What's this electric money counter for?"
They pulled out a bunch of rubber bands. "Why are there so many of them?
What are you going to use them for?"
The phone rang. When they picked it
up, they heard a loud, excited voice speaking in Spanish. "Pepe, what's
happening? Call me! Call me!" A call-back number appeared on the screen,
but the two detectives already had enough to do without trying to trace
the call. Robinson figured that the guy who called was expecting Patino
to bring him the money-counting machine.
They found a series of rent receipts
for a number of apartments. Mockler and Robinson took Patino first to an
apartment on Roosevelt Avenue and 82nd Street. When they entered the
lobby, Patino began sweating and turned pale. The detectives woke up the
superintendent. When Patino saw him, he blurted: "This is where I live,
right? Tell them this is where I live." The verbal barrage confused and
frightened the super, but he whispered to one of the agents, "No, he
doesn't."
The detectives showed the super a
photo. "Yeah, that's Victor Crespo," he confirmed. "I've seen him and
the guy you're with together. They sure keep strange hours, but they
don't cause any problems." The super directed the two detectives to the
ground floor apartment, where they found a fake passport in the name of
Victor Crespo and discovered he had been receiving mail there. Group
Five had hit a home run.
When investigators got to the
apartment on Burns Court, they had to kick down the door. The sickly
smell of cocaine in the apartment almost knocked them out. The windows
were barred and the agents couldn't open them. Some of them left the
apartment to get some air. The rugs were infested with coke and the
bathtub was crammed with kilo packages of white powder.
The occupants had fled, but the
investigators hit another home run. They found 44 pounds of cocaine in a
huge safe, machine guns, thousands of rounds of ammunition, bullet-proof
vests, drivers' licenses, business cards, an aircraft registration, an
automobile registration, coded customer lists, and more financial
records.26 Group Five seized books and manuals that explained how to use
firearms, including a Marine Corps manual entitled Destruction by
Demolition, Incendiaries and Sabotage. "Nobody had ever seen 44
pounds of cocaine in New York City before," Robinson recalled.
John Fallon, the DEA's Northeast
regional director, said the weapons collection was the largest ever
taken by authorities in a coke bust. Fallon publicly worried that a war
for dominance of the Big Apple's cocaine market, similar to the one
going on Miami, would break out among local criminal gangs.
The publicity generated by the Burns
Court bust was a wake-up call. "The DEA brass in New York City sent the
Washington headquarters information providing evidence that cocaine was
becoming a problem, not just in Miami but also New York City," Crawford
recalled. "The DEA started to take the drug seriously. It began
assigning more agents to cocaine investigations."
While Burns Court was being
inspected, Rich Crawford and another investigator checked out The
Towers, a high-rise apartment overlooking Long Island Sound in Bayside,
Queens. There, they found Santacruz's authentic Colombian passport. And
all along they had thought Victor Crespo was Santacruz's real name. The
detectives also found bank records of Gilberto and Miguel Rodriguez
connecting them directly to drug sales in New York.
Inside the safe houses and stash
pads, the detectives found a mountain of evidence: adding machines,
money wrappers, coded customer lists, counterfeit bill detection
equipment, and adding machine tape with a total of $700,740. Group Five
could now begin an in-depth financial investigation of the organization.
The investigators hauled the evidence back to headquarters, where they
split it up and spent several months going through every scrap of paper,
tracing bank records, breaking codes and trying to see what other
stashes they could uncover.
When Group Five investigators finally
decoded the financial records, they found it hard to comprehend the
amount of money involved. In three weeks, Patino had collected
$6,932,000 from just 13 customers, and the organization had made 47 cash
deliveries to money couriers. The amounts of cash delivered were
staggering: $824,000, $722,000, $798,000, and in one instance
$1,721,000. And where was the money going? All over the globe, to safe
havens in Colombia, Panama, and Peru, as well as banking institutions in
Europe, Asia, and the Bahamas.
The investigation uncovered some gold
nuggets. The agents had seen a photo of Victor Crespo. He was the man
they had stopped in the parking lot at JFK airport. When Crespo's name
was put through the DEA's Naddis computer system, routine details of the
life of mystery trafficker Jose Santacruz began to emerge. He was an
unmarried, 35-year-old Puerto Rican whom the Argentine Interpol had
connected to an attempted murder. Authorities also tied Santacruz to
another rising drug trafficker named Gilberto Rodriguez Orejuela, who
was making quite a name for himself in his native Cali as an
entrepreneur, banker and businessman.
The group went back through some of
the old cases and began to make connections as early as 1976. For
instance, they pulled up a file providing details about the police
seizure of 280 kilograms of cocaine paste and a Lodestar aircraft and
the arrest of nine members of the Victor Crespo organization. Most
important for later in the investigation, the records revealed a stamp
for the T.E.A. Manufacturing Company and deposits in the name of a
company named Sandra Ana S.A., registered in Panama. T.E.A., it turned
out, was the front company, while Sandra Ana S.A. was merely used as a
post office box for receiving bank balances. The sole owner? Jose
Santacruz.
The surveillance, long hours, digging
and persistence had paid off. They had finally uncovered the
organization responsible for the growing cocaine problem in New York
City. It was based in Cali and its leaders were Jose Santacruz and
Gilberto and Miguel Rodriguez. They headed a complex international
criminal enterprise, reaching from the coca fields in Peru and Bolivia
to the processing labs in Colombia to the streets of New York and other
U.S. cities.
As the investigation continued,
Robinson, who knew no Spanish, joked that he was getting punch-drunk
with all the Spanish surnames swirling around in his head. To add to the
confusion, some of the bad guys had more code names than CIA spies in a
major intelligence operation. Robinson and Crawford normally didn't have
a problem finding confidential informants to further their
investigations, but the Colombians didn't trust outsiders, so the
investigators had to gather most of their evidence the time-consuming,
old-fashioned way: through surveillance.
Group Five continued to make arrests,
but they didn't seem to make a dent in the organization's supply of
available people. Those arrested and convicted kept their mouths shut
and went to jail for 10-to-15 years, ignoring offers of lighter
sentences in return for cooperation. Even if they'd wanted to sing, they
really couldn't tell much. "The organization operated through
independent cells, and the members of each cell didn't know each other,"
Robinson explained. "When we arrested someone, he would say, I don't
know anything. I've just been dealing with one guy.'"
If suspects made bail, Group Five
never saw them again, and this would drive Robinson nuts. The Colombians
were flight risks and menaces to society, Robinson would tell the
judges. They shouldn't be allowed bail. "It took them [the judges] about
a year after we began the investigation to realize this," Robinson
recalled. "We named the arrangement the Colombian Acquittal Bail.' The
bail was automatic acquittal for any member of the organization because
they would flee to Colombia."
Arranging the bail for the
organization was a group of American attorneys who, beginning in the
late 1970s, had no problem taking drug dollars for their services as the
Colombian version of house counsel for the mob. In 1979, one attorney
met with Santacruz in Miami to discuss a trial in progress in New York
City involving Santacruz's men. Santacruz asked the attorney to gather
information for him about the arrest of one of his distributors in the
city. The two discussed and agreed a fee for the work. This same
attorney, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office in the Eastern
District of New York, was usually the first to be concerned about any
potential names of informants and statements during pre-trial
discussions with the U.S. Attorney's Office. Four years later, an
informant told law enforcement that this same attorney was providing
Santacruz with trial and hearing information after gang members were
arrested. The lawyers wanted their clients from the Cali organization to
go to trial so they could find out during the discovery phase what kind
of evidence the prosecutors had.
Agents had to be creative in their
investigative techniques, given the limitations of the technology of the
day. The NYDETF, for example, didn't have ways of wiretapping public
telephones. "You could give us a number and we could tell you it's a pay
phone, but we didn't have any technology for it," said Robinson. Group
Five made extensive use of pen registers. "We didn't need a court order
for a pen register as we did for a wire tap," Crawford said. "We would
see that a call was being made and then the person would leave the
apartment. We would follow them, get the information off the phone
records, check them, and find out where the call was going to."
The organization was clever, to be
sure, but it also could be as ruthless as it needed to be. One Colombian
suspected of talking to the police returned to her apartment to find her
babysitter gone and her three children in the cellar, stabbed to death.
Later the Group Five investigation learned that prospective employees
had to give the names of relatives in Colombia. There was no doubt that
if you betrayed the bosses of Cali, someone in your family was going to
pay dearly.
The organization was cocky, too. In
September Group Five investigators followed Fernando Carmona and some of
his associates to JFK airport, but the Colombians spotted the detectives
and in turn began following them. Then they took photos. Robinson's jaw
dropped; one of them even had a video camera. It wouldn't be the last
time that would happen. "They had no respect for law enforcement, so at
times they got sloppy and made mistakes and that gave us a chance to
catch up to them," Crawford said.
Over time, the investigators
discerned a pattern to the organization's modus operandi, but in its
sophistication it was unlike any they had seen in their professional
careers. The Colombians used a seemingly endless supply of false
passports, they changed phones and residences as often as changing their
underwear, and they maintained separate apartments and stash houses for
drugs, money and weapons.
By tracing telephone numbers in the
records seized in the Patino bust, Group Five was able to connect the
airline registration for T.E.A. Manufacturing to a Tulio E. Ayerbe.
Further investigation of the airline registration revealed that the
plane had been modified for what looked like drug transportation: short
runways and long-range flights. Further digging revealed that Ayerbe,
under the name of Juan Baez, had bought a Lockheed Lodestar that had
been seized in Peru with 192 pounds of cocaine paste. The follow-up
police investigation connected the airplane to a Victor Crespo.
Meanwhile, Group Five put Ayerbe
under surveillance and hooked a pen register on his telephone. He was
making a lot of calls to a condominium complex on Grove Island on the
South Florida coast near Miami. In February 1980, Group Five agents went
to Miami to follow up. When shown a photo of Jose Santacruz (aka Victor
Crespo), the superintendent said, yes, he was with Mr. Fernando
Guiterrez, the man who rented the apartment when he signed the papers.
Crawford pulled out another photo. "Yes, that's Mister Guiterrez," the
super confirmed. Mr. Guiterrez was none other than Gilberto Rodriguez
Orejuela.
Group Five was now on a roll. The
investigators uncovered another Ayerbe apartment in Hallendale, Fla.,
under a phony name. They connected Ayerbe to the purchase and delivery
of two safes to a warehouse near a private airfield in Opa-Locka, a
rural community close to Miami Beach. Twenty-six days after arriving
from New York, Robinson and other Group Five investigators raided the
warehouse. The hits just kept getting better 285 kilos of cocaine
valued at $7.5 million was seized, the biggest bust ever at that time.
Gilberto Rodriguez realized he had a
serious problem and decided to move his operation to a much quieter
place. He ordered his subordinate Jaime Munera to pay $800,000 for a
622-acre cattle ranch in Hope Hull, Alabama. Munera built a 3,600-foot
airstrip on the Bar-J Ranch, but he blew his cover by doing a stupid
thing: buying 200 head of cattle for cash and at a price well above the
herd's market value. The man who sold Munera the cattle mentioned the
sale to his cousin, who just happened to work for the Alabama Bureau of
Investigation. A computer check revealed that the DEA was investigating
Munera, so Alabama police notified the NYDETF, and once again Group Five
detectives left New York City for long hours, boring nights, and no
extra pay to help their colleagues in Alabama pursue the Colombian
connection.
In September 1981, authorities seized
the ranch, charging that the property had been bought with money
generated by a multi-million-dollar Colombian drug trafficking gang and
was intended to serve as a base for shipping cocaine. The seizure
included machinery, equipment, livestock, a private plane, and the
proceeds of two bank accounts belonging to Munera. The property was
valued at $1 million.
Group Five had much to show for its
hard work: an impressive list of successful inroads into the cartel's
drug operations. Since September 1978, NYDETF had been responsible for
seizing $2 million in cash, 70 weapons, and more than 430 pounds of
cocaine with a street value of $50 million. Law enforcement officers had
identified some 40 members of the organization and prosecutors had
convicted many of them on cocaine trafficking charges. Group Five had
exposed a drug ring with the organization, resources and nerve to turn
their city into Cocaine Central of the United States. The three major
godfathers Gilberto and Miguel Rodriguez and Jose Santacruz had been
identified and their carefully woven cover was blown.
But three years after Group Five had
followed up on the confidential informant's lead that took them to
Nelson Gomez and the red Chevy Impala, the reality was this they had
stung the men from Cali but not crippled them.
