Ron Chepesiuk

June 20, 2007

An excerpt from Ron Chepesiuk's Drug Lords: the Rise and Fall of the Cali Cartel, chronicling how the longest running and most important investigation in DEA history began. Originally published in 2005 in paperback by Milo Books, the book has been expanded and updated to include information about the successful completion of the Cali Cartel takedown. It will be available for purchase this July (2007). For background see Crime Magazine's The Fall of the Cali Cartel by Ron Chepesiuk.

by Ron Chepesiuk

No one had ever seen 44 pounds of cocaine in New York City before.

– Ken Robinson, DEA agent

 In the summer of 1978, the DEA's New York City branch office received a letter from a citizen's committee representing the Jackson Heights neighborhood in the borough of Queens. "I'm concerned about the violence in our district and the crime wave the cocaine traffic is causing," the letter read. "The DEA is the government agency responsible for investigating drugs. You need to do something about it."

As heroin was the DEA's focus at the time, the letter didn't cause a ripple. The agency, in fact, had yet to do a major cocaine trafficking investigation. "The DEA didn't want to mess with cocaine," recalled Ken Robinson, who was then a member of the New York Drug Enforcement Task Force (NYDETF). "The agency thought the drug was small time, so they turned the matter over to the NYDETF for investigation."

October 21, 2006

Gilberto Rodriguez Orejuela

The sentencing of Gilberto and Miguel Rodriguez Orejuela brought down the world's most successful drug cartel, but did little if anything to halt the flow of drugs to the United States.

by Ron Chepesiuk

U.S. justice was finally served on Sept. 26, 2006 in a Miami court when the godfathers of the Cali Cartel, Gilberto Rodriguez Orejuela, and his brother Miguel, pled guilty to drug trafficking and money laundering charges. The plea, which came after months of intense negotiations with several U.S. agencies, marked the end of the largest running and most important investigation in U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency history.

The 67-year-old Gilberto, known as the "Chess Player' for his brilliance, and the 62-year-old Miguel, "El Senor" for his no-nonsense style of criminal management, were the co-founders of Colombia's Cali Cartel, history's biggest and most powerful drug-trafficking organization and arguably its most significant organized crime syndicate. In the 1980s and early 1990s, the brothers made billions of dollars building the cartel into the world's top supplier of cocaine. Along the way, they destroyed thousands of lives in the United States and other countries around the world distributing their poison. In the process, the brothers revolutionized the way criminals did business, and in 1994, nearly turned Colombia into a narco-democracy by almost buying the presidency with an illegal $6.2 million donation to the campaign of presidential candidate Ernesto Samper, who was eventually elected.

It is no overstatement to say that Cali Cartel succeeded in the drug trade and organized crime like no other criminal group before or since. In the early 1990s, the cartel supplied more than 80 percent of the cocaine smuggled in the United States, and was raking in between $5 and $7 billion annually, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.

June 15, 2003

This is the prologue to the book The Bullet or the Bribe: Taking Down Colombia's Cali Drug Cartel by Ron Chepesiuk, the story of the rise of the powerful Cali Cartel and the long and often frustrating campaign that U.S. and international law enforcement waged to take it down. The book details the cartel's rise to international prominence and the lifestyles of its godfathers, its efforts to buy Colombia, its death struggle with legendary Colombian drug trafficker Pablo Escobar, its brilliant strategy to portray itself as the kinder, gentler drug cartel from Colombia, and the mistakes that ultimately led to the crumbling of its well-oiled organization. The book will be published by Praeger, a member of the Greenwood Publishing Group, in the fall of 2003.

 by Ron Chepesiuk

Prologue:

"It's similar to, maybe, baking a cake."
 — David Karasiewski, Forensic Chemist, DEA 

 The call that launched the biggest drug trafficking investigation in New York State Police (NYSP) history came on April 12, 1985. Bob Sears, a DEA agent in the Albany office of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), groped for the switch on the bed lamp and squinted at the alarm clock on the end table. It was a little past 2 a.m. Sears fumbled with the phone and blurted: "This better be important."

The caller was Ken Cook, a friend for years, but Cook was also an investigator assigned to the Major Crime Units of Troop Six, NYSP, and he had worked with Sears on many joint investigations. This was no social call.

"There has been an explosion at a farm house in Minden," Cook explained. "We don´t know what happened. It could be a bomb factory...a meth lab. Barrels of chemicals are all over the place. It´s a mess. Maybe the DEA needs to go out and take a look." ¹

Sears yawned and rubbed his warm bed. He had a better idea. "Come on, Ken, it´s almost morning. Can´t we sleep on it ´til tomorrow?" ²

But Cook persisted. "No, we need to go out there tonight while the scene is still hot." Sears knew well what Cook meant. Often, he would go out to a crime scene only to find that some young cop fresh out of the academy had left his hoof and paw prints all over the place. ³