OUTWITTING CALI'S PROFESSOR MORIARTY

By Kevin Fedarko

Despite having bank accounts that have ranged as far afield as Hong Kong, in the past few years Josa Santacruz Londono has rarely ventured outside Cali, Colombia's cocaine capital. In recent weeks, though, word leaked that the reputed mastermind behind the world's No. 1 drug cartel had fled to Bogota, flushed from cover by an elite government strike force that had been chasing him for months. Santacruz is sometimes called "El Gordo" -- the Fat One -- and knowing he likes to eat, General Rosso Josa Serrano Cadena, chief of the Colombian National Police, ordered his men to stake out several of the good restaurants in the northern part of the city. Last Tuesday night Santacruz and three business associates dropped by a steakhouse called Carbon de Palo.

Santacruz was drinking lemonade when two police officers spotted him. When Serrano was informed, he realized the restaurant was only nine blocks from his home, and immediately ordered the bodyguards watching over his own family to arrest Santacruz. They arrived in three or four minutes and took the druglord into custody. "He was a bit fatter than in the pictures and videos we had of him," says Serrano. "He was in a very shocked state."

Understandably so. The police crackdown has now put most of the Cali cartel's alleged leaders behind bars. Some have been arrested, while others have felt the pressure and surrendered. After Santacruz's capture, Phanor Arizabaleta Arzayuz turned himself in. Known as a particularly violent cartel leader, he is suspected of, but not yet charged with, involvement in the murder of a police intelligence officer. Arizabaleta says he is innocent, and gave himself up only to clear his reputation.

Only a year ago the Cali kingpins were freely gadding about, unhampered by both the Colombian authorities and the rival Medellin cartel, which died along with its chief Pablo Escobar in 1993. The Cali cartel now handles 80% of the world's cocaine traffic, with a $7 billion gross last year in the U.S. alone. "This is probably the biggest organized-crime syndicate there has ever been," says Thomas Constantine, head of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. "For their impact, profit and control, they're bigger than the Mafia in the U.S. ever was." Santacruz lived as a cocaine baron should, throwing lavish birthday parties for his children, buying ranches and cavorting with his mistresses.

Then last March, the U.S. State Department accused the government of Colombian President Ernesto Samper Pizano of lacking the political will to go after Cali's bosses. Though the State Department stopped short of suggesting that the U.S. cut off aid to Colombia and veto loans from institutions such as the World Bank, the rebuke apparently rocked Samper, whose presidential campaign was alleged to have been partly financed by the cartel.

Anxious to forestall further criticism that might jeopardize both his own reputation and his nation's ability to court foreign investment, Samper ordered his national police chief, a man with a ferocious antipathy toward corruption, to destroy the cartel. Serrano was determined to do so swiftly, given reports that the organization was making plans for a nationwide terrorist campaign. When the Medell'n cartel launched a similar offensive in the mid-1980s, blowing up schools and offices, public outcry eventually forced the government to mount a bloody nine-year offensive that broke the cartel.

Serrano turned up the heat. For the past four months, his 6,000-man Special Forces have been aggressively busting up cartel-owned businesses, seizing hundreds of records, ledgers and computer discs. Investigators have been able to trace the cartel's financial empire and freeze some bank accounts, cutting the cartel's cash flow in half. But it was the relentless surveillance and raids that on June 9 led to the arrest of Gilberto Rodriguez Orejuela, one of Cali's chiefs. Ten days later, Henry ("The Scorpion") Loaiza surrendered. He was the cartel's military leader and has been linked to, among other crimes, ordering the massacre of 107 peasants and the dismemberment of their bodies with chain saws. With Santacruz and Arizabaleta in custody, only two of the seven cartel bosses remain at large. "If you told me two months ago that they would arrest the two key figures in the Cali cartel [Rodriguez and Santacruz]," says the DEA's Constantine, "I would have said it was impossible."

Of the seven leaders, Santacruz is perhaps the least dispensable. "He's the biggest," says a DEA agent. "He started it all." Veteran agent Bill Mockler calls Santacruz "my Professor Moriarty." Santacruz got into cocaine during the 1970s when, as one of the first to recognize the drug's lucrative potential, he forged connections with coca suppliers in Peru and Bolivia. He soon helped to design elaborate smuggling methods -- transporting the product by concealing it inside everything from hollow mahogany boards to blocks of chocolate. By the late '70s, while Medellin's cocaine cowboys were swaggering around Miami, Santacruz was coolly staking out an empire on the streets of New York City.

He seemed to commute invisibly between the U.S. and Colombia, and attained a measure of legend in the New York underworld for his habit of occasionally putting in a surprise personal appearance at a drug deal, trading a few pleasantries with the buyer, then vanishing. In 1983, DEA agents discovered that Santacruz had been occupying a luxury apartment from which he could see the agency's Manhattan field office, then at West 57th Street. Only once was he ensnared by the law in the U.S.: in 1977 he was arrested on a weapons charge. He was let out on bail, which he jumped, and did not see the inside of a police station again until last week.

Given his wiliness, the ease with which Santacruz was arrested led some DEA agents to wonder if his capture had been orchestrated by the Samper government as part of a deal. "Everybody says how astute he is on surveillance," says a U.S. official who has followed Santacruz for years. "It just sounds strange that he would go into a restaurant like that in Bogota." Serrano unequivocally dismisses such speculations. "There has been absolutely no negotiation," he says.

In recent years, Santacruz has preoccupied himself with countersurveillance. His lieutenants moved about Cali with laptop computers linked, via radio, to a mainframe that contained such information as records of every long-distance call into and out of the city. Old-fashioned, low-tech ruthlessness was not beneath him, however. In addition to allegedly being connected to at least three killings in the U.S., he was the one who established the cartel's draconian methods of policing its own ranks. As insurance, the dealers to whom cocaine is consigned put up not only cash and property, but also human collateral -- the names and addresses of relatives in Colombia.

The system worked so well that Santacruz may be hard to replace. "He has more corporate knowledge in his little finger," says a DEA agent, "than anybody else down there has in his whole body." That's why Santacruz's arrest is seen as wiping out the cartel's trade. "With the capture of Gilberto Rodr'guez Orejuela and Santacruz, the Cali cartel has crumpled," Serrano said. "I think the justice system will give the maximum penalties that a criminal like Santacruz deserves."

Perhaps. But Colombia's sentencing practices are notoriously lax. During the crackdown, the U.S. has offered Colombia only grudging praise, dwelling instead on the subject of punishment. "We look forward," says a State Department official, "to a prison sentence commensurate with the crimes Santacruz has committed, and complete forfeiture of his assets."

Even if his arrest spells the demise of the Cali cartel, few experts believe that this means an end to the business of drug trafficking in Colombia. "The Rodr'guez Orejuelas are going to fall," said William Ram'rez, a political-science professor at the National University in Bogota. "The Scorpions will fall. But there are always going to be others to replace them until you tackle consumption." That, however, is a problem the U.S. must tend to within its own borders.

--Reported by Mary Matheson/Bogota and Elaine Shannon/Washington

With reporting by MARY MATHESON/BOGOTA AND ELAINE SHANNON/WASHINGTON