CAPITALISM'S ACHILLES HEEL Dirty Money and How to

Dirty Money at Work 95
group provided money to a shadowy lot known as PEPES (People Persecuted
by Pablo Escobar), essentially hired killers who murdered Escobar’s
lieutenants and provided intelligence to the army and police on his activities
and whereabouts.
The Cali cartel quickly became bigger than its rivals, controlling some
80 percent of cocaine shipments to the United States and Europe. It distinguished
itself from its competitors by operating in a businesslike, hierarchical
fashion, employing producers, chemists, truckers, pilots, accountants,
bankers, wholesalers, and retailers, while also maintaining scores of politicians
on the take. Regarded by the police as los caballeros, the gentlemen,
cartel members invested heavily in Colombia, reportedly owning, for example,
Drogas La Rebaja, the largest drugstore chain in the country and an
ideal business for recycling laundered money. 88 The Cali cartel also formed
close alliances with Russian and Italian mafias, pioneering the cooperation
among criminal groups that now characterizes global racketeering.
Observing these growing connections, the Drug Enforcement Administration
(DEA) mounted Operation Green Ice against the Cali cartel in
1992, resulting in some 200 arrests and seizures of more than $50 million in
assets in the United States, the United Kingdom, Spain, and Italy. The DEA
chief bragged that “We have damaged the cartel’s financial operations and
disrupted their cash flow.” 89 A DEA chief of operations also noted that “. . .
the major result . . . was the message it sent to the drug mafias—that the
number of safe havens for their drug money is quickly dwindling.” 90 If so,
the cartel didn’t notice. Its operations mushroomed over the next three years,
conservatively reaching $8 billion annually in revenues, easily laundered
into the global financial system.
The Rodriguez Orejuela brothers were finally captured in 1995 and became
model prisoners enthusiastically participating in a jailhouse workstudy
program. This and probably a few million dollars contributed to their
release in 2002, although they were recently extradited to the United States
to face charges. But the Cali cartel had nevertheless been largely broken up.
Only to be replaced by dozens of smaller groups, decentralized and diverse
and subcontracting major parts of their trafficking to independent producers,
transporters, smugglers, wholesalers, and money launderers. This
process has made anti-drug activities even more difficult than in the heyday
of the cartels. General Rosso Jose Serrano, head of the Colombian National
Police, said it well: “It is a whole new generation of traffickers who have