One of India’s most wanted criminals was Archana Sharma, girlfriend of gang leader Om Prakash, also known as ‘Babloo’ Srivastava. She is still on the ‘wanted’ list because no one knows whether she is dead or alive.
Hailing from Lucknow, the university-educated Archana moved to Dubai in 1993 and opened a fashion store. There she met ‘Babloo’ Srivastava and together they travelled the world – until Interpol caught up with him in Singapore and he was extradited and jailed. Archana followed him back to India and had a brief stint as a Bollywood actress – appearing in a movie titled Gangster – before devoting herself to a full-time career of crime, organising violent extortion rackets for her jailed boyfriend.
In 1997 she was arrested by Delhi police in a murder case but jumped bail. The following year she turned up in India’s seventh largest city, Pune, where she organised the abduction of a businessman, whose body was found hacked to shreds in his abandoned car. She had employed a team to follow the victim for 34 days before striking. Sharma resurfaced briefly in Kolkata in December 1998, where her kidnap target was a wealthy hotel owner. This time a police tip-off foiled the plot. She has not been seen since, and there were reports that she had been killed in Nepal for cheating a drugs cartel. But the Indian press still regularly asked the question: Is the ‘Lady Don’ dead?
Sharma’s principal rival in Pune was Arun ‘Daddy’ Gawli, whose murderous rule began when he personally disposed of the owner of a garment company in the early Eighties. His gang went on to run a systematic extortion racket and contract killing operation in Pune. Gawli was a protégé of gangster Rama Naik, who was working for Dawood Ibrahim. (That name again. All recent criminality in India seems to be linked to Ibrahim, though perhaps only by repute. Even Archana Sharma was reported to have been granted his protection when she went on the run.)
The triumvirate of Pune gang bosses fell out over a property deal in 1987. Naik was murdered and his partner Gawli blamed Dawood. Thus began a deadly rivalry between the two men, which extended to Mumbai, where ‘Daddy’ Gawli was, by the Nineties, probably the only gangster strong enough to oppose Dawood. In 1993 he even ordered the murder of Dawood’s brother-in-law, Ibrahim Parkar.
Gawli’s downfall came when he tried to muscle his way into the political power base, back in Pune. A long-standing contract killing had been offered by local property developers on a leading member of the Shiv Sena party, Kamlakar Jamsandekar. In March 2007 four hitmen entered the politician’s house and shot him dead at point-blank range in front of his daughter. The following May, Gawli and 11 members of his gang were arrested. Big ‘Daddy’ avoided execution but, after a long-delayed trial, in August 2012 he was given a life sentence.
Historically, Indian police have always acted with supreme force against the nation’s hardened criminal gangs. But the men in khaki have in recent years been mired in allegations of corruption, mafia links and human rights violations. In 2000 Prime Minister Atal Biharee Vajpayee pushed through a massive modernisation programme that improved police stations, weaponry, transport, computerisation, as well as police pay and housing. This infusion of funds from the centre has made a substantial difference to the enforcement of law and order in many states. But as a Mumbai newspaper commentator recently said: ‘The task of changing medieval cops into modern ones won’t be achieved in a decade.’
CHAPTER 21
THE CRUSHING OF COLOMBIA’S WARRING DRUG CARTELS
The heart of the worldwide cocaine industry has, since the 1970s, been the once-lawless South American country of Colombia. It is still home to some of the most violent yet sophisticated drug trafficking organisations in the world. Their enormous multi-national cocaine empire provides enough capital to buy ships, planes and even a submarine to smuggle large quantities of cocaine to the United States.
The Colombian drugs industry started modestly. In the mid-Seventies marijuana smugglers began exporting small quantities of cocaine to the US hidden in suitcases. At that point, cocaine could be processed for $1,000 per kilo in jungle labs and sold on the streets for between $50,000 and $100,000. A violent thief named Pablo Escobar had grander plans and masterminded the criminal enterprise that became known as the Medellín Cartel, hiring pilots to fly light planes directly into the US. The vast profits allowed the cartel to reinvest in high-tech laboratories, swifter boats, larger airplanes and even an island in the Caribbean, where they could refuel. Astonishingly, the Colombian National Police discovered that traffickers had hired engineers from Russia to supply and refit a former military submarine as a sure way of crossing the Caribbean to the American mainland undetected.
Southern Florida, and Miami in particular, became the main import centre for South American narcotics. Distribution networks were highly sophisticated, using electronic homing devices to keep track of shipments while monitors tapped into the radio frequencies of federal and state law enforcement agencies. Much of Miami’s economic boom came from the drug trade as legitimate businesses, mainly in construction, were bought to disguise operations. The so-called ‘Cocaine Cowboy Wars’ between rival gangs inspired the 1983 film Scarface, starring Al Pacino.
When, under pressure from the US, the Colombian government tried to sweep the town of Medellín clean of drugs, the megalomaniac Escobar declared war on the authorities. His renegade army was responsible for the murder of hundreds of government officials, police, prosecutors, judges, journalists and innocent bystanders. By the early Nineties the cartel had split into factions and many of its leaders were caught and jailed. Pablo Escobar was hunted down and killed after a long series of jungle battles.
The drugs industry switched to the west Colombian city of Cali, controlled by Escobar’s main rivals, the Rodriguez Orejuala brothers, who had started out as kidnappers, once demanding a £500,000 ransom. This sum launched their drugs empire – but instead of killing politicians and police, they bribed them. The Cali Cartel funded politicians, hired top international lawyers and invested their drugs profits in legitimate businesses. But in 1995 their leaders were also hauled into jail – though with relatively soft sentences allowing them to continue running their empire from behind bars.
In the late Nineties, after the Cali and Medellín Cartels had fragmented, a third major group came to prominence. The Norte del Valle Cartel, based in the southwest of the country, became the most powerful organisation in the Colombian drugs trade.
According to a US government investigation, in the 15 years from 1990, the Norte del Valle cartel exported more than 500 metric tons of cocaine worth in excess of $10 billion from Colombia to Mexico and ultimately to the United States for resale. The cartel paid a right-wing paramilitary group to protect its members, its laboratories and its drug routes. The 2004 US investigation revealed how the cartel bribed and corrupted Colombian police and legislators to foil raids on its supply chains. Through wiretaps, gang members were able to listen in to communications between Colombian and American law enforcement agencies. So powerful was the cartel that it even bribed politicians to delay the extradition of Colombian narcotics traffickers to the US.
The Norte del Valle Cartel was run by the Montoya Sanchez family, whose leader Diego was on the FBI’s list of the world’s ‘Ten Most Wanted Fugitives’. In September 2007 an elite Colombian force mounted a strike on a gang hideout, a ranch in the forested Valle del Cauca and captured Diego Montoya Sanchez, hiding in a creek-bed. He was extradited from Colombia to Miami a year later, the fourth Montoya family member to end up in American custody. All were subsequently convicted of conspiring to import cocaine and two of them convicted of ‘obstruction of justice by murder’, the sentences handed down in October 2009 ranging from 19 to 45 years.
The FBI celebrated that ‘a brutal chapter in the history of drug trafficking has come to an end’ thanks to unprecedented cooperation between the US and the Colombian government. Acting US Attorney Jeffrey H. Sloman claimed: ‘This milestone prosecution effectively dismantled the violent and prolific Norte Valle Cartel. Nonetheless, we in
law enforcement understand full well that today’s victory is not the end of the war on drugs. We remain poised and committed to continue to fight the flow of illegal narcotics into our communities.’
A ‘milestone’ or just a stepping stone? It did not take long for another gang to take up where the Norte del Valle Cartel left off. Based in Colombia’s eastern plains, the El Dorado Cartel, also known as ‘The Junta’, was run by Luis ‘Don Lucho’ Caicedo and Daniel ‘El Loco’ (The Madman) Barrera. According to 2010 US indictments, Caicedo and Barrera had overseen hundreds of tons of cocaine exports every month, with an average sale of $11 million in cocaine per shipment. Over the years, the ill-gotten proceeds added up to hundreds of millions of dollars, possibly even billions. To ensure that their drugs could be produced without interference and make it out of the country securely, the cartel paid protection money to the United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia, a notorious right-wing paramilitary group.
It seemed that the cartel unravelled in 2010 after Caicedo was arrested in Argentina and quickly extradited to Florida. In exchange for a reduced ten-year sentence, he reportedly revealed the identities of 246 associates in the cocaine business. It is suspected that one of those he snitched on was his partner, ‘El Loco’ Barrera, who was arrested in Venezuela in September 2012 as the result of a complex four-nation endeavour. The operation that swooped on him while chatting on a payphone involved everything from wiretaps to a broad coalition of Venezuelan police, Colombian intelligence officials, the British MI6, and agents from the CIA and the US Drug Enforcement Administration.
Barrera was a legend in the cocaine business, noted for torture and murder of those who crossed him. Marking him as Colombia’s ‘Public Enemy Number One’, President Juan Manuel Santos said: ‘He dedicated 20 years to doing bad things to Colombia and the world – all types of crime and perverse alliances with paramilitaries.’ While on the run, Barrera had undergone plastic surgery and burnt his fingertips. The reward offered for his capture by the US was $5 million – the same as for Osama Bin Laden. Colombia added $2.7 million to that. President Santos, who called him ‘the last of the great kingpins’, heralded his arrest as a major victory in the drugs war.
Barrera’s arrest was the third detention of a Colombian drug baron over the course of a year of successful international cooperation. In June 2011, Venezuelan authorities captured the head of the Los Rajostros Cartel, Diego Perez Henao. His gang, a major exporter of cocaine to the US via Mexico, is said to have controlled half the members of the paramilitary criminal organisations involved in drug trafficking in Colombia. The cartel’s previous leader, Javier Antonio Calle Serna, surrendered to US authorities on the island of Aruba in May 2012. He was charged with the 2008 murder of Wilber Varela, a Colombian drugs baron whose smuggling routes he supposedly took over.
The destruction of the Medellín, Cali, Norte del Valle and El Dorado Cartels means that the drugs industry in Colombia is now fragmented, with different gangs along the manufacturing and supply chain making it more difficult to stamp out the trade. Also, worryingly, with cocaine use in the United States dropping, the gangs are increasingly heading shipments towards Europe and Asia.
The US Drugs Enforcement Agency and the Colombian National Police believe there are more than 300 active drug smuggling organisations in Colombia today. Cocaine is shipped to every industrialised nation in the world and profits remain incredibly high. And the trade is spreading. Colombian crooks’ profits from cocaine have encouraged gangsters to open laboratories in other countries, including Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, Jamaica, Dominican Republic, Trinidad and Tobago and, of course, Mexico.
General Oscar Naranjo, the retired commander of the Colombian national police who became security adviser to the new Mexican government, has claimed that cartels such as the most recently busted Caicedo-Barrera organisation ended up working as no more than suppliers to Mexican Syndicates. If that is the case, then it’s also a sign of how far the Colombian cartels have fallen and been supplanted by the larger and more dangerous Mexican cartels, with the Colombian gangs playing only a supporting role.
If the ultimate control of the international drugs industry is gradually switching away from Colombia to Mexico (as will be seen in the next chapter), the change of power base will be of no comfort to the hard-pressed US agencies who have had so much success in smashing the South American cartels. The problem still lies on their own doorstep.
One final case history reflects the lawlessness and almost casual slayings that have marked the near-half century of Colombia’s drugs trade with the United States. It’s the saga of Griselda Blanco, the most ruthless female gangster of recent years, who was shot dead by two motorcycle assassins as she was out shopping in the city of Medellín in 2012.
It was a suitably dramatic ending for the 69-year-old cocaine trafficker, who was an insatiable fan of the movie The Godfather. Blanco was known as ‘La Madrina’, Spanish for ‘Godmother’, and even named her youngest son Michael Corleone after the main character in the film trilogy. Her other nicknames were the ‘Cocaine Queen’ and the ‘Black Widow’. ‘We don’t know why they killed her,’ said the local police chief, ‘but the first hypothesis would be revenge or a settling of accounts.’
Blanco had certainly gained enough enemies in her murderous lifetime. Born in a shanty town in the Colombian coastal city of Cartagena in 1943, she began her criminal career as a 12-year-old pickpocket and prostitute, eventually commanding a billion-dollar empire that exported 1,500 kilograms of cocaine per month by boat and plane. She established many of the smuggling routes used by the Medellín Cartel and solidified her place in Colombian criminal legend as the mentor to drugs king Pablo Escobar.
Blanco had a reputation for ruthlessness, ordering the killing of dozens of rivals to get to the top of the drug smuggling business in the Seventies and Eighties. Prosecutors believe she was responsible for at least 40 murders, though some police put the number closer to 250. Her nickname ‘Black Widow’ arose from the claim that she had killed a couple of her husbands. It was also said that she slit the throats of some of her lovers after she had slept with them.
The title ‘Cocaine Queen’ came after she launched her drug operations in Florida in the Seventies. She eliminated other drugs gangs by having machine-gun assassins spray bullets indiscriminately at her rivals and their families. One infamous attack took place at a Miami mall in 1979, when screaming shoppers ran for their lives as two hitmen riddled a store with bullets, leaving two dead and two wounded shop workers. Blanco ordered the killing of a Colombian drug dealer in the busy concourse of Miami Airport. Because he was nicknamed ‘The Pig’, she ordered that he be carved up with a bayonet. One less violent legacy of her reign as drugs Godmother was that she is said to have revolutionised smuggling by developing her own line of underwear with secret compartments for drugs.
Griselda Blanco’s fall from power began when a Colombian drugs Syndicate put a $4 million price on her head, forcing her into hiding. Back in Colombia, three of her four sons were murdered. Only Michael Corleone survived. Blanco was seized by police in California and in 1985 was jailed for cocaine trafficking. Three years later she was further sentenced to 20 years for three murders – the 1982 contract killings of two drug dealers and a toddler. The two-year-old died when bullets meant for his father hit the boy instead. Blanco was deported back to Colombia in 2004, where she earned warped fame through the film documentary Cocaine Cowboys and its sequel, Hustlin’ With The Godmother.
The podgy 69-year-old was gunned down on 3 September 2012 as she left her local butcher’s shop. Her assassins escaped by motorbike and Blanco died on her way to hospital. A former Florida homicide detective who had helped put her behind bars commented: ‘It’s surprising to all of us that she had not been killed sooner. When you hurt so many people like she did, it’s only a matter of time before they find you and try to even the score.’
CHAPTER 22
THE COST OF A SIX-YEAR WAR ON DRUGS… ‘EXTRAORDI
NARY VIOLENCE’
Shamed by its inability to control the violent crime lords who terrorised the country with seeming impunity, the Mexican government in December 2006 declared full-scale war on its drug gangs. The result was that Mexico became a battleground. The official death toll since President Felipe Calderón launched his military offensive against the cartels soared to more than 70,000 police, traffickers and civilians. The true figure is believed to be even higher.
The violence is horrific but is now an everyday event. Over a three-year span ending in January 2013, more than 20 sitting mayors were killed by cartels and many other politicians were murdered or simply disappeared. One such victim whose assassination made worldwide headlines was a politician who had been hailed as a heroine for standing up to the cartels. Dr Maria Santos Gorrostieta, 36-year-old ex-mayor of Tiquicheo, west of Mexico City, survived two assassination attempts in 2009, firstly when gunmen raked her car with bullets, killing her first husband, and secondly when she was again ambushed and suffered even more serious injuries. In a famous act of defiance, Dr Gorrostieta posed for pictures showing the extent of her wounds and subsequently ran for the Mexican Congress, although she failed to win a seat. In November 2012 the mother of three and her second husband were abducted. Her body was found at a roadside near San Juan Tararameo three weeks later. She had been killed by a blow to the head. But she had also been stabbed, her arms and legs bound and her waist and chest covered in burns, indicating that she had been tortured. Her husband remained missing.
The World's Most Evil Gangs Page 21