Criminal Masterminds

by Anne Williams

  In the end, the Félix organisation was a major embarrassment to the government in Mexico, as it was considered to be more powerful than the authorities themselves. They have been allowed to operate freely without being ever brought to justice.

  trail of blood

  Wherever there was danger, Ramón seemed to be close at hand, and he was always the one who volunteered to carry out an assassination. Often he could be heard saying to his men, ‘Let’s go kill someone’. He killed out of simple ennui.

  One of the worst examples of the AFO’s bloodlust was at a fishing village called Ensenada, which just so happened to be the home of a small-time drug smuggler by the name of Fermín Castro Flores. Even though Fermín Castro had never faltered on a protection payment to the AFO, they eventually decided that he might become too competitive. On September 17, 1998, AFO gunmen arrived in the middle of the night and lined up every man, woman and child they could find in the village against a concrete wall. They were then brutally murdered by men dressed in black carrying AK-47s. Among the victims were: Fermín Castro Flores, 38, his wife and two-year-old son, his brother-in-law, Francisco Flores Altamirano, 30, Flores’ 52-year-old mother, his sister, his wife and five children aged between four and thirteen years of age, and seven neighbours, including a pregnant woman. Fermín Castro survived the attack but remained unconscious for over a month and finally died. The only two survivors on that day were a fifteen-year-old girl and a twelve-year-old boy.

  The Mexican police were convinced that it was a drug-related massacre and described it has the ‘worst murder associated with organised crime ever to have occurred in this country’. The two surviving children were extremely traumatised and described the massacre as lasting an ‘eternity’, when it reality it probably took about fifteen minutes.

  The AFO had broken the rule of the cartels that ‘children are never touched’. This led for an intensive search for the gunmen, which ended with the arrest of fourteen suspects. Juan Carlos Moctezuma, José María Bernal, Francisco Javier Villalobos and José Torres were all tested for gun powder residue, and all four men were found to be positive.

  In April 2000, a prosecutor named José Patino Moreno, along with two aides, a special prosecutor, Oscar Pompa Plaza and a Mexican army captain, Rafael Torres Bernal, disappeared into thin air from a Tijuana street. When their bodies were eventually discovered near Moreno’s wrecked car, their bodies were hardly recognisable. Their heads had been crushed using some sort of industrial press and every single bone in their bodies were shattered. The local police ironically insisted that the men had died in a regrettable road accident, but it came to no surprise when the AFO started to lose their power, that two police commanders were charged with the murders.

  ‘narco-juniors’

  Ramón would drive around in a flashy red Porsche, dressed in an outlandish mink jacket and heavy gold jewellery, cruising the streets of Tijuana. His arrogant attitude became a magnet for the bored sons of the city’s rich and Ramón took advantage of this by recruiting several of them as his ‘narco-juniors’. They became trusted hitmen who, when they were not killing for business, killed for fun.

  Cristina and Alejandro Hodoyan were just such parents living in the middle class area of Tijuana. Their lives changed drastically when their eldest son, Alex, went missing in the mid-1990s. They soon discovered that he had been arrested and was suspected of having connections with the infamous Arellano Félix cartel.

  Following months of confinement and brutal torture at the hands of the Mexican military, Alex eventually confessed to being involved with the cartel. Shortly afterwards, Alex’s brother Alfredo was arrested in San Diego on gun charges. The Mexican government requested Alfredo’s extradition to Mexico as he was suspected to have taken part in the murder of a federal prosecutor.

  In a peculiar series of events, Alex was flown by Mexican authorities to the USA and handed over to the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA). They tried to convince Alex to become a witness in their case against the Félix cartel and offered him a witness protection programme. Although Alex was in theory free, he was retained in a San Diego hotel room, but believing he would have to testify against his brother, he managed to escape back to Tijuana. Several days later, Alex was kidnapped while driving with his mother and has never been seen since and is presumed dead.

  Alfredo was extradited to Mexico and held in a high security prison outside of the city awaiting trial. It was later discovered that the man responsible for kidnapping Alex, General Gutiérrez Rebollo, was working for a rival cartel, which shocked the US authorities.

  Alex and Alfredo were part of the group of juniors who became entangled with gang members involved in the cocaine business. Although the Hodoyans had hoped to keep their children away from drugs, living in Tijuana it was hard when the majority of teenagers were exposed to temptation whenever they walked into a nightclub.

  ramón’s demise

  Ramón’s exit from the world of drugs was as dramatic as his lifestyle. On September 17, 1998, he was driving a Volkswagen full of ‘narco-juniors’ down to the coastal town of Mazatlan. Their mission was to kill a rival gang leader, using the Mardi Gras carnival as their cover. However, Ramón made a mistake by driving down a one-way street the wrong way right into the arms of a patrol car. There was a shoot-out, which left three bodies lying on the streets amid the festivities of the carnaval.

  One of the bodies had an identity card in the pocket of his clothing, which bore the name Jorge Perez Lopez – the equivalent of ‘John Smith’ in Mexican. However, by the time the police realised that the card was forged, the body had mysteriously disappeared. Some members of the AFO had seen to it that they relieved the terrified local undertaker of the body, threatening him into silence.

  It wasn’t until the police studied the photographs taken at the crime scene that they realised that could possibly have killed one of the FBI’s most wanted men – Ramón Arellano Félix.

  With Ramón gone, Benjamin, the cartel’s mastermind, seemed to lose the will to carry on as head of the organisation and prepared to flee the country. He was apprehended by soldiers just as he was about to leave with his bags packed and his wallet stuffed full of $100 notes. The DEA and the authorities were celebrating and declared that it was ‘a great day for law enforcement’.

  However, despite their partial success in fighting the drug cartel, other people within the government were more cautious. They were well aware that the remaining Félix brothers would now try and gain control of the cartel and that their rivals would try and muscle in on some of their drug routes. The situation was very tenuous and it was feared that violence would escalate.

  The youngest of the brothers, Francisco Javier, was captured on August 14, 2006, along with two assassins, just off the coast of Baja California. Authorities suspect that the notorious cartel is now being run by two more brothers, Javier and Eduardo Arellano Félix. They also believe that they were the two brothers who were responsible for the massive, sophisticated underground tunnels discovered in January 2006. The State Department currently has a $5 million reward out for both men for information leading to their arrest.

  The Medellin Cartel

  Since the 1970s, Colombia in South America has been witness to some of the most violent and perhaps sophisticated drug trafficking organisations in the world. The Medellin cartel started off as a small-time cocaine smuggling business, but it quickly turned into a massive multi-national cocaine empire. It was masterminded by a man named Pablo Emilio Escobar Gaviria (better known as Pablo Escobar) and is believed to have been formed in 1978 when a man named Carlos Lehder purchased a large portion of Normans Cay, which was an island off the coast of the Bahamas. It was on this island that the six main kingpins of the cartel are said to have come together – Pablo Escobar, the Ochoa brothers, Jorge, Fabio and Juan, José Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha (also known as ‘The Mexican’) and Carlos Lehder himself. Lehder convinced the men that they could fly cocaine in small aeroplanes directly into the USA, w
hich would do away with the need for countless smaller suitcase trips. From then on the six men started using the island as a launching point for the exportation of their drugs.

  The growing appetite for cocaine in the USA led to the Medellin cartel making huge profits, which resulted in them reinvesting much of their money into more sophisticated laboratories and better aeroplanes. However, their success had a much darker side. Pablo Escobar was an incredibly violent man who was considered to be one of the most brutally ruthless, ambitious and powerful drug dealers ever encountered.

  pablo escobar

  Pablo was raised with his brother, Roberto, on the streets of Medellin, which is where his life of crime began. He was a tough street thug who put fear into the hearts of the local population, a population who saw him get richer and richer day by day. He worked his way into the cocaine trade by killing off the opposition, a well-known dealer by the name of Fabio Restrepo. Escobar then informed Restrepo’s men that their leader was dead, and left them in no doubt as to who they were working for from now on.

  In May 1976, Escobar and some of his men were arrested after returning from a drug run to Ecuador. Escobar attempted to bribe the judge but was unsuccessful. However, after two of the arresting officers were found dead, the case was dropped. From then on Escobar and his men used violence and strong-arm tactics with anyone who got in their way.

  During the 1980s, the Medellin cartel revolted against the government’s threats to extradite traffickers to the USA. The cartel, urged by Escobar, waged a war against the Colombian government and are thought to have been responsible for the murder of hundreds of government officials, police, prosecutors, judges, journalists and even innocent bystanders that happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  It has also been claimed that Escobar was behind the the storming of the Colombian Supreme Court in 1985, which resulted in the murder of half the judges. At the time the Supreme Court was working on Colombia’s extradition treaty with the USA, something which Escobar was desperate to stop.

  At the height of his career, Escobar owned properties all over the world. In Medillin alone, he owned nineteen villas, all of which had helicopter pads. He also owned banks, apartments and huge tracts of land, a fleet of ships and aeroplanes and an army of white-collar criminals who laundered his money. In 1989, Escobar was rated by Forbes magazines as being the seventh-richest man in the world. It was estimated that the Medellin cartel was taking in anything up to $30 billion a year.

  Despite his tough image, in his own town of Medellin, Escobar was seen as a hero. He helped the community, sponsored the building of sports stadiums and frequently distributed money to the less privileged. The population often helped Escobar by allowing him to hideout in their houses and did everything in their power to protect him from the authorities.

  the cali cartel

  The main rivals to the Medellin cartel were an organisation situated in the Colombian city of Cali. The Cali cartel was run by the Rodriguez Orejuela brothers and Santacruz Londoño. They ran a far more sophisticated set-up, learning from the mistakes made by some of the Medellin members. As opposed to the Medellin cartel, the Cali re-invested its money in legitimate businesses and also tried to establish good relationships with the government. In fact, the Cali were so highly regarded by the government that they received the nickname the ‘gentlemen’ while their main rivals were called the ‘hoodlums’.

  As competition became more violent, the Cali started to attack the Medellin cartel, and in particular Escobar. They formed an association called the PEPES, or People Against Pablo Escobar, which was designed to target his homes, businesses and crew members. They also secretly supplied the Colombian police and the DEA with information about Escobar’s activities and some of his hideouts.

  The Cali cartel instigated the eventual downfall of Pablo Escobar, and by 1991 he was on his own and running for his life. Escobar turned himself in to the Colombian government to avoid being assassinated by his rivals. As a reward for turning himself in, Escobar was allowed to build his own private prison, which became known as La Catedral. He bartered with his government and they agreed he would be jailed for a period of five years and would be guaranteed no extradition to the USA so long as his drug trafficking activities ceased. However, Escobar, as was the nature of the man, abused the agreement and was often seen outside the confines of his supposed prison. After the local media showed pictures of the luxurious La Catedral, claiming that several business associates had been murdered when they visited Escobar there, the public forced the government into taking action. They moved him to another jail, but on July 22, 1992, Escobar escaped, fearing that he was about to be extradited to the USA, where he knew he would face certain life imprisonment.

  The Colombian police force formed a special unit called the Search Bloc and started an intensive manhunt to find Escobar. As the number of his enemies grew, a vigilante group called PEPES and financed by the Cali cartel, carried out a bloody campaign against Escobar’s family and friends. In the end, about 300 people were killed and large amounts of the Medellin cartel’s property were destroyed.

  The hunt for Escobar ended on December 2, 1993, just one day after his forty-fourth birthday, as he tried desperately to elude the Search Bloc for the last time. An elite force of police and military commandos trapped the drug lord on a rooftop in Medellin. Escobar was killed in a hail of bullets and the troops celebrated by firing their weapons into the air and shouting, ‘We won!’

  The leaders of the Cali cartel were eventually tracked down and arrested in the mid-1990s.

  colombia today

  After the Medellin and Cali cartels began to self-destruct, the cocaine business began to break up into splinter groups. One group smuggled drugs from Colombia to Mexico, while another controlled the laboratories. There are known links between Marxist guerilla groups and the cocaine trade, who use them to protect their fields and the more remote laboratories in exchange for a large fee. This is not good news for Colombia, because this means that both sides are reaping huge profits from the drug industry, which in turn are used to buy arms for further fighting. The DEA have estimated that there may be as many as 300 narcotic-linked organisations in Colombia today as cocaine is shipped to virtually every nation in the world. Although cocaine has been refined and distributed around the world for centuries, it is South America that has become the primary exporter of the drug. Colombia alone, with its many clandestine laboratories, accounts for an estimated seventy-five per cent of the world’s cocaine supply, which is masterminded by just a few major kingpins in the world of narcotics.

  PART FOUR: Spies and Double Agents

  Mata Hari

  Mata Hari was a beautiful, exotic dancer who became an espionage agent. The glamorous World War I spy was eventually shot by the French in 1917, despite the fact that there was never any evidence that she actually passed on anything of military importance.

  She was born Margaretha Gertruida Zelle on August 7, 1876 in Leeuwarden, Holland. Her father, Adam Zelle, was a successful milliner who was married to Antje van der Meulen. Margaretha was the only girl in a family of four boys and, in a society noted for its fair complexions, blonde hair and blue eyes, she stood out from the crowd. She had an olive complexion, thick black hair and black eyes, and her father doted on her, often indulging his vivacious daughter.

  The young Margaretha was beautiful, intelligent and, in many ways, showed a flair for dancing and dramatics from an early age. She loved to wear brightly coloured clothes and often told exaggerated tales about her exotic origins. Her friends listened to her stories of castles and princes, totally enthralled, although deep down they knew it was all a fantasy inside her head. She was a popular pupil who was quick to learn and seemed to have a natural aptitude for languages.

  When Margaretha was only thirteen years old, disaster struck the Zelle family. Her father’s business went bankrupt when he made some misguided investments on the stock market. They were forced to sell off their b
eautiful furniture and the family moved to a much smaller house in a shabby part of town. Her father decided to go to Amsterdam to see if he could earn some money, and he left his children in the care of his wife. Unfortunately, Antje found it all too much to handle and became mentally ill and died when Margaretha was only fifteen. The teenager took the death of her mother very hard, but her spirits lifted when her father returned home to attend the funeral.

  Margaretha believed that she would now live with her beloved father, but she was wrong, as he left a few days later leaving her with her godfather, Heer Visser. Visser was not keen to take on the orphan and suggested that she started training to become a kindergarten teacher. Aware that she was not really wanted in the Visser household, Margaretha accepted a place at a teaching school in Leyde, run by Heer Wybrandus Haanstra. Even at this age, Margaretha at 178 cm (5 ft 10in) tall towered above most of the other female students.

  Margaretha had one major problem at the school, and that was the proprietor Haanstra. He had developed an infatuation for the stunning young Margaretha, and forced his attentions on her. For a while it appears as though she welcomed his affections, but their affair became a subject of public scandal. The blame was placed on Margaretha, who was said to have made advances to the elderly man, and she was forced to leave the school in disgrace.