The Cobra team was gaining success in destroying the cocaine shipments from Colombia. Either the shipments were being seized or manoeuvred to be delivered at the wrong places. In another event, the daughter of Roberto Cardenas (a board member of the cartel) is persuaded by a fake lover to travel to New York.
No sooner does she arrive in New York, that cocaine is recovered from her baggage. As soon as Roberto comes to know about his daughter's arrest, he sends Julio Luz, the cartel's attorney to New York to get his daughter released. However, the American attorney engaged by Julio Luz portrays a bleak picture about the trial of the offender. He says:
"Senor Luz, I must be brutally frank. Things are not good. Personally, I have no doubt your ward was lured into a disastrous situation by the cocaine smuggler who called himself Domingo de Vega and that she was unaware of what she was doing. She was duped. It happens all the time."
"So that is good," interjected the Colombian. "It is good that I believe it. But if I am to represent her, I must. The problem is, I am neither the jury nor the judge, and I am certainly not the DEA, the FBI or the District Attorney. And a much bigger problem is that this Vega man has not only vanished, but there is not a shred of evidence that he existed."
The law firm's limousine crossed the East River and Luz stared down glumly at the gray water. "But Vega was not the baggage handler," he protested. "There must be another man, the one in Madrid who opened her case and put in the package." "We do not know that," sighed the Manhattan counsellor. "He may have been the baggage handler as well. Or have had access to the baggage hall. He may have passed for an Iberia staffer or customs officer with right of access. He may even have been either of these things. How energetic will the Madrid authorities be to divert their precious resources to the task of trying to liberate one they probably see as a dope smuggler, and a non-Spanish to boot?"
They turned onto the East River Drive toward Bose-man Barrow's comfort zone, downtown Manhattan. "I have funds," protested Julio Luz. "I can engage private investigators on both sides of the Atlantic. How you say, 'The sky is the limit.'" Barrow beamed down at his companion. He could almost smell the odor of the new wing of his mansion in the Hamptons. This was going to take many months.
"We have one powerful argument, Senor Luz. It is clear that the security apparatus at Madrid Airport screwed up badly." "Screwed up?" "Failed. In these paranoid days, all airline baggage heading to the US should be X-ray screened at the air-port of departure. Especially in Europe. There are bilateral compacts. The outline of the bag should have shown up at Madrid. And they have sniffer dogs. Why no sniffer dogs? It all points to an insertion after the usual checks . . ."
"Then we can ask they drop the charges?" "On an administrative foul-up? I'm afraid dropping the charges is out of the question. As for our chances in court, without some blistering new evidence in her favour, not good. A New York jury simply will not believe a screw up in Madrid Airport is possible.
"They will look at the known evidence, not the protestations of the accused. One passenger from, of all places, Colombia; slipping through the Green Channel; one kilogram of Colombian pure; floods of tears. I am afraid it is very, very common. And the city of New York is getting very, very sick of it." Mr Barrow forbore to say that his own engagement would not look good either. Olympian quantities of money were associated by low-budget New Yorkers, the sort who end up on juries, with the cocaine trade. A real, innocent mule would be abandoned to the Legal Aid Office. But no need to secure his own departure from the case.
"What happens now?" asked Luz. His entrails were starting to melt again at the idea of confronting the volcanic temper of Roberto Cardenas with this. "Well, she will soon appear before the Federal District Court for Brooklyn. The judge will not grant bail. That is a given. She will be transferred to an upstate federal jail on remand, pending trial. These are not nice places. She is not street hardened. Convent educated, you said? Oh dear. There are aggressive lesbians in these places. I am deeply sorry to say that. I doubt it is different in Colombia."
Luz put his face in his hands. "Dios mio," He. murmured. "How long there?" "Well, not less than six months, I fear. Time for the Prosecutor's Office to prepare its case, somewhere in its vast workload. And for us, of course. For your private eyes to see what they can turn up."
Julio Luz also declined to be frank. He had no doubt a few private eyes would be Cub Scouts compared to the army of hard men Roberto Cardenas would unleash to find the destroyer of his daughter. But he was wrong in that. Cardenas would do no such thing, because Don Diego would find out. The Don did not know about the secret daughter, and the Don insisted on knowing everything. Even Julio Luz had thought she was the gangster's girlfriend and the envelopes he carried were her allowance. He had one last timid question. The limousine hissed through the slush to a halt outside the luxury office block whose penthouse floor housed the small but gold-plated law firm of Manson Barrow.
"If she is found guilty, Senor Barrow, what would be the sentence?"
"Hard to say, of course. Depends on mitigating evidence, if any; my own advocacy; the judge on the day. But I fear in the present mood it might be felt necessary to create an example. A deterrent. In the area of twenty years in a federal penitentiary. Thank heavens her parents are not around to see it." Julio Luz moaned. Barrow took pity. "Of course, the picture could be transformed if she became an informant. We call it 'plea bargaining.' The DEA does trade deals for insider information to catch the much bigger fish. Now, if-"
"She cannot," moaned Luz. "She knows nothing. She is truly innocent.." "Ah well, then . . . such a pity." Luz was being quite truthful. He alone knew what the jailed young woman's father did, and he certainly did not dare to tell her." The actions of the cobra team suggested that the team was faithfully acting on the advice of Chinese thinker Sun Tazu (having gained fame from his book, "The Art of War") who had advised centuries ago that study the enemy and always make him under-estimate you.
The cartel had no idea how adverse things were happening to them and who was the architect behind the scenes. Roberto's daughter was in possession of the DEA, he approached the Cobra team for her release. He was made to believe that unless he provided them with the list of their supporters in the law enforcement agencies, the girl was not going to be released. Roberto had no option but to provide them with the list of secret actors. The second phases of the mission namely, "hiss" now came to an end. And it was now time to strike.
The cartels have always been riven by one psychiatric defect, that is, raging paranoia, and the capacity for suspicion is instant and uncontrollable. In day-to-day practice, the cartel does not forgive two crimes to steal the product and to inform the authorities. The practice is that the thief and the snitch will always be hunted down and revenge exacted. For example, what was done to the family of a suspect is evident form this report:
"... The children were not a problem. They were buried, alive of course. In front of the mother. Still she refused to confess. It took her several hours to die, but she clung to her story that her husband had said nothing and done nothing wrong. Finally, Paco Valdez had no choice but to believe her. He could not continue anyway. She was dead..."
This event was the direct outcome of the successful strikes being made by the law-enforcement agencies who took control of the contraband. The cartel for the first time felt helpless and in misery. Their consignments were not reaching the targets and whereabouts of the lost consignment was not known. In fact nothing was traceable. The men and the cocaine were captured, and everything else disappeared forever. In another event, officials of various agencies around the globe with links to the mafia were arrested in different episodes. This made the life of the cartel more miserable. Day-by-day it was becoming difficult for the mafia to succeed in making delivery of drugs.
The things were bad for Don. Their goods were disappearing. Obviously he thought there must be someone stealing the goods. For him this was treachery or theft, which was another form of treachery. And treachery had only one response. Identify and punish with insensate violence. Whoever they were, they had to learn. Consequently many of those who were suspected were shot dead.
In the meantime Julio Luz, the cartel's attorney was arrested in Madrid and all the records relating to accounts handled by him were seized. Two days later he was informed that since there was no direct evidence against him he was free to go. He, however, refused to go. Why, the same is more clear from the following scene: "...In the morning, he refused to leave. His defending counsellor was bewildered. Luz continued to refuse.
"You have no choice, senor," said Chief Inspector Ortega. "It seems we have no case against you. Your lawyer here has been too clever for me. You have to go back to Bogota."
"But if I confess?" There was silence in the cell. The defending lawyer threw up his hands and left in a huff. He had done his best. He had succeeded. But even he could not defend a fool. Paco Ortega led Luz to an interview room.
"Now," he said, "let's talk. Let's really talk. About lots of things. That is, if you really want sanctuary here." And Luz talked. On and on. He knew so much, not just about Banco Guzman but about others. Like Eber-hardt Milch in Hamburg, he was just not cut out for this sort of thing..."
The happenings and events were making cartel's senior management uneasy and like Luz many other people were thinking of co-operating with the law enforcement agencies. The agencies on the other hand were claiming that all the success was due to new technology being employed to unearth the crime.
Most of these seizures did not hurt the cartel directly because the ownership had already passed, but it meant that national gangs lost fortune, and were forced to re-place fresh orders and placate their own clamouring subagents and secondary purchases. Another tradition of the cartel is a cavalier attitude to the unwanted attention of customs and excise men. Smugglers have often been seen in a romantic light, but there is nothing light in the ruthlessness with which smugglers fight the authorities and punish squealers.
Every interception, loss or disappearance in transit between Colombia and handover point was a loss to the cartel. But that was not the point. The US customs, state and city police did make scores of successful raids on inland depots. These losses were hurting the cartel and its supporters badly.
Each giant importing gang had a huge grid of smaller clients whose needs had to be satisfied. There is no loyalty' in this business. If a habitual supplier cannot supply and a different one can, the smaller dealer will simply switch. Now a national shortage was developing. Prices were rising in accordance with market forces. Importers were cutting the puro not six or seven to one but up to ten to one, trying to spin out supplies and keep customers. Some users were snorting only a seven percent mix. The bulking-up materials were becoming more and more just junk, with the chemists throwing in insane quantities of substitute drugs like ketamine to try to fool the user that he was getting a high-quality sensation instead of a large dose of horse tranquilliser, which just happened to look and smell the same.
The 'Cobra' plan was working with success. The time had come for the serpent to show its venom. The first weapon of venom was disinformation. And for that radio stations and an untraceable blog on the internet were selected. To begin with the Cobra selected the Mexican cartel to bust. He inserted two pieces of information that were true and one that was not. The false information was sufficient to create a rift and to ignite the venom of the rival cartel groups. The cobra weapon was successful and the rival groups scattered corpses from coast to coast in the US.
The unidentified and untraceable source of seemingly infallible information about the cocaine world, which the Cobra had established, published a supposed leak out from Colombia. The insider claimed that Don Diego Esteban had admitted in a private meeting that his future favour would fall upon the eventual clear winner of any settlement of accounts in the European underworld.
There were gang killings from Dublin to Warsaw. Tourists hurled themselves screaming to the floor in bars and restaurants as submachine Carbines "executed settlements of accounts across dining tables and office parties. In London, the nanny of the Home Secretary, taking her toddler charges for a walk on Primrose Hill, found a body in the shrubbery. It had no head. In Hamburg, Frankfurt and Darmstadt, cadavers appeared on the street every night for a week. Fourteen corpses were pulled out of French rivers in a single morning. Two were black, and dental work established the rest were not French but from the East.
On the other hand, 'COBRA's' action started on land, sea and air. The consignments of cocaine were either destroyed, drowned or taken possession of. There was no respite. Gangs wars spread their fights around the world and more precisely in US towns. It looked as if an undeclared world war was going on. The political powers became uneasy due to the unknown reaction of the public. The 'Cobra' operation was ordered to be stopped.
Devereaux was heart broken on the ending of war against crime by the political leadership. He had in possession tons of cocaine seized by him. He approached the cartel and made a deal for the return of the seized goods. Dexter visits the place where seized cocaine was stored and finds out the details about the deal of the cartel and Devereaux. He destroys the cocaine. The cartel had made payment to Devereaux, and he fails to supply the goods. According to the cartel's regulations he was shot dead.
(The writer is an advocate and is currently working as an associate with Azim-ud-Din Law Associates) 1. Fredric Forsyth, The Cobra; (2010), A Signet Book.
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