27-YR. COKE PROBE PAYS OFF FOR COPS

Nearly three decades ago, when cocaine was considered a rich kid's
drug, a couple of NYPD detectives refused to ignore a Queens crew
peddling the illegal blow.

The drug dealers seemed more organized than typical hoodlums. They
never ran out of cocaine and cloaked their moves by communicating
with beepers, unheard of in 1978.

The cops' hunch grew into a legendary probe that led all the way to
the coca fields of Colombia - and finally delivered a
multimillion-dollar payoff to the city just last week.

Following a trail of evidence, NYPD, state police and federal Drug
Enforcement Administration agents linked the Queens crew to the
notorious Cali drug cartel and kingpin Jose Santacruz Londono.

"When we started, if we seized 44 pounds of cocaine, we thought that
was great," said retired NYPD Detective Kenneth Robinson, one of the
original sleuths on the Queens case. "By the end, we were seizing
tons of coke."

Londono was behind 80% of the cocaine on the city's streets in the
1980s and 1990s. But he was unlucky enough to come to power just as
the city was trying a new tactic - teaming local, state and federal
investigators to go after illegal drug operations.

After years of digging, state police uncovered massive cocaine
processing labs upstate in the mid-1980s and tied them to the dealers
in Queens.

By tapping phones and tracing beepers and faxes, the task force built
a database of who bought the cocaine, who sold it and who washed the money.

"They'd know we were on them," said Bill Mante, who was the senior
investigator for State Police Troop K on the Cali case. "They'd leave
a couple hundred thousand in a padlocked closet and hope we wouldn't
find the $5 million in cash they had hidden in vaults in the walls.

"But our guys were bloodhounds."

In one case, a fingerprint on a beer can in a Jamaica Estates drug
den matched a Colombia passport seized in Bayside that belonged to a
dealer in Argentina who was working out of a Baltimore warehouse
packed with drugs, said Bill Mockler, the former DEA chief of the task force.

The investigators slowly chopped down the Cali family tree. Drug
lieutenants were exposed and middlemen arrested. All of them worked
for Londono.

Living luxuriously in Colombia, he spent millions on homes, cars,
fancy art and furniture. He got plastic surgery for himself - to mask
his identity - and for his family - to feed their vanity.

The feds joked they should seize his daughter's nose - paid for with
$10,000 of drug money.

Londono was captured in Colombia in 1996. He soon escaped from a
prison in his homeland only to be gunned down several months later by
Colombian authorities after the United States threatened to stop
sending them billions of dollars in international aid.

Last week, the NYPD, state police and DEA finally shared more than $3
million in drug proceeds from Londono's criminal enterprise. The cash
had been stashed in banks across Europe for decades.

"We worked as a team," said DEA Agent Robbie Michaelis as many of the
players gathered in New York this week to mark the drug enforcement
task force's 35th anniversary. "We worked as a team and took him down."