DR. B AND GROUP 43

International models. Colombian cocaine traffickers. Champagne baths, and a
fashion photographer doubling as government agent. It's a case the U.S.
government wishes would go away.

The war on drugs had never seen anything like it. For four days, U.S.
counternarcotics agents and the drug traffickers they were chasing gathered
at the Inter Continental Hotel in Panama City. They called it "The Convention."

The Central American capital, with its reputation for shady deals, made an
ideal setting. At the crossroads between North and South America,
traffickers and law enforcement considered it neutral ground.

Coordinating these off-the-record meetings was Baruch Vega, a
silver-tongued Colombian-American fashion photographer whose specialty was
shooting gorgeous models. He also happened to be the United States' best
hope of getting inside the world of Colombia's drug lords.

For this assignment he posed as a fixer. For a fee, Vega told his
trafficker contacts, he could get his U.S. law enforcement friends to,
shall we say, smooth out their legal problems. They would get out of prison
after a few years, most of their fortunes intact, their books cleared.

In the drug trade, Vega's deals were so popular, what he was offering came
to be known as the "Colombian Traffickers Rehabilitation Program."

He couldn't keep up with demand one trafficker at a time. Thus, the
Convention. About two dozen traffickers or their lawyers made the short
trip from Colombia to the Inter Continental, along the Panama City bayfront.

"I mean the place was packed," Vega said in a series of conversations
between fashion shoots on Miami Beach. "We went from one meeting to the
next telling people to wait and canceling meetings. They wanted to know if
they could hire us to mediate on behalf of their friends and relatives.
Everybody wanted in."

Vega picked up everybody's expenses, charging more than $100,000 to his
credit cards. He organized dinner at a plush restaurant, Seven Seas. "It
was bizarre. They (the traffickers) were all mingling with the agents.
Everybody was happy."

The traffickers and agents capped the night at Josephine's, a Panama City
strip club. Vega paid.

His accomplishments as a "mediator" (his preferred term), are considerable.
Too bad what he and the government did was a scam, and, some say, an
illegal one at that. Winners all around

Vega worked with Drug Enforcement Administration agents David Tinsley and
Larry Castillo, from the DEA's Group 43 in Miami.

Agents working from Group 9, in Fort Lauderdale, were conducting a separate
investigation, code-named Operation Millennium, that targeted some of the
very traffickers that Vega and his Group 43 handlers were dining with in
Panama City. Group 9, though, was not in on what Group 43 was up to.

The night of Oct. 13, 1999, Colombian police rounded up 30 indicted
traffickers. In Washington and Bogota, Operation Millennium was hailed as
among the most effective counterdrug actions in Colombian history. The
accused were said to have exported as much as 30 tons of drugs a month to
the United States.

"We believe Operation Millennium has disrupted a consortium of major
Colombian drug trafficking networks responsible for flooding our streets
with tons of cocaine each and every month," Attorney General Janet Reno said.

Soon after the indictment was announced, agents who worked Operation
Millennium were surprised to learn Vega and Group 43 had potentially
undercut their work. The operation would be called into question, and more
than three years later, drug supplies remain plentiful and prices steady.
That's not to say the operation didn't work out well.

Vega got his cut, though the government would later come down hard on him.

Drug agents boosted arrest numbers, and politicians crowed about
devastating advances in the drug war.

The traffickers made out, as well, with deals so sweet they begged to sign up.

The only loser, perhaps, was the American public, misled about the war on
drugs. Then again, the public wasn't supposed to find out. Everybody loves
Baruch

Vega was the second of 11 children fathered by a trumpet player of little
means in Bogota. At 15, he won a $20,000 amateur photography contest
sponsored by Kodak. His was a chance shot he made of a bird, a fish in its
beak, diving into a still lake behind the house where he grew up in
Bucaramanga, Colombia.

His parents wouldn't let him study photography, so he studied engineering
at Industrial University of Santander State in Colombia. A professor
recruited him for the CIA.

In the early 1970s, he says he was sent to Chile, to help CIA efforts to
destabilize the government of Salvador Allende. After a botched bombing in
Santiago, he quit the CIA and moved to New York.

The idea was to work as a structural engineer, but he married a model and
started a modeling agency.

Living on the Upper East side, Vega stumbled back into contact with law
enforcement when an FBI drug raid netted a Colombian neighbor and the man's
tearful wife asked him for help. Vega called a former CIA colleague, now
with the FBI, who said the case was weak and probably would be dropped.

Vega reported back that everything would be okay and, indeed, the case went
away. Assuming Vega used his influence, the neighbor showed his gratitude
in cash, $20,000.

Vega's modeling business flourished; his subjects included Lauren Hutton,
Christie Brinkley and Cheryl Tiegs. He remarried, this time to the daughter
of a real estate tycoon. In the late 1970s, he sold his New York modeling
agency for $2.5-million and moved south, to an exclusive islet off Miami
Beach called Palm Island, and a 12-bedroom mansion on two acres.

These were the Miami Vice days, the city crawling with international
cocaine dealers who hung out at the Mutiny Hotel, owned by Vega's
father-in-law. Vega helped out, organizing champagne baths for the coke
dealers' girlfriends.

He did occasional police work, as well. He helped Miami police track a
notorious hit man and helped the FBI build a database of drug traffickers.
He posed as a wealthy Florida horse dealer, operating from a huge ranch in
Lake County that the FBI and IRS confiscated from a drug dealer.

A trusted undercover asset in the war on drugs, his work was a secret
well-kept. Some knew Baruch Vega only as "Dr. B."

His photography work on Miami Beach provided the perfect cover. He and his
business partner, Roman Suarez, made frequent trips to Colombia, scouting
for trafficker clients.

Said Vega: "We were mingling with all these attractive women. They (models)
always attract the wealthiest and worst element. I used to go to Colombia
with the most spectacular women in the world and they (drug traffickers)
would just melt."

His handlers weren't bothered by how Vega financed his operations, even if
he was taking money from drug dealers. "We were happy," said one former
agent. "He was getting results and it wasn't costing us a cent."

Vega's glitzy lifestyle caused distrust in some law enforcement circles. He
says he was investigated four times and cleared each time on accusations of
corruption.

His latest assignment was working with DEA and FBI agents targeting
traffickers known as the Northern Valley cartel, or "Devil's cartel,"
suspected of enjoying high-level Colombian police protection.

Vega's job was to recruit well-placed Colombians who might work as
informers. It was an assignment for which Dr. B had no equal.

Most agents who worked closely with Vega speak glowingly of his work, but
not publicly, because they say they are bound by the secrecy of their
undercover operations. They credit Vega with providing intelligence that
led to the surrender of more than 100 traffickers and mountains of seized
cocaine.

"Baruch is a hero in my book," a former agent said. "For years he risked
his life to give us quality information. We looked at it like we were at
war and Baruch could get us into the heads of the enemy generals."

Equally pleased were the drug dealers. Vega's deals required them to give
the government their cooperation and forfeit some of their ill-gotten
wealth. But they got to keep most of their bank accounts, luxury homes and
other assets, and they could count their prison sentences in months rather
than multiple life terms.

Everybody, it seemed, loved Vega. His U.S. handlers were happy with the
access he enjoyed in Colombia. Equally, as long as he delivered attractive
plea bargains, the traffickers weren't bothered by his close ties to law
enforcement. Then an odd proposal

Among those to negotiate his surrender was Julio Correa, a fugitive
Colombian who was dating the country's top fashion model, Natalia Paris. He
had been indicted in October 1995 as the ringleader of a conspiracy to
smuggle two tons of cocaine into the port of Miami.

Correa never saw a day in jail. He was given a U.S. visa under an alias and
went to work undercover. His name disappeared from court records. (Correa
would vanish in 2001, during a trip to Colombia to visit his girlfriend and
attend a soccer tournament; he is presumed murdered.)

Vega says Correa paid him $300,000 for his services but spread the word
that he had paid $6-million. The bigger the sum, the more attention it
would generate, the bigger fish it would draw.

The Next Trafficker

Vega brought in was Nicolas Bergonzoli, a rancher from Medellin with ties
to Colombia's illegal paramilitary forces. He had been indicted in October
1995 for a 3,300-pound cocaine shipment.

Vega says Bergonzoli paid him $500,000, though Bergonzoli told others he
paid $8-million. Vega chartered a Lear jet and flew him to Fort Lauderdale.
After a closed hearing in federal court, Bergonzoli was released on bail.

Bergonzoli helped the DEA contact the head of Colombia's paramilitary,
Carlos Castano. According to Castano, the agents wanted his help in
"arranging the surrender of drug traffickers."

It was an odd proposal to say the least. Castano has openly admitted
collaborating with drug traffickers and taxing their business in his zones
of control. Human rights groups and the State Department hold Castano's
private army, the Colombian Self-Defense Forces (AUC), responsible for some
of the worst atrocities in the country's long-running civil war.

Castano apparently hoped to win a slot in Vega's program for lenient
treatment. But on Sept. 10, 2001, Secretary of State Colin Powell
designated the AUC a "foreign terrorist organization." The talks with
Castano broke off.

He was indicted last September, accused of trafficking 17 tons of cocaine;
he has not been caught.

Castano wasn't the only one for whom the program failed to work. Word got
out that a "cartel of snitches" was working with the government. Death
threats were issued.

One of Vega's highest level informers, drug lord Pacho Herrera, was
murdered in a Palmira jail; Vega was outside waiting to visit him and heard
the shots. His main Medellin contact, art dealer Arturo Piza, was murdered
in March 1999, hours after he met with Vega.

"After that I never went back to Colombia," Vega said.

By the autumn of 1999, he had no need to go back. He moved his deal-cutting
business to Panama City and put out the word: All traffickers welcome.

Two dozen or their representatives showed up, along with Vega's DEA
handlers, the FBI and a Metro Miami-Dade police officer representing a
South Florida drug task force. To prove the program worked, Vega brought
along Correa and Bergonzoli. Correa flashed his fraudulent Colombian
passport and U.S. visa. Bergonzoli talked up Vega's contacts.

Vega took down biographical details of the program applicants and DEA agent
Larry Castillo cross-checked the names with his agency's files. The biggest
potential catch was Luis Hernando Gomez, alias Rasguno (Scratch), who was
under indictment in Roanoke, Va.

Vega recalls agent Castillo asking Rasguno how many kilos of cocaine he was
bringing into the United States.

Rasguno thought for a moment: "Look, I don't know, because it's been a
while since I reckoned the merchandise in kilos. We do it by the ton."
Business at hand

The Justice Department unveiled the Millennium indictment two weeks later,
which only cemented the popularity of Vega's program. Most everyone wanted in.

It no longer made business sense to keep renting private jets to dazzle
customers. Vega and his partner made a $250,000 down payment for a
lease-purchase on a nine-seat Hawker 700 jet. The DEA chipped in $28,000.

Just four days after the Millennium arrests, Vega held another
well-attended convention in Panama. Only this time, Bogota DEA agent Nick
Kolen crashed the proceedings. He wanted to know what Vega and Group 43
were up to.

"Kolen informed (Miami DEA agent) Castillo that Vega's practices, while
acting for DEA, were improper," the government would say later in court.

The internal DEA wranglings did not interrupt the business at hand. Aboard
Vega's jet the next day, agent Castillo escorted the first Panama "snitch"
- - Orlando Sanchez-Cristancho, a fugitive in the Millennium case - to Miami.

To keep the program secret, prosecutors arranged to have
Sanchez-Cristancho's hearing held in camera, just the government, his
lawyer and the judge. He was released on $300,000 bail. No official records
entered in the court's public filing system.

At a closed hearing before a U.S. magistrate on Dec. 1, 1999, Assistant
U.S. Attorney Theresa Van Vliet attested to Sanchez-Cristancho's
cooperation. She conveyed the government's strongest possible backing for
the Vega program.

"I think in terms of the buck stopping, if this falls apart, it will be on
my little neck in terms of the government. So you can put me on the line on
this one."

A week later Vega was back in Panama, setting up more meetings with
traffickers and his Group 43 handlers. Van Vliet got wind and, as she puts
it, was "livid." She did not want Vega and the Group 43 agents meeting with
suspects, including several Millennium fugitives.

Van Vliet called DEA agent David Tinsley. "I told him that he had to put
his informant (Vega) under control."

Van Vliet instructed another Bogota DEA agent, Paul Craine, to deliver a
stern message to the traffickers in Panama: Stay away from Vega; anyone
seeking a deal was to have his lawyer contact the U.S. Attorney's Office.

"There was no other avenue of surrender, or cooperation or anything."

When Vega found out Craine had come to Panama, he hurriedly checked out of
the Inter Continental and directed all traffickers and their relatives to a
JW Marriott a few streets away.

But not before agent Craine knocked on the door as agent Castillo met with
one of the traffickers. Castillo bundled him in a closet until Craine left.
Word gets around

What did Craine think of the goings-on in Panama? Unorthodox, he said. "I
was not aware that (agent) Castillo was authorized to meet with the
(Millennium) defendants."

Such matters normally went to a high-level, interagency group in Washington
known as the Blitz Committee, responsible for vetting cooperation deals.

"I was aware (Group 43) had several sources with contacts with top echelon
traffickers," Craine said. As for Vega's "dirty" cooperation pitch, "I had
heard rumors."

Vega's activities also caught the attention of Edward Kacerosky, a
well-regarded U.S. Customs agent with several high-profile drug cases under
his belt. Kacerosky was incensed when he got wind of what Group 43 was up to.

In December 1999, Kacerosky told Van Vliet that Vega was spreading the word
that some of his dirty money was being used to bribe her. She immediately
notified her office's Public Corruption Section, which started investigating.

Still the Panama conventions continued. In late December, Vega netted
another prize: Carlos Ramon, alias, El Medico.

Little did Vega know that having brought him in, Ramon would turn on him.
Jetting to the deal

Ramon was studying medicine early in the 1990s when his father was
kidnapped for ransom and murdered by legendary drug lord Pablo Escobar.

He promptly abandoned his studies and joined Los PEPES, a Spanish acronym
for Persons Persecuted by Pablo Escobar. The group helped Colombian police,
the CIA and the DEA hunt for him. Colombian police killed Escobar in 1993.

Ramon boasted of his close ties to La Terraza, one of Medellin's most
violent gangs, which carried out scores of contract murders on behalf of
the paramilitary and local drug bosses.

When Ramon met with Vega in November 1999, he was under indictment in South
Florida. Vega flew him to Miami on the company jet to arrange the terms of
his deal with prosecutors.

He surrendered as part of a $42-million family package hashed out with Vega
that included Ramon's brother-in-law and two cousins, all under indictment.
Ramon paid Vega $3-million in advance. Riding trust

To demonstrate his influence to potential clients, Vega would smuggle them,
their wives and girlfriends into the United States on his private plane.
Most were fugitives or did not have U.S. visas, but agent Castillo would go
along.

At the airport, they would be met by the DEA and FBI and whisked through
customs and immigration, no questions asked. Vega called this his "trust ride."

When it came time to turn themselves in, the traffickers would repeat the
ride. They typically would spend the night in a government-paid hotel room,
with agents next door, make a brief court appearance and be released on bail.

On Dec. 18, 1999, Vega and a load of traffickers flew from Panama to Miami.
Some took a side trip to Disney World. Two days later Vega was back in
Panama to pick up Ramon and smuggle him into Miami to meet with prosecutors.

To celebrate, Ramon joined a New Year's Eve millennium bash in Biscayne Bay
aboard the Camelot, a 100-foot luxury party yacht.

On Feb. 9, 2000, accompanied by his lawyer, Ramon flew back to Miami.
Despite a warrant for his arrest, he entered the country without being
detained. He had dinner with his girlfriend at one of South Beach's
trendiest restaurants, China Grill, and turned himself in the next morning.

At a closed sentencing hearing a year later, Ramon admitted to drug
trafficking. His lawyer stressed his "voluntary surrender" and his role in
arranging the surrender of three relatives.

He was presented as a repentant trafficker, capable of providing
substantial assistance. There was no mention of his involvement in La
Terraza, nor was there mention of his $42-million deal with Vega.

The judge agreed he qualified for a reduced sentence of six years.

It Couldn't Last Forever

The new millennium commenced auspiciously for Vega, but his charmed life as
a mediator was nearing an inglorious end.

The government's unease and the friction between the Miami and Bogota DEA
offices was about to blow open.

March 21, 2000, Vega was just back in his Miami Beach penthouse from a
photo shoot in the Yucatan Peninsula. Agents came over for what he assumed
would be a routine debriefing. They handcuffed him and informed him of the
charges: obstruction of justice and money laundering.

Vega turned over the cash in his house, $453,892, and $56,253 in money
orders. They froze another $925,000 in bank accounts.

According to an affidavit by FBI agent John Jones, Vega engaged "in a
fraudulent scheme" to trick drug traffickers into giving him "large amounts
of money which Vega claimed he would use corruptly to ensure (they) would
be treated leniently after they surrendered in the United States."

Jones cited the testimony of an unnamed cooperating witness who said he had
paid Vega $3-million.

Vega knew the government's informer could be none other than Ramon, whose
surrender he had arranged.

He waited 52 days in jail expecting one of the U.S. agencies he had worked
for to bail him out. Nobody came. "Each day I thought they would come and
say, "He's cool. It's a mistake. He's one of us.' "

He finally made bail of $150,000.

Vega does not deny taking money from the traffickers. But contrary to the
government's calculation that he made as much as $100-million from the
deals, he says it was only about $4-million total.

What of the traffickers who said they paid him multimillions? He says that
they used inflated figures as part of the ruse and that most of what they
did pay him in advances went for expenses. He says he never collected the
balance.

U.S. law forbids informers from being paid for their services, except from
the agencies they work for, and certainly not from drug traffickers.

Vega says that does not apply to his case.

"I was not informing. I was conveying messages. I wasn't part of the
government operation. The government never paid me anything. I could take
as much as I wanted. I could take $1 or $1-million. It was my consultancy fee."

He says he earned what he got, fair reward for risking his life. Besides,
he says, it's not like he was some rogue. "I was reporting everything to
the U.S. government. Every time I came back from Panama I was debriefed.
Every time I went to Panama here were DEA agents with me and someone from
the U.S. Embassy was present."

As for making it sound like he could fix cases, Vega said making his
program sound crooked was the only way to convince the traffickers the
deals were genuine. It was a wickedly ingenious pitch, dreamed up by none
other than his handlers at the FBI.

Said Vega: "If you approach a criminal and tell them they have to make an
honest plea and surrender to the U.S. government, 90 percent of the time
you won't walk out alive.

"But if you go there and pretend to present a criminal deal, they believe
it, and they love it. That was our M.O."

Once in Miami, it wouldn't take long for the traffickers to realize they
had been fooled, their cases were not fixed. But no one complained. It
wasn't the corrupt system Vega had sold them, but it might as well have
been. Some of Vega's clients never saw a day in jail. Others are serving
from 34 to 72 months.

Vega sold it as their best option. Facing extradition, there was nowhere
they could run. Avoiding Colombian authorities was costing them protection
money. Laundering money had become expensive, with financiers charging
commissions as high as 25 percent.

"They were better off going to the U.S. and declaring everything to the tax
man," Vega said. "Just so long as they would go free in the end."

The program was beset with legal shortcomings. Not only was it improper to
let the traffickers pay Vega, worse, say defense attorneys, the government
kept U.S. judges in the dark about the true nature of the deals.

His DEA handlers, Tinsley and Castillo, were suspended in 2000 and
investigated by the Justice Department's Office of Public Integrity. The
office cleared the agents of criminal wrongdoing but recommended Tinsley be
"terminated" over the $28,000 the DEA contributed to Vega's Hawker jet,
according to his lawyer.

Attorney Richard Sharpstein said Tinsley has memos proving the payment was
authorized. "He is fit to be tied. He is ready to unleash upon the people
who have left him hanging in the wind as a scapegoat for this ridiculous
farce. We have tens, dozens of people from all different law enforcement
agencies who are ready to stand up for him, going against their own
government."

Tinsley didn't know Vega was taking money, Sharpstein said. When he found
out, he requested an investigation but was rebuffed. The government has
made such a mess of the case, Sharpstein said, that it can't find a way out.

"Vega's a thoroughbred who was riding without a jockey. He needed a whip
and a saddle and 100 pounds on his back to keep him going straight."

At Last, an Acknowledgement

In November 2001, more than 18 months after Vega was arrested, all charges
were dropped. In court three months ago, the government finally
acknowledged it bore some responsibility for his deals.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Ed Ryan said his office dropped the charges because
Vega had a "colorable" - or plausible - explanation for his actions. Vega's
explanation is that he had kept agents informed of the very deals the
government was now prosecuting him for.

Though the government now acknowledges that Vega ran an inappropriate scam,
it denies defense arguments that it compromised the Millennium case.

Vega is out the $1.5-million the government seized (he's appealing), and
banks foreclosed on his two Miami Beach condos. He lived with relatives
until February, when he says he got death threats and started moving from
place to place every few days.

"I'm homeless," he likes to say.

Still, at 56, he is back doing what he loves best - taking pictures of
models on South Beach. Plus, he says, he's on his way to sweet revenge over
Kacerosky, the U.S. Customs agent who blew the whistle on him.

Kacerosky negotiated the surrender of several traffickers from the Northern
Valley cartel, but now it seems they're getting cold feet, and Kacerosky
reportedly has been told to leave Colombia. U.S. and Colombian officials
declined to say why.

Vega says traffickers complained that their deals had not worked out as
advertised. Two of them were murdered. He says some of the others turned to
him to sort things out, and his client list is climbing again.

"But this time, it's all 100 percent legit."

COMING MONDAY: From Medellin, Colombia, the storied Ochoa family gets a
visit from Dr. B. Vega's world

1. For more than three decades, fashion photographer Baruch Vega accepted a
variety of assignments for U.S. law enforcement. Said one agent: "We
regarded Vega as our prinicipal weapon."

2. Late in 1997, the supervisor of DEA Group 43 in Miami, David Tinsley,
asked him to recruit Colombians to work as informers to help penetrate a
cartel suspected of enjoying Colombian police protection.

3. Through his contacts in Colombia, Vega spread the word that if
traffickers came up with cash, his crooked U.S. law enforcement friends
would get them sweet deals. To demonstrate his influence, he would smuggle
fugitive traffickers into Miami on a private jet.

4. The "Colombian Traffickers Rehabilitation Program," as it came to be
known, proved such a success that Vega held six "conventions" in Panama,
where he and his DEA and FBI handlers held off-the-record meetings with
traffickers. The meetings led to deals under which many turned themselves in.

5. Some of these traffickers also were targets of an unrelated
investigation, Operation Millennium, run by DEA Group 9 in Fort Lauderdale.
Neither group knew precisely what the other was up to, or that their
investigations were on a collision course.

Sources for This Special Report

The story of Operation Millennium sits in a bulging docket at the federal
courthouse in Miami titled: USA vs. Bernal-Madrigal et al.

There are 1,306 entries, including literally hundreds of thousands of pages
of legal filings. Many are sealed.

The government argues that the identity and information regarding certain
persons involved in the case must remain hidden to protect lives. Defense
lawyers say the government is using secrecy to hide other things, too.

That's what prompted this story, which was reported over the past 18 months.

The secrecy surrounding the case is also a sign of its political
sensitivity. The drug war in Colombia is at a critical stage after the
United States has pumped almost $2-billion into that country in the past
three years.

The U.S. Attorney's Office declined to discuss Operation Millennium.
Neither would the DEA. Where U.S. officials or DEA agents are quoted, their
comments are taken from court documents or from public pretrial hearings
held in February.

The St. Petersburg Times reviewed as much of the evidence available in the
public record as possible. The government's main evidence, thousands of
hours of wiretaps and bugged conversations, has not been made public,
although defense lawyers were provided copies. The Times was able to review
partial transcripts of some conversations.

Interviews were conducted in Miami and Medellin with lawyers for many of
the 43 defendants, as well as their family members.

Baruch Vega agreed to be interviewed, on four separate occasions, several
hours at a time. The family of Fabio Ochoa also agreed to lengthy
interviews at the family ranch outside Medellin.