EXTRADITED DRUG CHIEF IN COURT

NEW YORK, Aug. 21 - The first major Colombian drug kingpin to be extradited
to the United States in a decade, Alberto "The Snail" Orlandez Gamboa made
his first court appearance here today as prosecutors presented charges of a
massive cocaine smuggling operation that moved up to $3 billion worth of
the drug over 10 years.

Gamboa directed an air-land-and-sea cocaine smuggling operation even from
his jail cell in Bogota, Colombia, prosecutors said. He had been held there
since 1998 on charges including murder and kidnapping, until his
extradition on Saturday on federal drug trafficking and money laundering
charges.

Described by U.S. agents as a drug trafficking "CEO," Gamboa is accused of
leading a group known as the Caracol Organization ("caracol" means "snail")
headquartered in Barranquilla on Colombia's north coast. It became a center
of the South America cocaine trade following the virtual shutdown of the
Medellin and Cali cartels in the 1980s and 1990s.

True to the drug trafficking tradition of which he allegedly is part,
Gamboa's forced departure from Colombia was greeted with threats of
retaliation. A group calling itself the "Our Country Movement"--reportedly
made up of drug traffickers--threatened in a paid newspaper advertisement
to assassinate Colombian government officials and judges unless the Gamboa
extradition was reversed.

The last time such threats were made, in 1989, Colombia was plunged into a
bloody reign of terror by the "narco-trafficantes" known then as the
"Extraditables," who wanted to stop a government plan to summarily
extradite drug traffickers wanted by U.S. prosecutors. Among those
assassinated was an appeals court judge, a police chief and a leading
presidential candidate and anti-trafficking campaigner, Carlos Galan.

Even back then, Gamboa was among the "extraditables." He was arrested to be
sent to the United States. But Colombian authorities were forced to release
him when they discovered Gamboa had no pending U.S. charges against him.

The rest, prosecutors claim, is history.

In crimes allegedly dating back to 1992, Gamboa's group shipped hundreds of
thousands of kilograms of cocaine from Colombia to the mainland United
States, via Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. Over the years, U.S.
drug enforcement agents have seized Caracol group cocaine in Miami,
Philadelphia and New York.

His organization "employed every imaginable means of bulk transportation
and packaging," including commercial cargo ships, speedboats, commercial
and private aircraft and parcel delivery services, said Mary Jo White, the
U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. The Gamboa cocaine was
packed in everything from sawdust to mustard to cough medicine in order to
throw drug-sniffing dogs off the scent and shipped in crates containing
corn oil, engine parts, cement, bananas and ceramic tiles, White said.

Gamboa's lawyer, Martin Schmuckler, called the case "extremely weak"
because of technicalities surrounding the extradition, which stipulates
that acts before Dec. 16, 1997--when a new extradition law took effect--are
excluded. That would severely shrink the scope of the case, with about half
of the indictment's alleged illegal acts falling before the 1997 date.

"He was extradited on that limited condition and the U.S. accepted that,"
Schmuckler said.

White, the lead federal prosecutor here, said the government will go
forward on the full indictment.

"It may well be the subject, given that it was raised this morning, of some
motions in court," White said. "We're confident that we will go forward
with the charges as filed."