FIGHTING THE NEW DRUG LORDS

The DEA's nightmare: Colombian targets get smart, techno-hip and
phenomenally successful

Aside from a few human weaknesses, Alejandro Bernal Madrigal was the
very image of respectability--at least by the strict but skin-deep
standards of Colombia's upper-middle class.

The light-complexioned, blue-eyed businessman, 40, lavished millions
of dollars on his pampered stable of top-of-the-line show horses.

Another favorite pastime was taking Caribbean cruises with bosomy
young models aboard his yacht, the Claudia V. He was also said to
enjoy an occasional puff or two of marijuana.

But Bernal's little faults never hurt his social standing. His three
children attended one of the best private schools in Medellin. His
wife, Blanca Estela, kept fit playing tennis at the city's exclusive
Ceylan Racquet Club. By the late 1990s, Bernal had reached the top of
his profession. According to Colombian law-enforcement officials, he
was using satellite phones and the Internet to run an export network
that handled at least 10 tons of cocaine every month--roughly 25
percent of Colombia's total production.

U.S. and Colombian authorities say Bernal exemplifies an insidious new
breed of drug lord. The young narcotraficantes are buttoned-down,
businesslike and technologically sophisticated. "These new guys don't
flaunt jewels or drive flashy cars, and they are more educated and
less violent," says Gen. Rosso Jose Serrano, chief of the Colombian
National Police. "You have to use a lot more intelligence and
surveillance to nab them." And they are phenomenally successful. Their
drug shipments dwarf the amounts that were sent north by the old
Medellin and Cali cocaine cartels at the peak of their bloody careers
a decade ago. In 1990 the country's traffickers produced about 65
metric tons of cocaine.

Last year the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration calculated
Colombia's annual cocaine production at about 165 metric tons. This
month Central Intelligence Agency Director George Tenet told a U.S.
Senate committee that the latest estimate is more than two and a half
times that much.

The cocaine boom has pushed Colombia and the drug war back to the top
of the White House's foreign-policy agenda.

Last week the Clinton administration formally unveiled a two-year,
$1.3 billion emergency aid package to help Colombia's beleaguered
president, Andres Pastrana, fight the tide. Congressional approval of
the bill would make Bogota by far the largest U.S. foreign-aid
recipient outside the Mideast. The growing investment of American
troops, arms and money has already begun provoking comparisons with
Vietnam, where Washington was incrementally sucked into a disastrous
and unwinnable conflict.

Bernal himself is on the sidelines for now, locked up in a
maximum-security Colombian prison and fighting efforts to extradite
him to the United States. A federal grand jury in Florida has indicted
him on charges of money laundering and conspiracy to smuggle cocaine.
(In reply to NEWSWEEK's repeated requests for an interview, Bernal
claimed prison officials had forbidden it. He also declined to answer
a list of written questions.

According to Eduardo Aguilar, his Bogota attorney, Bernal insists
Colombia's extradition proceedings against him are nothing but a
political ploy to win congressional approval of the $1.3 billion U.S.
aid package.)

Colombian police seized Bernal late last year during a nationwide drug
raid code-named Operation Millennium, the culmination of a joint
U.S.-Colombian investigation spanning a year and two continents. In a
single night, some 30 of Colombia's most wanted individuals were
rounded up, including Fabio Ochoa Vasquez, a leading member of
Medellin's reputed first family of cocaine.

Even so, Bernal was the one who got top billing in the DEA's
announcement of the mass arrests. (Ochoa has publicly declared his
innocence.)

Law enforcers call Bernal anything but a common criminal.

Colombia's trigger-happy first generation of coke lords tended to be
short-term scary but long-term dumb. They declared war on their own
country, planting car bombs outside law-enforcement headquarters and
hiring assassins to rub out troublesome judges, cabinet ministers and
presidential candidates. In Bernal's earlier years, investigators say,
one of his mentors was the notorious Pablo Escobar. Before his death
in a 1993 police shootout, the Medellin godfather once ordered a
Colombian airliner blown out of the sky, killing 110 passengers,
because he thought two police informants were aboard.

The drug bosses ultimately brought destruction on themselves. By the
mid-1990s many of them were dead or behind bars, and the cartels they
had built were in ruins.

Such violence was scarcely Bernal's style.

Urbane and smooth, he preferred to go about his daily affairs
unencumbered by obtrusive bodyguards. Without them he could blend in
perfectly with the other impeccably tailored customers at the finest
restaurants in Bogota and Cartagena. Besides, blood feuds tend to be
bad for commerce. "They have learned a lot from the past," a senior
Colombian intelligence official says of the new generation of
narcobosses. "They consider drug trafficking to be a business, not a
crime, and it's not in their interest to kill someone." Working their
way up as second-tier lieutenants in the Medellin and Cali cartels,
they had plenty of opportunity to learn from the disastrous mistakes
of their elders.

Bernal appreciated the value of keeping a low profile.

That was just one of the many ways he differed from the streetcorner
cowboys and renegade aristocrats who allegedly taught him the
narcotics trade in the 1980s. As police sources retell the story of
Bernal's life, he grew up in the city of Pereira, about 200 kilometers
due south of Medellin, in a proper middle-class family.

As a young man, however, Bernal fell in with a fellow horse fancier:
Fabio Ochoa Vasquez, the youngest of three sons in the family of a
powerful Medellin cattle baron, Don Fabio Ochoa Restrepo. Along with
Escobar, the Ochoa boys are generally regarded as central figures in
the creation of Colombia's international cocaine trade in the late
1970s. Bernal moved to Los Angeles in 1981 to oversee their West Coast
trafficking and money-laundering operations in the United States,
according to investigators. "The Medellin cartel was Bernal's school
of drug trafficking," says the Colombian intelligence official. "They
were the pros who taught the young novice how to obtain, transport and
distribute drugs."

He seems to have done his homework.

In the States, Bernal went into business selling bathroom faucets and
ornamental tiles.

He shattered that cover in 1989 when Mexican police busted him with
500 kilos of cocaine in his possession. He spent the next three years
in a Mexican prison--but he never betrayed his friends outside.

His stand-up reputation paid off handsomely when he went home to
Colombia in 1995. By then police had broken the cartels' backs.

Police say Bernal quickly filled the vacuum by building a network of
his own.

It was an evolutionary leap beyond any drug ring Colombia had ever
seen. Bernal recruited a team of systems analysts to create secure
channels for internal communications. He also enlisted the services of
seemingly legitimate professionals such as Alberto de Jesus Gallego. A
former vice president of marketing for the Colombian airline Aces, he
would become the new syndicate's chief financial officer, drug
investigators say. (Since being captured in the Operation Millennium
sweep, Gallego has not replied publicly to the charges against him. He
has avoided extradition so far.) Bernal himself allegedly specialized
in transportation, sending multiton loads of cocaine via Ecuador,
Mexico and the Bahamas (map). According to the sworn affidavit of one
DEA agent, Bernal claimed he was shipping 60 tons of cocaine a month
to the United States at the syndicate's peak.

Law officers say Bernal's biggest stride was his use of technology to
boost efficiency and protect trade secrets--like most successful
entrepreneurs in the '90s. "He took his organization into a new realm
where high-tech operations were the norm," in the words of Donnie
Marshall, the DEA chief.

The syndicate hired a Colombian techie who had done some jobs for the
Cali cartel in the past. Motorola, as he called himself, had the knack
of pirating cell-phone ID codes assigned to legitimate customers.

Disguising their calls with borrowed codes, the syndicate's members
could make their phone communications more difficult to trace.

The group's computer experts also set up private Internet chat rooms,
with firewalls designed to foil any hackers working for the cops, so
the far-flung traffickers could exchange messages and instructions.
Bernal's faith in high-tech security extended to his most cherished
possessions: he hid special microchips under the skin of his paso fino
horses to make them easier to trace in case of theft.

For all that, technology may have been Bernal's undoing.

In December 1998, DEA agents armed with a search warrant entered the
north Miami apartment of an alleged Bernal money launderer named
Carlos Jaramillo. (His present whereabouts are unknown; he was
targeted for arrest in Operation Millennium but evaded capture.) The
DEA agents discovered a wealth of intelligence stored in a computer at
the apartment. Investigators say the files revealed in detail how the
syndicate used e-mail and Internet-based telecommunications to
coordinate pickups and deliveries.

Less than three months after the Miami raid, Colombian police
succeeded in bugging a Bogota office suite that was rented in
Jaramillo's name and used as the syndicate's nerve center.

Colombian authorities also managed to wiretap 180 supposedly secure
cell phones, pagers, fax machines and landline phones used by alleged
members of the syndicate.

Based on evidence gathered by the investigators, last September a
federal grand jury in Florida indicted Bernal and 39 alleged
associates, including Jaramillo and Ochoa, for narcotics smuggling and
money laundering.

The end came during the predawn hours of Oct. 13. Bernal and two
colleagues were sharing a bottle of 18-year-old scotch whisky in a
north Bogota apartment when a plate-glass window in the living room
shattered with a deafening crack.

Fifty policemen and Colombian special agents burst into the flat; the
three men offered no resistance. Within a few hours they and 27 other
accused traffickers and accomplices were on display at a press
conference in Bogota to declare victory for the forces of Operation
Millennium.

The roundup of the alleged Bernal syndicate was a public-relations
triumph for U.S. and Colombian law enforcers.

The DEA trumpeted the mass arrests as the joint effort's "most
significant success to date." All the same, there's no guarantee that
the arrests will make much of a dent on Colombia's overall narcotics
trade.

Nine of the 40 Operation Millennium codefendants remain at
large.

And Colombian intelligence officials estimate that the country still
has 28 major smuggling syndicates in business, buying and exporting
narcotics from more than 400 small suppliers.

Busting the new drug lords isn't getting any easier.

The cartels of the 1980s were set up something like vertically
integrated corporations. They were run by senior executives who
controlled practically everything from the production, transportation
and distribution of narcotics to the laundering of the profits.

Police investigators needed to recruit only a single strategically
placed informant to disrupt an entire cartel.

Today's syndicates tend to operate more as loose-knit consortiums of
independent traffickers. The participants pool their resources for
specific opportunities and then split up until the next big order
comes along.

Such a fragmented structure means that the arrest of an alleged
kingpin like Bernal no longer heralds the collapse of his entire
organization. "You don't have one or two individuals who control
everything," says a Bogota-based DEA agent. "These organizations come
together for convenience, and you no longer have a situation where if
you target these guys you're targeting the entire cartel."

Is war the answer?

Military assistance is at the core of Clinton's proposed emergency
plan, which provides for the training of two special Colombian Army
anti-drug battalions to augment a 950-strong unit trained by U.S.
Green Berets last year. Some $700 million, about a third of the total
dollar amount, is for the purchase of 30 Blackhawk and 33 Huey
helicopters to help the Army dislodge the leftist guerrillas who
control much of the prime drug-growing land in the south. "Eradication
is the principal goal of this package," says Thomas Umberg, the White
House's deputy drug czar. "You can't fly down there without seeing
coca fields all over."

Wiping out the coca growers isn't likely to have much effect on the
kingpins beyond raising the price of their product.

Bernal had no known ties to Colombia's leftist rebels.

On the contrary, court documents in his case identify two of his
Operation Millennium codefendants as right-wing paramilitary members,
blood enemies of the guerrillas. And the syndicate's alleged nerve
center was a $500-a-month fifth-floor office suite in the capital,
hundreds of kilometers away from the steamy southern lowlands where
most of the country's coca bushes grow.

So far Washington's drug warriors haven't had much luck trying to
spend the enemy into surrender.

Between 1996 and 1999, U.S. aid to Colombia grew fivefold, from about
$65 million to $290 million.

During those years the country's total area under coca cultivation
didn't shrink: drug experts say it appears to have at least doubled.
"We have spent billions trying to stop the flow of illegal drugs into
the United States, and the flow has gotten worse, not better," says
U.S. Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont. The trouble is, a few billion
dollars is nothing compared with the money U.S. drug users will pay to
keep their supply flowing.

You don't have to be an Alejandro Bernal to get the picture.