NEARLY $280 MILLION IN COLOMBIAN DRUG CASH SEIZED

MIAMI, Dec 18 (Reuters) - The United States has seized nearly $280 million
in illicit drug spoils from a Colombian trafficking family and its cronies,
the largest seizures of narcotics cash in history, U.S. authorities said on
Friday.

The biggest of the seizures, about $180 million stashed in Swiss bank
accounts by Colombian drug lord Julio Nasser David and his wife, Sheila
Arana de Nasser, will be split 50-50 with the government of Switzerland,
U.S. officials said.

The seizures resulted from investigations into Nasser's Colombian North
Coast Cartel, which smuggled tons of marijuana and cocaine into the United
States in the late 1970s and early 1980s, officials said.

"I'm happy to say we pretty much put a dent in that organisation," Michael
Kane, associate special agent in charge of the U.S. Drug Enforcement
Administration's Miami office, said at a news conference.

Miami U.S. Attorney Tom Scott called the seizures "the largest, I repeat,
largest ever cash criminal forfeiture in United States history to be taken
from a single narcotics smuggling group."

In Washington, U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno signed an agreement on
Friday to split about $180 million with Switzerland. Swiss Ambassador
Alfred Defago said the agreement proved that "crime does not pay -- not in
the United States and not in Switzerland."

At a news conference in Miami, the U.S. Customs Service displayed a check
for $50 million seized from Paul Edward Hindelang, a convicted marijuana
smuggler who worked with Nasser and his family.

And U.S. agencies, including the Internal Revenue Service, made a seizure in
Georgia of $46 million in cash and several million dollars in real estate
from Joe Pegg, a Floridian who also imported narcotics for the Nasser
organisation, agents said.

"We're not going to take it any longer," Raphael Lopez, chief of the Miami
U.S. Customs office, said. "We're going to go after not only their dope, but
their money."

U.S. authorities said the Nassers, of Barranquilla, were among the most
powerful Colombian traffickers of the 1970s and '80s but were little known
outside a country that produced the famed Medellin and Cali cocaine cartels.

The Nassers pioneered the use of large freighters, or mother ships, to
transport tons of marijuana and cocaine through the Caribbean and then
offload it to smaller, faster boats just off the U.S. coast, agents said.
They also guaranteed delivery.

The family began stashing proceeds from cash-heavy smuggling operations in
Switzerland in the late 1970s, counting on Swiss bank secrecy laws to
protect their profits, agents said.

After Switzerland changed its bank disclosure laws, U.S. drug agents
launched Operation Tentmaker -- a play on Nasser's penchant for sleeping in
a tent in his marijuana fields when he first started in the business,
officials said.

U.S. and Swiss agents collaborated to trace a web of bank accounts
containing millions of dollars in drug profits, officials said. Over the
years, the money grew to $180 million through interest and investments.

Sheila Arana, 56, was arrested in Switzerland and extradited to the United
States in 1995 where she was sentenced to 12 years in prison in a plea
agreement that forced her to surrender the family money in Europe.

Nasser David, 58, is in prison in Colombia and faces drug charges in the
United States but is unlikely to be extradited, agents said.

The confiscated drug money will be distributed to federal and local law
enforcement agencies to be used in future drug investigations, officials
said.

"We'll use their money against them," Kane said.

Checked-by: Don Beck