DEALER GOES UNDERCOVER ON UNDERWORLD ODYSSEY

Drugs: Southland cocaine supplier forged friendship with DEA agent and
helped expose official corruption.

MIAMI--When Roberto Rodriguez was sentenced to 12 years in prison in 1989,
apparently ending his reign as one of the San Fernando Valley's premier
cocaine dealers, a federal judge in Los Angeles gave the Cuban immigrant 30
days to get his affairs in order. That month became nearly a decade.
Rodriguez jumped bond and headed south, embarking on an odyssey through the
drug underworld of the Americas that made him a target of hit men in Los
Angeles and Detroit; a drug supplier for street gangs in Chicago, Detroit
and New York; and a partner and friend to leaders of the Cali cocaine
cartel in Colombia. Before it ended this year on witness stands and in
debriefing rooms in four U.S. cities, that long journey through drug land
for Rodriguez and his Cuban-born stepbrother, Osvaldo Marcial, also exposed
official corruption in several U.S. cities. Their testimony ultimately
revealed the dark double lives of corrupt cops in suburban Michigan, a
middle school vice principal dealing crack cocaine in South Florida, and a
former federal prosecutor who crossed the line for his cocaine overlords in
Miami. And it led to charges against two prominent businessmen in the
Dominican Republic accused of laundering cocaine profits. In all, court
documents obtained by The Times show that Rodriguez and his brother, along
with Mark Minelli, the Drug Enforcement Administration special agent who
won their trust, account for more than 40 convictions of major drug dealers
and the officials who protected them in Chicago, Detroit, New York and
Miami. In the more than 18 months since Rodriguez joined his brother in
secretly working for Minelli and the DEA, their undercover operations led
to the seizure of nearly $3 million in drug money, aircraft worth $3
million and cocaine worth $12 million. Their cooperation also helped solve
a gangland slaying in Chicago and an attempted murder in Los Angeles.

Case Exposes Depth, Reach of Corruption

In short, the three men quietly became a singular wrecking crew against the
Colombian cartel's distributors and protectors in the United States, and
exposed the depth and reach of cocaine corruption in U.S. society. The
array of cases prosecuted with the help of the three men is "a disturbing
example of how the drug trade permeates every level of our society,
corrupting even those who we trust most," said Vincent J. Mazzilli, chief
of the DEA's Miami office. The court documents in these cases, culled from
federal courthouses in the United States and their counterpart in the
Dominican Republic, also tell the story of a unique friendship between
hunter and hunted at the front line of the U.S. war on drugs. It is the
kind of relationship that many prosecutors and drug agents say is the key
to winning that war. "Without someone like Rodriguez, we could not have
uncovered the nature of the corruption we had here," said Assistant U.S.
Atty. Joe Allen, who used Rodriguez this year to successfully prosecute
four senior police officers in the suburbs of Detroit for taking
drug-protection money. "It would take years and years and years to make a
case like this without a person at [Rodriguez's] level in the drug world,"
Allen said. How the brash and enterprising Rodriguez reached that level,
bringing along his younger brother, helps explain how the drug underworld
has flourished in the Western Hemisphere. Rodriguez's lawyer declined to
make him available for an interview. Marcial gave a brief interview outside
a Miami courtroom last week, confirming his undercover role and saying it
has left him feeling at peace--despite the price he said the drug
underworld has put on his head. The brothers have told their story
separately and in detail under oath on witness stands during trials this
year in Miami and Detroit. Those details were also confirmed in testimony
by Minelli, who has supervised the brothers since they switched sides in
the drug war. Federal drug enforcement officials say Rodriguez was among
Southern California's major cocaine dealers when he was caught in 1989
delivering more than 100 pounds of the drug. A legal immigrant who stated
that he came to Los Angeles from Havana as a child six years after Fidel
Castro's revolution in 1959, Rodriguez testified that he had been dealing
drugs throughout Southern California since 1977--an enterprise he later
estimated had netted him as much as $3 million through the years. Even
after his 1989 conviction, Rodriguez continued to deal cocaine during a
court-approved leave. He was caught selling 44 pounds of the drug to
undercover drug agents at a Temecula hotel as he attempted to recover his
financial losses from the earlier arrest. "You engaged in another drug
transaction to pay for the first one?" prosecutor Allen asked Rodriguez on
the witness stand in Detroit in February. "Yes." "And when you got caught,
you fled the country?" "That's right." Rodriguez testified in the Detroit
case that he fled to Miami, then to the Dominican Republic, Panama and
finally Costa Rica, where a doctor operated on his hands to surgically
alter his fingerprints. Rodriguez said he paid for the operation with a
$10,000 Rolex watch. He testified he had hoped to stay in Costa Rica and
start a new life with his wife and three children but panicked and fled to
Colombia when he learned that Interpol was investigating him.

Odyssey Continues With Colombia Cartel He didn't Leave Alone.

While in Costa Rica, Rodriguez befriended another Cuban-born drug dealer,
Jorge Hernandez, who had undergone the same fingerprint surgery as
Rodriguez. In 1991, the two men traveled to Cali, where Rodriguez
ingratiated himself with the leaders of Colombia's most powerful cocaine
cartel.

He and Hernandez formed a partnership that would supply hundreds of pounds
of Cali cocaine to major U.S. cities in the years that followed. The
partnership ended only when Hernandez--who has pleaded guilty in Miami to
charges of drug trafficking and in Los Angeles to attempted
murder--threatened, as Rodriguez later recounted on the witness stand, "to
put a bullet in my head." It was during their partnership that Rodriguez's
brother became a major player in the two partners' cocaine operation.
Marcial testified at a trial in Miami in January that, unlike his brother,
he had immigrated to Los Angeles illegally--a yearlong journey from Havana
through Panama, Costa Rica and Mexico that cost $4,000 before he finally
crossed the U.S. border at Tijuana in 1987.

Marcial stated that Rodriguez started him in the drug business soon after,
and he moved up through the ranks as his brother rose in stature with the
Colombians and the Mexican cartels that transship cocaine into the United
States. "I was the pickup guy, the one that picks up the dope and puts it
in the stash house," Marcial testified in Miami. Later, Marcial said, he
graduated to "cocaine driver," running dozens of loads of at least 200
pounds each from Los Angeles and southern Texas to New York, Chicago and
Miami.

41 Family Members Were Relocated

The brothers later testified separately that their key contacts were in
Mexico, Chicago, New York and Miami. Those contacts were so powerful, in
fact, that the U.S. government has spent more than $150,000 relocating at
least 41 members of Rodriguez's family from California and Colombia,
according to court documents and testimony.

Rodriguez testified that the family members received death threats after
the brothers began cooperating with drug enforcement agents after Marcial's
capture in May 1995. Marcial was arrested, along with four other people,
while delivering 30 pounds of cocaine to a suburban Miami apartment
complex. Among the powerful drug distributors who were later convicted as a
result of the brothers' undercover work and testimony was Francisco Medina,
a Chicago-based cousin of Amado Carrillo Fuentes. U.S. and Mexican
authorities had labeled Carrillo Fuentes the most powerful drug lord in
Mexico until his death after plastic surgery in 1997. Marcial's cooperation
also resulted in the arrest and guilty plea of Ruben Carillo Rosales, a
major Colombian cocaine distributor in Manhattan who later helped U.S.
authorities break up a smuggling operation that used Colombian air force
cargo planes to bring cocaine into the United States. And the brothers'
undercover work, aided by Carillo's subsequent cooperation, led to the
conviction of Luis H. Cano, a Mexican American businessman who was found
guilty by a federal jury in Miami this year of heading a vast cocaine
network that imported more than 10 tons of the drug into the United States
during the past decade. Cano, who is appealing the verdict, was sentenced
to life in prison.

U.S. authorities are trying to extradite two Dominican businessmen also
indicted for money laundering in that case. Through it all, the brothers
later testified, official corruption was the subtext that allowed their
smuggling operation to flourish. Marcial helped federal authorities win a
guilty plea to drug-conspiracy charges from his prominent Miami defense
lawyer, former Assistant U.S. Atty. Michael Burnbaum. After Marcial's 1995
arrest, he secretly recorded a jailhouse conversation in which Burnbaum was
concerned only with locating a 300-pound cocaine shipment that Marcial hid
in the Chicago suburbs. Marcial, who testified that his attorney's actions
helped persuade him to cooperate with the DEA, also went undercover earlier
this year to expose drug trafficking by Willie Young, who was vice
principal of a middle school in Miami at the time. Marcial was the key
witness in September against Young, whom he described as a buyer and seller
of cocaine, before a federal jury that convicted Young of drug trafficking.
Young is scheduled to be sentenced Monday and faces up to life in prison.
It was Marcial's elder brother, though, who helped prosecutors win the
federal case against the four police officers in suburban Detroit. Such
cases, U.S. authorities say, are among the most difficult forms of official
drug corruption to expose because the lawbreakers are also the law
enforcers. The accused ranged in rank from sergeant to deputy chief.
Rodriguez testified at the Detroit trial of one officer that the four
police officials from Highland Park and Royal Oak Township had taken a
total of several thousand dollars in bribes to protect cocaine shipments
that Rodriguez brought into their towns for the Colombians. The officer was
convicted, and the other three pleaded guilty, to drug-conspiracy charges.
Asked during that trial why he decided to switch sides in the drug war,
Rodriguez first cited what he said was a murder contract put out on him by
"the thugs in Detroit." However, later in his testimony, Rodriguez gave the
same answer his brother has offered in several trials during the past year:
the trust and friendship they gradually forged with DEA agent Minelli.

Going After Top Distributors

For a year after Marcial's 1995 arrest and decision to work undercover for
the DEA, Rodriguez testified that he had several telephone conversations
with Minelli. "The understanding between me and Minelli was that if he was
to see me, he was to arrest me," Rodriguez stated. Meanwhile, Rodriguez
added, he helped Minelli make a case against Hernandez, his former partner,
who had been arrested with Marcial. Finally, in January 1997, Rodriguez met
Minelli for the first time--for breakfast at a Cuban cafe in North Miami
Beach--and surrendered. For the next two months, he worked undercover.
Wearing hidden microphones and cameras, he led Minelli to some of the top
cocaine distributors in the United States. As Marcial said on the witness
stand in Miami when asked why he decided to cooperate with federal
authorities: "I talked to my brother, and I told him about Mr. Minelli. I
convinced him to surrender himself. . . . I told him I know an agent, and
he is honest, and he can trust him with his life."

Minelli, a 14-year veteran of the drug fight, last month was awarded one of
the Justice Department's highest honors for his lead role in the Cano case.
He has won high praise from state prosecutors in Chicago, who say he and
his key witnesses solved a contract murder there earlier this year.
Meanwhile, Marcial has pleaded guilty to drug-conspiracy charges and is
scheduled to begin serving a nine-year prison term later this month. And
Rodriguez is in federal prison serving a 17-year term for his two drug
convictions in Southern California, although his attorney, Minelli and
other federal agents have indicated that they will formally appeal for a
reduced sentence later this year.

Looking back last week, Marcial, who also hopes to have his sentence
reduced in the coming weeks, said one of the best days of his life came
when he was arrested--and decided to "do the right thing." "I'm glad I got
caught," he told The Times. "That day they put the handcuffs on me,
something left my body--some kind of heavy stuff. It was like, that's it.
It's over."

Checked-by: Pat Dolan