Open House: DECORATORS DESCRIBE DRUG LORD'S MANSIONS

NEW YORK -- When your client is one of the world's leading cocaine
traffickers and a man untroubled by an occasional expedient homicide,
keeping him happy is both good business and a matter of self-preservation.
So when Alexander Blarek, an interior designer, needed to create a handmade
leather sofa for Jose Santacruz Londono, he knew that ordinary cows would
not do.

Without revealing his client, Blarek boasted that he had traveled to
England in pursuit of the perfect herd. There, his story went, he found 17
cows raised in a pen, their hides unblemished by barbed wire. Such
indulgence also led Blarek to Italy in search of marble for the 15
bathrooms Santacruz and his wife, Amparo, wanted in a new mansion in Cali,
Colombia, modeled partly on the White House.

"Made the Colombian Connection," Blarek wrote in his diary in 1979, after
first landing Santacruz as a client. "Santacruz. House is fantastic!"

For 18 years, Blarek, 56, and his business partner and companion, Frank V.
Pellecchia, 49, explored the far reaches of excess in the service of
Santacruz, described by federal agents as the leader of the Cali drug
cartel before his death in 1996.

The two decorators traveled on lavish buying trips, spending at least $6
million on furnishings and art, including gold-plated sinks, bronze nudes,
ivory tusks and cabinets with secret compartments.

It was as much a clash of cliches as a business relationship: two San
Francisco interior decorators selecting fabrics and color schemes for a
Colombian drug lord. "It's like 'The Birdcage' meets 'Scarface,' " is the
joke making the rounds at U.S. District Court in Brooklyn.

Federal prosecutors, however, are not laughing. In a case expected to
conclude this week, Blarek and Pellecchia are charged with laundering
narcotics money for the Cali Cartel, once a leading cocaine supplier to the
United States.

The trial is being held in Brooklyn because Blarek and Pellecchia often
shopped for Santacruz at exclusive New York stores like Lorin Marsh
Limited, where they bought a custom-made dining room table with 18 chairs.
Prosecutors also contend that the defendants came to New York to collect
bags of cash taken from a drug money "stash house" in Queens.

Whatever the verdict, the case of Blarek and Pellecchia has offered an
unusual glimpse into the Cali cartel life style. To paraphrase F. Scott
Fitzgerald, drug lords are different from you and me.

"It was just unbelievable," Blarek declared in a taped telephone
conversation presented as evidence by the government. In the conversation,
he described a Colombian warehouse owned by Santacruz that was filled with
appliances, cars and other American goods. "It was like a Home Depot."

Not even last week's sober financial testimony by government witnesses
could obscure a certain loopy quality to the case. Several government
witnesses carefully described a money trail between Santacruz, the
defendants and a Miami accountant; other witnesses described $300,000
orders of china and stemware and a $200,000 home stereo system. And the bag
that prosecutors said contained the cash deliveries from Santacruz to the
defendants? Gucci.

A critical issue in the case is one of intent. Federal prosecutors are
contending that Blarek and Pellecchia knowingly participated in a
conspiracy to launder drug money.

They have placed into evidence diaries, day planners and financial records
detailing the ties between the two defendants and Santacruz. They have
confirmed numerous cash payments to the defendants, including one for $1
million. An assistant U.S. attorney, Mark W. Lerner, described the two
interior decorators as "heads of the department of lavish and excessive
drug dealer's consumption."

But defense lawyers believe the government is wrongly depicting the two
defendants as members of the Cali Cartel rather than as simply hired help.

Friday, Blarek testified that he knew of Santacruz's chosen profession as
early as 1981, but that he never discussed drugs or money laundering with
him. Blarek testified that most of his dealings were actually with Mrs.
Santacruz, not the drug lord himself.

His defense attorney, Paul Shechtman, argued that "guilt by association" is
not a crime. "They're not on trial for their taste in clients," Shechtman
said, "but for whether they were part of a criminal conspiracy with
Santacruz. And they weren't."

For 18 years, Blarek and Pellecchia worked almost exclusively for
Santacruz, his wife and, later, two of his mistresses. The association
ended in March 1996 after Santacruz died in a shootout with the Colombian
Army.

The association began in 1979, when Blarek visited Colombia with another
designer. While driving though Cali, Blarek noticed a large home under
construction. After the security guard agreed to summon the owners, and
Mrs. Santacruz appeared. It was a fortuitous meeting; the couple needed an
interior designer and decorator. Blarek eventually extracted a contract for
$200,000, after initially asking for $300,000.

There would be at least 15 different Santacruz residences in Colombia and
the United States that would command the attention of Blarek and
Pellecchia. The two men had met while living in Miami, and at a dinner in
March 1981, they formed a professional partnership that would also become
personal.

Blarek was the designer; he conceived pieces of custom furniture and
created the "cattle" motif at Mrs. Santacruz's ranch house, just outside
Cali. Fluent in Spanish, Pellecchia oversaw on-site crews and drafted
blueprints.

The projects began to blur together. After the initial job, Blarek and
Pellecchia completed a $350,000 renovation of Santacruz's Cali office in
1983. In one flourish, Blarek bolted a dining table to the floor by a
narrow support so that "it looked like it was floating."

A $75,000 freshening of Mrs. Santacruz's Bogota apartment was completed in
1984. That same year, the decorators began working on two guest apartments
owned by Santacruz in a Cali high-rise.

During Friday's testimony, Blarek flipped through scrapbooks of the
projects, displaying his color schemes to the jury or explaining Art Deco
versus Italian modernist. "Is this a sales presentation or is it
testimony?" an exasperated Lerner said, without earning any sympathy from
the bemused judge, Jack Weinstein.

The prosecutors are leery of defense efforts to reduce the trial to a
decorating show. They have presented witnesses and evidence attacking the
credibility of the defendants.

Blarek conceded on the stand that he lied during different interviews with
Drug Enforcement Agency investigators about Santacruz. In 1981, a DEA
agent, Kenneth Robinson, interviewed Blarek at his Miami home, the first
time, Blarek said, that he learned about Santacruz's drug connections. But
when Santacruz mysteriously appeared at Blarek's doorstep the next day, the
decorator never called the DEA.

Blarek said he lied about losing his passport and he also admitted to
bleaching out stamps indicating trips to Colombia. Nor did he fully report
his gross receipts on his tax forms.

A string of vendors who supplied the merchandise ordered by Santacruz
testified about the different explanations that Blarek concocted for his
mystery client: that he was the president of Peru, the prime minister of
Venezuela, a South American industrialist or even a Spanish prince building
a castle.

"It was just simpler than explaining," Blarek testified.

He said that he and Pellecchia tried on more than one occasion to sever
their connection to Santacruz. "He made it clear that he terminates people,
they don't terminate him," Blarek testified. In 1992, Santacruz ordered the
slaying of a New York-based journalist, Manuel de Dios Unanue, who had
crusaded against the Colombian cartels.

The two decorators continued working for Santacruz when in 1984 he informed
them that an extensive renovation was needed for a new home intended for
his mistress, Marely, and their three children. Within a few years, a
second mistress, Patricia, appeared with her own decorating needs.

Shipping goods from the United States became a nightmare. In one instance,
diapers intended for a newly pregnant Marely (Mrs. Santacruz called her
"the rabbit") mistakenly arrived at one of Mrs. Santacruz's residences.

To navigate this delicate situation, Blarek testified that he assigned
codes to different residences: A1, for example, signified Mrs. Santacruz's
principal residence; M2 denoted Marely's country farm house. There also
were designations for apartments in Boston and New York.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Richard Weber has argued that the codes were
actually connected to money laundering.

Aware of her husband's infidelities, Mrs. Santacruz apparently took her
revenge on his bank account: she shopped.

"Yeah, she said it was better than sex with her husband," Blarek testified.
"Bloomingdale's was the mother cathedral of shopping. Saks Fifth Avenue,
all the better stores."

Blarek said Santacruz barked about the high price of the china ordered by
his wife, "My name is Santacruz, not Santa Claus."

But Marely's unexplained death in 1989, coupled with new decorating
projects, apparently lifted Mrs. Santacruz's spirits. Her ranch house
outside Cali, the A-6-N project, would be Blarek's and Pellecchia's
proudest achievement. ( Blarek testified that he and Pellecchia reserved
their best work for Mrs. Santacruz, their favorite.)

The ranch house featured a 40-by-60-foot atrium with a landscaped fountain
and palm trees.

The kitchen boasted at least five sinks and the capacity to cook a feast
for 100 guests. Leather carpets decorated the floors in keeping with
Blarek's earthy cattle motif.

For a man with at least a dozen residences, Santacruz nonetheless decided
by 1989 that he needed more space in the main house, Casa Blanco, which he
shared with his wife. With Marely's death, Mrs. Santacruz had agreed to
take in her four children, prompting Santacruz to call for a new wing.

Eventually, the entire house was razed to make room for a
20,000-square-foot replica of the White House. A concrete shell stands
today on the property, Santacruz's violent 1996 death having halted
construction.

A little more than a year later, on June 18, 1997, federal agents arrested
Pellecchia and Blarek at their San Francisco home in the exclusive Sea
Cliff area. It seems the decorators were living in style, too. Federal
agents seized $750,000 in cash from two safety deposit boxes and froze $2.1
million held in a brokerage account.

They also found the Gucci bag.