Millions awaited export

Drug witness: Business nearly choked on cash

Huge shipments of cocaine picked up in Phoenix, Houston or Los Angeles, were
kept in a stash house on Bent Mountain, according to Leonardo Rivera.

By JAN VERTEFEUILLE THE ROANOKE TIMES

Business was so good for Leonardo Rivera's organization that the piles of
cash he had laying around sometimes disrupted his drug distribution network.

"The money would get backed up so badly I'd have $6 million, $8 million
backed up in a stash house and I'd say, "No, I can't take any more dope
until I get rid of this money,'" Rivera testified Thursday in U.S. District
Court in Roanoke.

Until his 1991 arrest, the drug trafficker ran a New York distribution cell
for the Cali cartel, a Colombian cocaine syndicate that supplied 80 percent
of the world's cocaine at the time.

Rivera's testimony offered a rare glimpse into the high-level business side
of U.S. cocaine trafficking, a world where brokers refer to kilos of
brand-name cocaine as "units" and worry about price fluctuations caused by
oversupplies on the U.S. market.

The details emerged Thursday while he testified against an alleged underling
accused of running the money side of Rivera's organization, Julio Roberto
Castellanos.

Roanoke smuggler Javier Cruz ran Rivera's transportation network,
maintaining a fleet of vehicles and drivers who transported Rivera's cocaine
until their arrests in 1991. Cruz and Rivera have both pleaded guilty and
cooperated with the government to get their sentences reduced.

Rivera, 36, spent the whole day Thursday on the stand and still wasn't
finished detailing his involvement with cocaine trafficking. He returns to
the witness stand today.

The trafficker described his operation in almost corporate terms. Buying
pagers by the boxload and throwing them away after a few days -- in case the
authorities got the numbers -- was "a built-in cost," he said.

Huge shipments of cocaine would be picked up from Mexican smugglers in
Phoenix, Houston or Los Angeles and driven back to Roanoke. It was kept in a
stash house on Bent Mountain until Rivera needed a shipment brought to New
York. It normally wouldn't be warehoused there very long.

"I couldn't have dope sitting in Roanoke too long," he said, "because the
market [price] tends to change over three or four days."

The quality of his product was important to him since it made it easier to
sell quickly. He said the Colombian trafficker he usually dealt with
supplied cocaine under the brand names "Rolex" and "Cartier." Cruz once
moved 178 kilograms -- 352 pounds -- from Miami for him that came from a
"Perfume" shipment, which was "very well packaged, very well presented" in
half-kilogram perfume boxes.

Rivera said getting huge quantities of cash out of the country and back to
Colombia was harder for traffickers than getting the cocaine here from South
America. It was this weakness that the federal Drug Enforcement
Administration exploited in a Roanoke-based money-laundering sting. After
Cruz and Rivera were charged and agreed to cooperate, they introduced
undercover agents to traffickers with Colombia-bound currency on their
hands. DEA agents posed as businessmen who could provide Colombian
traffickers a means for getting their money back home.

The inability to move cash slowed Rivera's trafficking business.

"The problem was not me getting rid of the dope," he said. "The problem was
they [his Colombian suppliers] couldn't take the money."

The money was usually in $5, $10 and $20 bills, he testified, and that many
bills take up a lot of space, making the money hard to smuggle out of the
country.

Rivera worked his way up the trafficking ladder after becoming a drug-money
courier in Miami when he was 25.

Three years later, in 1989, Rivera was introduced by an uncle in Colombia to
some of the biggest traffickers in the country. He was allowed to buy into a
load of cocaine at Colombian prices rather than pay higher U.S. prices.

His cost per kilogram immediately dropped from $13,000 or $14,000 to $800 to
$1,500, Rivera testified. He had to then chip in for the costs of airplane
rentals, landing-strip fees and commissions to Mexican smugglers to get the
load into the United States. Still, it increased his profit margin
exponentially.

"For me, that was very important because that's where I was going to make my
big money," he said.

He detailed cocaine shipments as large as 800 kilograms -- 1,760 pounds --
which he bought wholesale for more than $11 million.

Rivera's plea bargain required him to give up a little more than $500,000.
That accounted for most of his assets when he was arrested in 1991, he
testified.

When his house in Bonsack is sold, he will turn over $50,000 from the sale,
he said. Rivera, his wife and children moved out of state after the case
became public in late 1996.

He said federal prosecutors allowed him to keep his business in Colombia,
which he said supports his family now. He owns the equivalent of the "Pick
3" lottery in that country, he said, and it generates $40,000 to $90,000 a
year. He bought it with drug proceeds.

He said the government has also paid him between $35,000 and $40,000 for
moving, travel and living expenses while working undercover for them after
his 1991 arrest.

Rivera, who was born in Cuba and raised in Colombia and the United States,
said prosecutors also arranged visas for his family so they can stay here.

"They have promised me they are going to do everything in their power so I
don't get deported to Colombia," he said.