The Everything Mafia Book (44 page)

The head of each cell reports to a regional director who is responsible for the overall management of several cells. The regional director, in turn, reports directly to one of the drug lords of a particular organization or their designee based in Colombia. A rigid top-down command-and-control structure is characteristic of these groups. Trusted lieutenants of the organization in the United States have discretion in the day-to-day operations, but ultimate authority rests with the leadership in Colombia.

The upper echelon and management levels of these cells are normally comprised of family members or long-time close associates who can be trusted by the Colombian drug lords—because their family members remain in Colombia as hostages to the cell members’ good behavior—to handle their day-to-day drug operations in the United States. The trusted personal nature of these organizations makes it that much harder to penetrate the organizations with confidential sources. That difficulty with penetration makes intercepting criminal telephone calls all the more vital. They report back to Colombia via cell phone, fax, and other sophisticated communications methods. Colombian drug traffickers continually employ a variety of counter-surveillance techniques and tactics, such as fake drug transactions, using telephones they suspect are monitored, limited-time use of cloned cell phones (frequently a week or less), limited use of pagers (from two to four weeks), and use of calling cards. The top-level managers of these Colombian organizations increasingly use sophisticated communications and encryption technology, posing a severe challenge to law enforcement’s ability to conduct effective investigations.

Medellin Cartel

The first of the major cartels was the Medellin cartel. This was perhaps the most famous cartel, due to its flamboyant and internationally recognized leader, Pablo Escobar. In the 1970s and early 1980s the Medellins, named for a city in Colombia where they originated, controlled the vast distribution network of drugs coming into North America, mainly through Florida. They had a fleet of American pilots who evaded radar and the peering eyes of law enforcement to bring kilos of coke into the United States.

The cartels also caused instability in their own country. They put bounties on the heads of police departments and infiltrated the government.

The Medellins were represented in Florida by a murderous psycho, who also happened to be a sweet-faced stocky Colombian matriarch named Griselda Blanco. She was so obsessed with crime, she even named one of her sons Michael Corleone! Her paranoia and murderous reign brought a lot of heat down on the organization. Before long the police, FBI, and DEA formed a task force to take the cartel down. Blanco and her underlings were taken out. Colombian police killed Pablo Escobar in 1993.

The Cali Cartel

The heads of the Medellin cartel were gradually murdered and arrested in the 1980s, and the drug outfit that achieved prominence in the lucrative cocaine trade was the Cali cartel. This organization had a little more finesse than its predecessor. Gone were the routine massacres and rampant violence. It was not eliminated entirely, but the Cali cartel was more adept at using legitimate businesses as fronts.

The Cali cartel has extensive operations in the United States. In upstate New York, the state police and the DEA raided a laboratory that had the equipment to produce more than $700 million worth of cocaine a year. And that was just one of their many facilities. It is estimated that the cartel made billions of dollars a year in a period from the late 1980s through the early 1990s.

Like the Medellin cartel, the Cali group had an elaborate network of cells in the United States. Each cell handled a particular aspect of the drug trade, from traffic to storage to bookkeeping. The Cali leadership insisted upon the names of family members of their employees. This was a form of blackmail. As stated earlier, the Colombians would murder entire families of their enemies and employees who fell out of favor either through incompetence or corruption.

Colombia does not have an extradition treaty with the United States. As a result it was illegal for the United States to bring Colombian drug lords to justice in the American justice system. Eventually, the combined efforts of the DEA and the Colombian National Police finally produced results after many years of failures. By 1996, the Cali cartel collapsed and its leaders were either in jail or dead. The Mexican problem continues, however.

When the Colombian drug cartels became known in America, much was written about their tendency to slaughter the whole families of their enemies, including women and children. This is something the American Mafia did not do. It is something that the Sicilian Mafia did. In the Old World, if they killed a man they also killed his sons lest they grow up and exact vengeance.

Mule Train

Heroin is also produced and shipped from Colombia. Poppies, the flower from which opium is produced, grows freely in Colombia and Peru. It goes from the poppy fields to laboratories to be converted into heroin. It is smuggled into the United States via many means, one of which is to use “mules.” People who are called “mules” swallow condoms filled with heroin, fly into the United States, and pass through customs. One would not want to be around when the “mule” discharges the heroin for delivery to the local drug dealer.

The Yakuza

This Japanese crime organization, known in Japan as
boryokudan
, is one of the oldest crime organizations in the world. The name derives from a Japanese card game called Oicho-Kabu; the worst hand in the game is 8-9-3, “ya-ku-sa.” The yakuza are regarded as losers in the austere and rigid Japanese culture. For losers, they have enjoyed great success in the underworld of crime. In addition to the homeland, the yakuza have spread across the world from Hawaii to Western Europe. The tattooed gangsters are among the most adept at exploiting new and profitable rackets.

From 1958 to 1963, membership in the yakuza grew an astonishing 150 percent, to more than 184,000 members. The average membership of a Mafia crime family during the Mafia’s glory days was never more than a few hundred per family. The largest yakuza gang is the Yamaguchi-gumi, based out of Kobe.

The yakuza tradition maintains that they were once proud citizens of medieval times who defended their cities and towns against marauding bandits that were terrorizing the countryside. The tradition paints them as heroic Robin Hood types. This is not entirely accurate. The modern yakuza really originated in the seventeenth century, when professional gamblers and other miscreants joined forces.

When Japan began to interact and trade with Western culture, it began to experience its version of the Industrial Revolution. Like its American criminal counterpart, the yakuza began to worm its way into the docks. They also began the age-old practice of bribing politicians.

While Al Capone was in effect the mayor of Chicago, halfway around the world the yakuza were terrorizing Japan. Yakuza hit men assassinated numerous politicians who refused to play ball, including two prime ministers.

The Modern Yakuza

After World War II the American forces occupied Japan and established a military government led by General Douglas MacArthur. The lower classes of the defeated nation were living in poverty, and a black market developed for the necessities and amenities that people had come to expect. Just as people in America had to pay through the nose for a shot of booze during Prohibition, the Japanese had to pay inflated prices to the yakuza. The yakuza fared well under the American occupation. The American military disarmed the citizenry but weren’t able to disarm the criminal underworld. As a result the yakuza ran roughshod over the law-abiding populace. While the Americans jailed some crime figures, one man was actually working with the intelligence community to combat Communism. His name was Yoshio Kodama and he is recognized as the liaison between the gangsters, spies, and politicians.

Who was the longest serving yakuza boss?
Kazuo Taoka was the boss of the Yamaguchi-gumi from 1946 until his death in 1981 from a heart attack. Following his demise, the streets of Kobe were filled with bodies as different factions fought for control.

As the American influence began to rise in postwar Japan, the yakuza became influenced by gangster movies and turned in their swords for guns and began to wear dark suits and sunglasses. The simple extortion rackets that were prevalent during the black market days gave way to a wide variety of moneymaking schemes from the usual—drugs and prostitution—to the unusual—corporate shakedowns.

Going Straight

Japan began to crack down on the yakuza in the early 1990s with surprising success. A series of laws were passed (and actually enforced) that diminished the yakuza’s ability to conduct business. In addition there was a change in the public’s attitude. Rather than viewed as benevolent neighborhood protectors, yakuza were being viewed as the criminals they were, bringing out more public scrutiny. Yakuza members began calling the authorities and inquiring about how they could get real jobs. Japanese companies even began to hire reformed yakuza in an effort to encourage more and more of them to go straight.

Like many other groups and individuals before it, the yakuza looks to the “decadent” West as a source of income and base of operations. But their operations here are not as widespread as other Asian criminals. The yakuza are feeling pressure from another Asian powerhouse of crime, the Chinese triads.

One of the major sources of money for the yakuza is the trafficking and distribution of ice, known in America as methamphetamine. The Japanese thugs who deal in this illicit narcotic have turned some section of Japanese cities into slums filled with addicts. The ice merchants have also spread their operations to other parts of Southeast Asia.

Triads

The triads are underground secret societies in Chinese culture that date back centuries. In the past, like the Mafia, they were quasi-patriotic organizations dedicated to helping out the less fortunate. As the years went on the groups morphed into organized crime syndicates. Headquartered mainly in Hong Kong, these gangs have become some of the most powerful crime organizations in the world, controlling heroin trafficking, illegal alien smuggling, high-tech fraud, production of counterfeit electronics, and a host of other crimes, including murder.