Real name José Santacruz Londoño, he was one of the four chiefs of the Cali Cartel, the multibillion-dollar cocaine syndicate that fueled an American epidemic of addiction. “She was so curious, she wanted to know more, she wanted to learn,” Alexander said. The designers are sent to separate prisons. On the cover that day was news of the arrest of the two interior designers, and Salazar called his federal handlers to tell them a story about how he had once delivered cash to the man named Frank. Then he shifted the conversation to his namesake’s progress in horseback riding and piano, and snarked about how Santacruz looked “heavy” when he was arrested. He said recently that the case’s rejection by San Francisco prosecutors was “only an incentive” to try to secure the conviction his counterparts thought was impossible. “And I guess eventually he got tired of that.”. “His reportage is ridiculous,” Frank griped recently. Santacruz put his chemical engineering skills to use and started cocaine production in the United States. But then the office led to other projects. Rojas became an informant in an effort to reduce her punishment. Portrayed by No transaction was too intimate for the ledger. In Santacruz’s own penthouse apartment in the same city, Alexander deployed sea foam green and peach hues because he noticed the don “responded to soft colors.”. The DEA agent said she came away from the undercover encounter liking Alexander and Frank and didn’t think “they were malicious in any way,” but was nonetheless determined to see them go to prison. There was the figure of $30 million cited in an indictment with apparently little to back it up. Salazar had made previous attempts to cooperate in order to reduce his thirty-year prison sentence, but federal agents had ended interviews every time after deciding he was lying and would never actually betray his cartel colleagues. Robinson studied the results from the pen register on Aguilera’s phone, using index cards to connect the numbers to known Cali bad guys, men with nicknames like “The Jaw,” “Big Head” and “Khadafy.”. Lerner, the Brooklyn prosecutor, agreed. Robinson’s crew seemed destined for similar glory, having by the middle of the decade methodically indicted many of Santacruz’s top operatives. In Colombia, Santacruz and Hélmer Herrera took part in the war with the Norte del Valle cartel. I was not involved in a scheme. On a night in 1984, he called Alexander and Frank down to the lobby of the hotel in Bogota where they were staying while working on Amparo’s apartment. Below that was the floor for Santacruz’s real estate and construction companies. But the Santacruzes suddenly went silent, leaving him to wonder if they were dissatisfied. But with Alexander and Frank, birthdays, holidays and daily meals were shared as a “functioning family,” Alexander said, for three adults who otherwise had missed out on one. Amparo appears to be on Facebook, listed as living in Cali and with her profile photo showing her posing under the lights of the Eiffel Tower. “Judge, is this a sales presentation?” Lerner, the prosecutor, complained. They were sentenced to 30 years each and are still in American prisons. Michaelis reasoned with Lerner that Salazar’s status as one of the most irredeemable criminals on the planet underscored the horror behind the blood money with which the designers were paid. In fact, there had been $50,000 in the safety deposit box, and more than $600,000 in another one. Clarke tasked Rojas with helping her get into the designers’ mansion to meet them. The Santacruzes’ new home – on the site of the demolished original house in Los Caños Gordos – was called Casa Blanca, or the White House. When Frank returned from work at the lighting gallery and heard about the federal agents’ visit, he was shaken to learn of Santacruz’s reputation. … There is nobody to go to for any kind of advice because the government had already come to us twice in the previous years, and they were no help.”. When the DEA raided her office, they found $650,000 in cash stuffed in a candy machine. Those agents asked Alexander whether he had any recent contact with Santacruz. Frank denied being nervous at all – just late for an appointment. They also deny that the millions of dollars worth of assets seized from the designers were a motivating factor in the decision to go after them, though government-hired appraisers streamed through their home following the raid to put stickers on pricey art and furniture. 5 March, 1996Medellín, Colombia When Frank didn’t return, Alexander grew impatient. It was a different office from that of the Chepe Chasers, and prosecutors and cops can be as turf-obsessed as any cartel. “There are things to do, Frank.”. She threatened to quit working with Alexander, but he managed to calm her by promising that the design work for the mistresses was of a lower quality than hers. Alexander and Frank were a respite from that life. Colombia had a history of resisting the extradition of top traffickers to the United States and instead sending them to cushy, so-called prisons they could leave on a whim. But the brothers were a Miami case. Appearances “Because you don’t trust me,” Frank complains. And then, with Santacruz finally on the ropes, he had the nerve to die. The designers reunite after serving prison and start a new chapter. He already had a client roster of Floridian luminaries. Prosecutors later claimed it was to be a replica of America’s presidential residence, which the designers deny. By then, the Cali Cartel was about to overtake its vanquished Medellin rivals as the DEA’s foremost enemy. In the 1980s, they branched out into cocaine trafficking. The real reason he was loathe to betray the Santacruzes was rooted in how a federal judge later described the designers’ relationship with the family – like that of Michelangelo and the House of Medici, a patron family with bottomless wealth to finance grand artistry. “Made the Colombia connection, Santacruz,” Alexander wrote. Laguna, the attorney who used his legal expertise to help the cartel launder billions, received a 53-month sentence. Alexander, now 78, and Frank, 71, have landed on an off-brand version of their pre-raid existence. Two of Santacruz’s partners atop the Cali Cartel, brothers Gilberto and Miguel Rodriguez Orejuela, would ultimately be extradited and plead guilty to cocaine importation. But the official response showed just how concerned the DEA was with the alleged criminality of Don Chepe's interior designers. Much of the first half of the proceedings seemed to be the trial of somebody else: José Santacruz. Alexander affirmed that they had. But in Santacruz’s world, murder begat opportunity. To Dave Gallo, the Army-trained DEA tactical specialist who planned the raid on Villa Vecchia, the interior designers were a different breed of target than the street-savvy Oakland dealers flipping cocaine by the ounce whose doors he routinely battered in. “And after that she disappeared.”. He ordered the chauffeur of his friend’s Chrysler to pull over so he could investigate the huge, under-construction home. For a year and a half after last hearing from Santacruz, Alexander rarely thought about the Colombians and the lost $10,000. Santacruz is dead but it's the beginning of problems for the designers. Frank described an instinctive repulsion. “We were filling up the airplane almost,” that freight forwarder, Maria Elena Rojas, later testified. After the demise of the Medellín Cartel, the DEA and Colombian authorities turned their attention toward Cali. His motives for escaping were attributed to a number of reasons.[1]. In fact, Alexander explained, it was designed so one of the daughters could sunbathe nude without being seen by the gardeners. To Alexander, the target of Robinson’s surveillance was just “Freddie,” a friendly, well-dressed young gentleman who spoke impeccable English while delivering to him a briefcase containing $100,000. Robert Michaelis, a since-retired DEA agent who was a member of the Chepe Chasers, said in a recent interview that by prosecuting the slain kingpin’s interior designers, “we, in a way, got to put (Santacruz) on trial.”. Two decades later, Robinson remains as skeptical as ever of his old targets. In February 1998 in a Brooklyn courthouse – a particularly bleak example of Brutalist architecture in the federal complex where Mexican drug lord “El Chapo” was convicted two decades later – Frank took stock of the audience there to watch the trial. By then, Alexander’s fondness for Amparo had swelled. A narcoleptic housekeeper rounded our their cadre. At the time, the virus was considered a certain death sentence, as it had proven to be for several of their friends. The scale of the operation came to resemble Santacruz’s specialty: trafficking, but in tasteful goods rather than cocaine. Frank moved in to Alexander’s modernist home, dubbed “Casa Solana.” Alexander made Frank the vice president of Blarek Designs, Inc. They convicted Alexander and Frank of money laundering and all but one of the RICO counts. No They learned from intelligence sources that he had ordered her murder. He was in a dalliance with a German-born decorator named Eva, and he accompanied her to visit relatives in Colombia. The prosecutors in her district did not share her zeal. He was followed after he left the mall and killed while attempting to flee, after the police stopped his car. Colombian It was after a day spent at a nearby country club that he saw the house. But Alexander said he refused to profile every rich Colombian as a trafficker and had no reason to disbelieve Santacruz’s claim that his trade was construction, among other legal industries. Patricia Dempsey, an acquaintance of Alexander’s from Wisconsin, served as their housekeeper and office manager in exchange for room, board and a small salary. “Oh my god,” Frank uttered as they read of the client’s “marble citadel” that “looms high above the sugarcane fields of Cali.” Designing the interior of that citadel had been among Alexander and Frank’s first jobs for Santacruz. Pêpê Rapazote. "I remember these pictures of fat women," the agent said, referring to Fernando Botero paintings. “Everything else I’ve got to share, and now my designer?” she said. He and the boss developed a Sunday morning tradition during Frank’s installation trips to Colombia. Among them was Francisco Laguna, a slick Georgetown-educated attorney who spoke five languages and helped disguise the cartel’s global system for washing Santacruz’s cocaine cash. In 1991, a national news publication made that distinction unavoidably explicit. He hastily bought a copy of the issue and brought it out once he and Frank were alone. Lerner planned an ambitious indictment in which the designers would be charged under the RICO Act, a mob statute holding individuals culpable for the conspiracy of their gang as a whole. The Monday after he retired from the force, he was back at work as a civilian DEA analyst doing virtually the same job. The government had laid claim to virtually all of Alexander's and Frank’s assets, including Villa Vecchia and other homes, three Harley-Davidsons, a Mercedes-Benz, about $75,000 worth of jewelry and hundreds of thousands of dollars found in bank accounts and safety deposit boxes. Several Cali Cartel leaders were arrested during the summer of 1995; Gilberto was arrested on 9 June, Santacruz on 4 July, and Miguel on 7 August. But still, Alexander admitted that he was stunned by the showcase of the evil of his top client – and disturbed by his role in it. Unlike the designers, Rojas’s money laundering for drug traffickers did not occupy a legal gray area. In his closing argument, Paul Schechtman, one of the designers’ attorneys, imagined that Santacruz had risen from the dead, watched the trial of his stand-ins and lamented, "Whoever conceived this has heads like maracas.". Salazar’s fortune changed when another inmate gave him a prison copy of El Diario La Prensa, a New York City Spanish-language newspaper whose editor Salazar had previously helped assassinate due to writings that had peeved Santacruz. The cartel’s bloody war with Medellin had boosted its profile, as had the unprecedented tonnage of cocaine it imported into American cities. To calm the situation, Alexander paid for the $15,000 kitchen item himself. There were so many apartments, chalets and farmhouses scattered along a strategic route around Cali that the designers implemented a coding and sticker system to keep their jobs separate. Rojas, the Miami freight forwarder who for years had transported crates of furniture and fixtures Alexander purchased to Santacruz’s homes, said she happened to be in town. “So that’s the life of a racketeer, all right?” he remarks, shutting off the video. Frank picked up cash from a Santacruz operative known as “Tanga” within nine days of Chepe Chaser Robbie Michaelis capturing the gangster. They grappled for the first time with the possibility that their boss – who Frank maintained was “always such a sweetheart” – was a cold-blooded killer. The designers' attorneys filed a spreadsheet in court estimating Santacruz’s total design costs to be $7.8 million, but Alexander says the figures were "not at all accurate" and suggested the actual total is higher. In the magazine, he referred to Jose Santacruz Londono and Gilberto Rodriguez-Orejuela as the leaders of the Cali Cartel and provided and organizational chart of the cartel's New York City cell. He had little time to ponder such matters before the doorbell rang again the next day. “My gang was Frank, the housekeeper, the freight forwarder and the accountant,” Alexander said. He ultimately obtained a mug shot of a man who seemed to be involved in every layer of the organization: Victor Crespo. At the time of this filming, around 1982, the job is still in progress. Once inside, Gallo took note of what he considered to be the proceeds of the cocaine trade. “I was in love from minute one,” Frank said. [2], https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=José_Santacruz_Londoño&oldid=983721008, Short description is different from Wikidata, Articles with unsourced statements from September 2017, Wikipedia articles with WORLDCATID identifiers, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, This page was last edited on 15 October 2020, at 21:17. Once in Colombia, the goods filled a warehouse. Patricia Dempsey, the housekeeper, described receiving so much cash from Santacruz couriers that she once lined Alexander and Frank’s bed sheets with large bills as a prank. They maintained that past interior design clients – including, according to Alexander, the onetime Bahamas attorney general – often paid with cash. “We wanted a clear record that the cartel operated in New York, operated at the scale we knew it operated – which was absolutely massive – and that there were persons in the U.S. who could be held accountable for cooperating with them,” Lerner said. No way he would put it where we could grab it.”. Before his death, José Santacruz’s payroll included some of the most violent and sophisticated criminals on the planet, from killers who used battery acid and plastic bags to torture and dispatch enemies, to Ivy League-educated attorneys who laundered billions through global shell holdings and shadow accounts. 11 At some point, the cartel supplied 80% of the United States' and 90% of the European cocaine market. It looked like a “cheap Italian wedding,” he said, a doomed union of two families at odds. “You will finish the office, and I’m looking forward to it,” Santacruz said. He and Alexander later said they resolved that on an upcoming trip to New York, in which Alexander was to discuss designs with Amparo, he would break the news that they were severing the relationship. “We can’t put on a witness that’s worse than our defendant.”. Money laundering had been outlawed by the U.S. government in 1986 as a weapon against those working with drug traffickers, and since then the government had been testing the statutes in court. She said that the designers instructed her to keep their client’s identity a secret and disputed the notion that they continued to work for him out of fear. The army we had was bad guys.”. When he confessed, Alexander said, Amparo burst into tears. As Alexander calculated aloud how much it would cost to fix the place up, they were mutually impressed by each other’s real estate acumen. But to his interior designers, he was simply Joe, just another wealthy client with whom they weren’t afraid to joust. More than 50 times, Clarke and a partner had driven up to Alexander and Frank’s Bay Area homes in the middle of the night with headlights out and flung their fastidiously separated recycling into their trunk. The mustaches remain, though they've lost much of their color. While working at an upscale lighting gallery, Frank Pellecchia couldn’t help but notice the customer who pulled up in a gleaming Mercedes convertible, in country club digs with a preppy flop of auburn hair over hazel eyes. “That was on cue,” he recently acknowledged – an attempt to win the jury’s sympathy. It included Amparo, her mother, two daughters, a nanny and an American pilot who served as a de facto translator. But Santacruz had commissioned his splendid apocalypse bunker too late. Alexander and Frank had on several occasions planned on finishing one last job for Santacruz before getting out for good. Nothing came of the allegation, and prison snitches are notoriously unreliable. Now it was under siege by a half dozen heavily armed drug agents backed up by roughly 30 more law enforcement officials whose vests showed off an alphabet soup of government force: DEA, IRS, SFPD. The designer took note of a gun on the nightstand, and another in a shoulder holster Aguilera revealed by taking off his jacket. Ultimately he arrived at a ruse in which a San Francisco police officer would ring their front gate to tell whoever answered it – Frank, as it turns out – of a problem outside, at which point Gallo's tactical team would storm in with guns drawn. “We’re working on a major project. Shot to death by the AUC With federal agents gripping him by his arms at the home’s front gate, Frank had a view of the law enforcement spectacle that had descended on the normally staid, exclusive neighborhood of Sea Cliff. “What we were saying was they were the bagmen for this organization.”. The task force of … “I know it sounds silly, but that’s the way it was.”. “Abandoned was their previously unblemished law-abiding life. Business was booming, and he had loads more work for them. Patricia read from a letter Alexander sent her a month after his arrest. Alexander Blarek and Frank Pellecchia learn their client has multiple families - and that they also need homes designed. But in the months to follow, a wild legal proposition formed – a Hail Mary to put Santacruz on trial despite being deceased.