11 Arrested in $50-Million Cocaine Bust

Federal drug agents staged dawn raids and arrested 11 suspects, including a former union leader, in an alleged plot to smuggle up to $50 million worth of cocaine into the United States from Colombia.

Among the suspects was Ray Lane, 69, former secretary-treasurer of the Hotel and Restaurant Employees Union Local 28 in Oakland and an ex-convict, who was arrested Sunday at his Alameda home.

Suspected Supplier

Simon Sotelo, 43, a Colombian citizen and Lane’s alleged partner in the scheme, was taken into custody at his San Jose home. Three Mexican nationals were picked up in Texas.

Colombian Alvaro Echeverra was arrested while vacationing at a Monterey, Calif., hotel with his family. The Drug Enforcement Agency charged that Echeverria was to have been the cocaine supplier for Lane and Sotelo and the plot was to have involved five tons of cocaine worth up to $50 million.

The others arrested were identified as Alberto Cruz Alaniz, 24, of McAllen, Tex.; Carlos Leoncio Tafich, 39, of McAllen; Beatriz Caisedo, 43, a Colombian national living in West Covina; her daughter, Gloria Milena Tabaras, 22, of West Covina; Jose Reinel Marin Buitrago, 45, a Colombian national also from West Covina; Cesar Fuentes-Oliveras, 24, of Gilroy, Calif., and Jorge Rueda-Ariza, 39, a Colombian national living in Gilroy.

Lane was convicted in 1978 on charges of embezzling funds from Local 28. He served a six-month sentence. He was also ordered to pay $275,000 in a 1980 sexual harassment suit brought by two union waitresses. He quit his union job the same year.

Indicted in 1983

Lane was indicted in a 1983 Organized Crime Strike Force case involving charges that he was planning to turn over control of the union’s pension fund to reputed Mafia financier Alan Dorfman in return for help in a union local merger and for personal retirement benefits.

Dorfman was slain in Chicago before he went on trial. The charges were later dismissed but some of them were reinstated in 1985 by a federal appeals court.

Lane’s name also came up in Senate and House probes of alleged organized crime involvement and other irregularities in both the national and local hotel workers’ union offices.

In 1976 Sotelo was arrested as the leader of a drug distribution ring that officers said “virtually controlled the cocaine and heroin traffic in the (San Francisco) Bay area and San Joaquin Valley counties.” Heroin worth nearly $2 million was seized.

Sotelo served seven years of a 30-year sentence.

Drug Enforcement agents raided Sotelo’s Gilroy ranch and seized 13 kilos of cocaine and several weapons during the weekend’s operations conducted by more than 80 drug agents and officers from 15 other law enforcement agencies.