Matta Will Be Questioned in Killing of Camarena : Reputed Drug Baron Put in U.S. Prison

A reputed billionaire drug kingpin who is suspected of ordering the brutal murder of a U.S. drug agent in Mexico was behind bars in a federal prison in Illinois on Wednesday, a day after he was whisked out of Honduras by officials there and turned over to American authorities.

Federal drug agents said they were delighted to have Juan Ramon Matta Ballesteros finally in custody, not only because he is believed to be one of the world’s biggest cocaine traffickers, but also because his Mexican drug ring is thought to be responsible for the 1985 slaying of Drug Enforcement Administration agent Enrique S. Camarena.

In February, 1985, Camarena was kidnaped in Guadalajara, Mexico, and later was found beaten to death. The crime has haunted American drug officials.

“This guy is a prime suspect,” DEA spokesman Cornelius Dougherty said in an interview. “We wanted to get him real bad.”

Howard Safir, a U.S. Marshals Service official, said Matta is one of the most important fugitives to be apprehended in recent years.

“He escaped once. He will not escape again,” he said, referring to Matta’s flight from a Florida prison in 1971.

At the time of his capture, Matta was living in Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras, which has no extradition treaty with the United States.

After extensive negotiations between the Marshals Service and leaders of the Honduran government, 60 police officers in helicopters swooped down on his home at dawn Tuesday, picked him up and put him aboard a flight to the Dominican Republic. Joined by U.S. Marshals there, he was flown to Puerto Rico and then to New York.

Matta is being held under high security at the federal prison in Marion, Ill., where he has 6 1/2 years left to serve on a previous federal sentence for illegal entry into the United States.

No charges have been filed against him in the Camarena slaying, but federal officials said he will be questioned about the crime.

“The likelihood is that he will be indicted for this (the Camarena murder), too, and be tried in Los Angeles on all the charges,” said a federal official, who asked not identified.

Dougherty said that U.S. intelligence “points to him (Matta), if not for the actual murder, then for the planning and direction of it.”

At the time of his death, Camarena had developed information about Matta’s Padrino drug organization in Guadalajara that led to the capture of several of its operatives.

U.S. officials said Matta started his drug operations in the 1970s as an underground narcotics chemist. After his prison escape in 1971, he rose to the top of a Mexican cocaine smuggling ring and was indicted in 1985 for drug crimes in Los Angeles, San Diego and Phoenix, Ariz.

Matta, 42, has slipped through the hands of U.S. officials more than once. A week after the abduction of Camarena, he was traced to a Mexico City apartment. But Mexican police officials delayed a raid on the apartment for three days, giving him time to escape. In March, 1986, Matta was jailed in Bogota, Colombia, on drug and murder charges. But before U.S. officials could question him, he escaped, reportedly after paying bribes of as much as $2 million to guards and prison officials.

Since moving to Tegucigalpa, Matta’s drug operation became the nation’s single largest employer, said Safir, interviewed in the Dominican Republic, where he was traveling with Atty. Gen. Edwin Meese III. “This is a guy who truly believed he could not be caught,” he said.

In a recent interview with the Associated Press, Matta said the charges that he is a drug kingpin are “a lie, a story.” He said his assets of $5 million came from cattle ranching and construction and trading in coffee, spices and tobacco.

Federal officials estimated Matta’s wealth at $1 billion to $2 billion and said he leads an organization that smuggles cocaine from Colombia to the United States.

“He is the senior player in cocaine trafficking,” said Stephen Boyle, spokesman for the U.S. Marshals Service. “If he isn’t No. 1, I don’t know who is.”

Last year, U.S. drug agents seized a shipment of 8,000 pounds of cocaine, worth $1.4 billion, that allegedly was shipped from Honduras by Matta.

U.S. officials declined to elaborate on the arrangements that led Honduran authorities to move against Matta in light of the lack of an extradition agreement. Prosecutors also declined to discuss a possible indictment in Camarena’s death.

“We have charged him (Matta) with operating a continuing criminal enterprise in Los Angeles,” said James Walsh, chief of the major narcotics section in the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles. From a Van Nuys location, Matta’s organization ran a cocaine distribution operation in 1981, Walsh said.

“His organization was a principal distributor of narcotics in this area,” Walsh said.

Times staff writer Ronald J. Ostrow contributed to this story from the Dominican Republic.