‘There was a compromise of the system. It would appear that he had help.’

On Aug. 25, 1987, suspected Colombian drug dealer William Londono slipped out of the Los Angeles County Central Jail after someone, possibly a sheriff’s deputy, sent an unauthorized “release message” on the jail’s internal computer system.

Nearly a year later, sheriff’s officials and the FBI still have not determined who helped Londono get away, nor do they know where he is, according to a sheriff’s spokesman.

“There’s nothing new at all on the case,” said Lt. Ben Nottingham.

An inmate normally would have had to pass through nine security checkpoints to go from the jail’s maximum security area, where Londono was kept, to the jail’s main entrance, one floor below Londono’s cell.

Security Stepped Up

Yet investigators found that after he left his cell after the unauthorized computer message, Londono passed through only one checkpoint, a guard station, before vanishing--but not before retrieving the clothes he was wearing when arrested.

It took deputies six days to realize that Londono had left the massive jail southeast of downtown Los Angeles which holds nearly 7,000 prisoners.

Sheriff Sherman Block immediately beefed up security measures at the jail and assigned a 13-detective task force to investigate. He also called in the FBI, which eventually took over the case.

Because Londono allegedly had access to large sums of money--he had $500,000 in cash when arrested--authorities expressed concern that one or more jailers may have been bribed to help him escape.

“There was a compromise of the system,” Block said at the time. “It would appear that he had help. We’re looking at this from all angles.”

Nottingham said recently that of the 70 deputies and civilians who were working in the jail at the time Londono slipped away, about 10 remain under suspicion. None has been charged or disciplined.

An FBI spokesman would say only that the case remains “active.”

Londono was being held on $3-million bail and was among 240 people arrested nationally in Operation Pisces, hailed by federal officials as the most successful, multi-agency drug probe ever undertaken.

High-Level ‘Cog’

Prosecutors described Londono as a high-level “cog” in a Los Angeles-based money-laundering ring through which $48 million in profits from cocaine sales was believed sent to Colombia.

He was arrested at an estate in the gated Ventura County community of Bell Canyon, in a $3-million house thought to be the ring’s headquarters.

Authorities said Londono’s escape was particularly unsettling because an undercover Los Angeles police officer, Horacio Marco, had testified against him in an earlier court hearing and the officer’s investigation had thus become known.

Marco, who was given police protection, works today as a narcotics investigator in the San Fernando Valley.