93 Charged in Vast Drug Investigation : FBI Reports Largest Operation Against 2 Colombian Cartels

The FBI announced today that 93 people tied to two Colombian drug cartels have been charged with importing cocaine, heroin and marijuana into the United States.

The people charged in the United States and abroad shipped drugs from South and Central America and other Caribbean countries and distributed the drugs through a network stretching from Miami to New York, Los Angeles and Europe, the FBI said.

U.S. attorneys’ offices in Miami and Tampa, Fla., assisted in the investigation and most of the 93 are being charged in those two cities, the FBI said.

The operation, code-named Cat-Com, led to the seizure of 11,000 pounds of cocaine, 211,000 pounds of marijuana and some heroin, according to the FBI.

The yearlong investigation “is the largest undercover operation ever directed toward the interworkings of the drug cartels based in Medellin and Cali, Colombia,” FBI Director William S. Sessions said in a statement.

‘Significant Impact’

“We believe that this case, because of the positions and large numbers of those charged and arrested, will have a significant impact on the ability of these cartels to continue to import drugs into the United States and abroad,” he said.

More than $1 million in cash and property has been seized and total seizures are expected to exceed $4 million, Sessions said.

Sessions said undercover agents posed as experts in the communications field.

A law enforcement source said the drug dealers were seeking secure communications devices that could not be monitored, but “what they asked for and received were not the same thing.”

“Some of the equipment enabled us to do some monitoring of them,” this source said, suggesting that the communications devices included scanners and beepers that enabled the bureau to electronically track the suspects.

Sailboat Incident

The traffickers identified themselves to undercover agents as transporting drugs on behalf of cocaine-trafficking cartels headed by Colombian drug lords Pablo Escobar-Gaviria, Jorge Luis Ochoa-Vasques and Jose Gonzalo Rodrigues-Gacha.

U.S. Navy warships and Coast Guard cutters acted on information provided by the FBI undercover operation to interdict vessels carrying the drugs headed for the United States from South America.

In one instance, a sailboat named Naut-For-Fun was piloted by FBI sources hired by the drug traffickers. The sailboat contained nearly 900 pounds of cocaine from Colombia.

The FBI had planned to seize the drugs covertly and tell the traffickers that the sailboat had sunk with the crew lost at sea. When bad weather hit, however, the Coast Guard interceded, rescuing the FBI and civilian personnel aboard the sailboat, which sank, and recovering the cocaine.