Court Case Tests U.S. Resolve in War on Drugs : Crime: Jorge Roca Suarez, who prosecutors say was the drug king of Bolivia, is among the first alleged South American drug lords to be brought to trial.

Five years ago, U.S. Customs Service agents in Miami opened an upright freezer that was being shipped from Los Angeles to Bolivia. Inside was cold cash, and plenty of it--more than $2 million in U.S. currency.

Two weeks later, Customs agents in Miami opened two more shipments--stereo speakers and vacuum cleaners--en route from Los Angeles to Bolivia. Inside one speaker was $500,000. Inside the two vacuum cleaners was $398,950.

The serial number of the freezer and the sales invoice for the vacuum cleaners led federal agents to a Los Angeles-area appliance store, and, ultimately, agents said in sworn statements filed recently in federal court in San Diego, to Jorge Roca Suarez.

Roca, prosecutors contend, was the drug king of Bolivia from 1985 to 1990. Last December, after five years of meticulously tracking Roca’s finances, agents arrested him at his estate in the Los Angeles suburb of San Marino.

Roca’s arrest signaled a high-stakes test of U.S. law enforcement resolve and ingenuity in the so-called “war on drugs,” leading to not just one, but two court cases, one in San Diego, the other in Los Angeles. Only in recent weeks has the court file begun to fill with legal papers offering hints of sordid family drama, international intrigue and big-time crime.

Prosecutors in San Diego, where meetings central to the case took place, charged Roca, 39, with 18 felony counts that could bring him life in prison. In Los Angeles, he was hit with 12 criminal tax and fraud counts as well as civil suits seeking the forfeiture of 35 assets worth millions of dollars. Defense attorneys insist in court filings that Roca is innocent.

Roca is among the first alleged South American drug lords brought to trial in the United States. The San Diego case is going first, with preliminary skirmishing set to begin at a Sept. 16 hearing. A trial is scheduled for March 3.

But already the case is something of a coup for the Drug Enforcement Administration.

It didn’t take a military invasion to get Roca to America--as it did for former Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega, whose drug trial began last week in Miami. Roca wasn’t kidnaped and pushed through a fence at the U.S.-Mexico border, as was Rene Martin Verdugo Urquidez, linked to the 1985 killing of DEA agent Enrique (Kiki) Camarena.

Roca didn’t even need to be extradited. He was simply arrested at one of his homes, a 19-room estate in San Marino.

It’s a measure of the case’s sensitivity that DEA officials, from the local to the national level, declined last week to discuss the arrest or the case. The prosecutor in the San Diego case, Steve Nelson, declined to return phone calls. Roca’s defense lawyer, Los Angeles attorney Michael Abzug, said he preferred not to discuss the case.

The DEA referred calls to its San Diego office to the Washington office of agency chief Robert Bonner, a former federal judge in Los Angeles. Bonner’s office referred calls to his top aides, then to press aides, then back to the San Diego office. Finally, DEA spokesman Ron D’Ulisse in San Diego said comment on the case would be “inappropriate.”

Although the San Diego trial is still six months away, the legal maneuvering already is intense. On July 19, U.S. District Judge Earl B. Gilliam denied Roca’s request for $550,000 bail, saying that was not enough to guarantee that Roca wouldn’t flee the country, given the severity of the charges against him. Roca remains in federal jail in Los Angeles.

Late last month, in preparation for the hearing next week before Gilliam, the first major pretrial session in the case, defense attorneys filed 13 separate bids to suppress evidence or to compel prosecutors to divulge evidence.

Buried amid the technical legal skirmishing are the hints--and so far, only the hints--of high drama. The court filings feature broad prosecution allegations of a Roca family-run cocaine cartel called “The Corporation,” clandestine meetings in La Jolla and Panama, secret drug labs in Bolivia, official Mexican corruption--and of kidnapings, beatings and murder.

Prosecutors allege that Roca took over a cartel and, with the aid of many family members, built it into “one of the most powerful organizations in Bolivia.”

For five years, prosecutors said, Roca and his family helped control all aspects of the cocaine trade, from the buying of coca paste in Bolivia to the import of the finished product to the United States and the export back to Bolivia of “hundreds of millions of drug dollars.”

The indictments name 20 other family members, most of whom remain fugitives, prosecutors said. Roca’s wife, Cirila, and two of his sisters, Beatriz and Vilma, were arrested but have posted bail, court records indicate.

Nicknamed Techo de Paja (Straw Roof) because of his blond hair, Roca was born in Bolivia in 1952. With his mother, he immigrated to the United States when he was 10 and spent most of his youth in Los Angeles, prosecutors said. He did not graduate from high school.

In 1981, after working for several years as a mechanic and car salesman at Los Angeles-area auto dealers, including his own failed dealership, Roca returned home to work for his uncle, Roberto Suarez Gomez. The patriarch of a respected cattle ranching family, Suarez became better known as the “cocaine godfather of Bolivia,” prosecutors said.

Bolivia provides a large proportion of the coca leaves and cocaine paste--called sulfato-- that are refined into powdered and rock cocaine. Suarez supplied paste to powerful Colombian traffickers, relying heavily on a group of young Bolivians, including nephew Roca, to buy sulfato and get it to shipment points, according to a DEA account.

According to that DEA account, Roca undercut his uncle’s price, betrayed Suarez by dealing with the Colombians behind his uncle’s back and got his own start with a chunk of operating capital that Suarez had advanced to him for buying paste.

Suarez, arrested in 1988, is now in prison in Bolivia, prosecutors said in court filings.

Roca has no criminal record in the United States. In Bolivia, he was acquitted in April, 1989, of operating a cocaine lab, defense attorney Abzug said in legal papers. That acquittal, prosecutors in San Diego responded in their filings, was because of high-level corruption that led to charges against two judges and a prosecutor.

The San Diego case evolved from yet another case--a 1989 trial in San Diego that resulted in the conviction of three Mexicans and four Bolivians on charges of conspiring to import 5,000 kilograms of cocaine into the United States for $27 million. U.S. District Judge William B. Enright sentenced all seven to 25 to 30 years in prison, and all have appealed.

Roca is not mentioned in that first indictment, but the connection to the earlier case is drawn in documents filed with his bid for bail.

Prosecutors gave the following account of the first case: In 1987, an informant for the Customs Service, David Wheeler, began negotiating with a Mexican attorney, Efren Mendez Duenas, about importing cocaine into the United States. Mendez identified a Bolivian source of supply, prosecutors said.

Shipping the cocaine to the United States meant landing and refueling planes in Mexico. Mendez located corrupt Mexican officials who could arrange to protect the planes, prosecutors said.

The Bolivians and Mexicans were introduced by Wheeler to an undercover DEA agent, Michael Levine, who posed as a buyer. Levine has since written a book--called “Deep Cover,” which is highly critical of the DEA--and is making the rounds on the TV talk-show circuit.

During meetings in La Jolla, Pacific Beach, Panama, Mexico and Bolivia, DEA agents were told how major traffickers in Bolivia had banded together to form a cooperative to dominate the market, prosecutors said. This association was referred to as “The Corporation,” and Roca dominated it, prosecutors said.

On Dec. 15, 1987, Wheeler and another informant “were introduced to the leader of the group, Roca, who approved the deal,” the $27-million transaction, after “personally meeting with the informants,” prosecutors said.

Defense lawyer Abzug said in filings that it’s not at all clear that Roca was at that meeting. Prosecutors insist that he was.

On Jan. 14, 1988, the conspirators--not Roca, who was not named in the first indictment--were arrested in San Diego. One, Jorge Carranza Peniche, was arrested in a La Jolla supermarket lot while wearing the uniform of a Mexican army colonel--though the defense would contend at the trial that he had been discharged from the Mexican army years earlier, and as a major.

Abzug said that Mendez gave federal investigators a lengthy, tape-recorded statement on Jan. 14, 1988, shortly after arrest, that clears Roca.

Prosecutors said the 1989 trial against Mendez and the six others is “but a chapter in the government’s case against Roca.” But what more there is has not yet landed in court files. Defense attorney Abzug said in court filings that the lawyers’ pretrial exchange of information already has reached 30,000 pages.

The companion Los Angeles case explores Roca’s finances. But what’s also missing from the court files, so far, is the chronology and the connections between the seizure of cash in Miami, the probe that led to the San Diego convictions of the three Mexicans and four Bolivians, and Roca’s arrest.

In a sworn affidavit, U.S. Customs agent Gary Intinarelli in Irvine said only that agents traced the $2.9 million found in the freezer, the speakers and the vacuum cleaners to a Howard’s Appliances and Television store in San Gabriel. Sales invoices led to Roca and his family, Intinarelli said.

Intinarelli declined to comment on the case.

Defense lawyer Abzug said in court filings that Intinarelli’s claim that the $2.9 million was from “Mr. Roca’s so-called narcotics organization was based on nothing more than his family bought appliances at a store, where perhaps tens of thousands of other people also made purchases.”

Abzug also has to fend off the Internal Revenue Service. Before 1985, according to a sworn statement filed by IRS agent Kent Greenberg in Los Angeles, Roca, his wife, mother and two sisters had a total of four bank accounts and three real estate properties. The one business that Roca had owned and operated, Roca Auto Sales, went out of business, Greenberg said.

For the years 1983 to 1988, Roca’s tax returns showed comparatively little income, Greenberg said. He reported $7,993 in 1983, $8,990 in 1984, $121,385 in 1985, $66,313 in 1986, $112,896 in 1987 and $55,766 in 1988, Greenberg said.

When Roca was arrested in December, 1990, according to prosecutors, the Rocas had accumulated the following assets, all of which were seized by the government: real estate with a value of $10 million to $12 million, bank accounts totaling about $260,000, an $80,000 Mercedes-Benz and a $32,000 sports car.

Abzug said the “source of Mr. Roca’s wealth” after 1985 was a trust fund created by his mother. Abzug also said that Roca has been involved in real estate since 1981, and “it is evident that for the past 10 years Mr. Roca has been a successful, legitimate businessman.”