Cali Drug Cartel Is Crumbling, U.S. Says : Latin America: Officials in Washington point to defection and arrest of a top financial officer of Colombian crime ring.

Federal law enforcement officials are claiming a significant development in their anti-drug campaign with the surrender of a top financial officer of Colombia’s notorious Cali drug cartel.

Climaxing several days of secret negotiations, and persuaded by U.S. evidence that he was about to be assassinated, Guillermo Pallomari-Gonzalez recently took a commercial flight from Bogota, the Colombian capital, to an undisclosed southern U.S. city and turned himself in to federal authorities. He was immediately placed in protective custody.

“This is further proof that the Cali cartel is crumbling,” said Lee P. Brown, President Clinton’s national drug policy coordinator. Half a dozen other cartel leaders have previously been taken into custody by Colombian national police.

Federal officials said Pallomari-Gonzalez, who reportedly possesses detailed knowledge of the cartel’s finances and drug routes to the United States, was convinced that he was about to be murdered in Colombia amid highly charged allegations that he had evidence the cartel funneled more than $6 million into President Ernesto Samper’s 1994 campaign.

The drug lord, who has had a falling-out with his now-imprisoned colleagues, is among 59 defendants indicted in June by a federal grand jury in Miami in a major racketeering case against U.S. lawyers who allegedly protected the cartel’s interests.

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Expectations are that Pallomari-Gonzalez will enter a negotiated plea in the Miami case and could be a powerful government witness against others. Potentially he could also provide U.S. authorities with information that they might share with Colombian officials looking into allegations about Samper, the sources said.

U.S. authorities who discovered a plot against Pallomari-Gonzalez “gave him the time and place [of his intended murder] and he became convinced,” one source said.

His wife had planned to accompany him to the United States but at the last moment stayed behind in Cali, Colombia, for an additional 24 hours. She was seized by the cartel and her fate is unknown, sources said.

Pallomari-Gonzalez reputedly knows intimate details of the cartel’s cocaine-smuggling and money-laundering operations in the United States and Mexico. One source said he could prove to be “the biggest witness of international drug trafficking we’ve ever had.”

“He’s a real catch,” another official said, calling him “a well-known accountant for the Cali cartel, specifically the Orejuela family,” which is one of seven “primaries,” or divisions, of the drug enterprise. This official said that Pallomari-Gonzalez is believed to have shared in overall intelligence-gathering by the cartel and to have kept meticulous records on aviation and fuel expenses, landing strips, aircraft leases and many other details of the trafficking operations.

“If anybody in Cali would have records on corruption, I think he would,” this official said. “In fact, he could be a gold mine. It’s sensitive because he could be the nail in the coffin of Samper.”

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In Colombia, even some leaders of Samper’s Liberal Party are saying that the evidence that drug money was used in the 1994 campaign is irrefutable.

Samper, after initially denying that narcotics traffickers provided any funds, said last month that drug money may have been used but he was not aware of it.

Senior members of Samper’s administration have been spreading word that the charges are part of a plot by Samper’s political enemies, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, the Cali cartel and others to bring down his government.

U.S. law enforcement officials said the defecting drug lord, if he cooperates fully, might obtain a U.S. prison sentence of 10 years or less. Although congressionally mandated sentencing guidelines are particularly harsh on drug offenders, a federal judge may take into consideration a defendant’s cooperation in assisting other prosecutions.

The Miami case describes the Cali cartel--rising in power to supplant the old Medellin cartel that was close to former Panamanian strongman Manuel A. Noriega--as a far-flung, corporate-style enterprise that has used American lawyers to protect its financial interests and thwart official investigations.

Among former federal prosecutors under indictment in the controversial case is Washington attorney Michael Abbell, onetime chief of the Justice Department’s Office of International Affairs, who had worked on foreign drug cases.

Some legal authorities have complained that the Justice Department overreached by going after defense attorneys who sought only to provide the best representation for their clients, but federal officials in Miami have charged that the lawyers actually participated in criminal offenses.

Brown, the drug policy coordinator, said the Clinton Administration’s “aggressive anti-drug strategy” deserves credit for recent developments in Colombia, the largest producer of cocaine in the world.

Brown cited the President’s use of decertification, under which countries such as Colombia can lose foreign aid, including U.S. loans and credits, if they do not agree to take concrete steps to combat drug smuggling. The Administration had, in effect, placed Colombia on probation, giving it a waiver from decertification pending a good-faith showing of its anti-drug progress.