Dealer Goes Undercover on Underworld Odyssey

When Roberto Rodriguez was sentenced to 12 years in prison in 1989, apparently ending his reign as one of the San Fernando Valley’s premier cocaine dealers, a federal judge in Los Angeles gave the Cuban immigrant 30 days to get his affairs in order.

That month became nearly a decade.

Rodriguez jumped bond and headed south, embarking on an odyssey through the drug underworld of the Americas that made him a target of hit men in Los Angeles and Detroit; a drug supplier for street gangs in Chicago, Detroit and New York; and a partner and friend to leaders of the Cali cocaine cartel in Colombia.

Before it ended this year on witness stands and in debriefing rooms in four U.S. cities, that long journey through drug land for Rodriguez and his Cuban-born stepbrother, Osvaldo Marcial, also exposed official corruption in several U.S. cities.

Their testimony ultimately revealed the dark double lives of corrupt cops in suburban Michigan, a middle school vice principal dealing crack cocaine in South Florida, and a former federal prosecutor who crossed the line for his cocaine overlords in Miami. And it led to charges against two prominent businessmen in the Dominican Republic accused of laundering cocaine profits.

In all, court documents obtained by The Times show that Rodriguez and his brother, along with Mark Minelli, the Drug Enforcement Administration special agent who won their trust, account for more than 40 convictions of major drug dealers and the officials who protected them in Chicago, Detroit, New York and Miami.

In the more than 18 months since Rodriguez joined his brother in secretly working for Minelli and the DEA, their undercover operations led to the seizure of nearly $3 million in drug money, aircraft worth $3 million and cocaine worth $12 million. Their cooperation also helped solve a gangland slaying in Chicago and an attempted murder in Los Angeles.

Case Exposes Depth, Reach of Corruption

In short, the three men quietly became a singular wrecking crew against the Colombian cartel’s distributors and protectors in the United States, and exposed the depth and reach of cocaine corruption in U.S. society.

The array of cases prosecuted with the help of the three men is “a disturbing example of how the drug trade permeates every level of our society, corrupting even those who we trust most,” said Vincent J. Mazzilli, chief of the DEA’s Miami office.

The court documents in these cases, culled from federal courthouses in the United States and their counterpart in the Dominican Republic, also tell the story of a unique friendship between hunter and hunted at the front line of the U.S. war on drugs.

It is the kind of relationship that many prosecutors and drug agents say is the key to winning that war.

“Without someone like Rodriguez, we could not have uncovered the nature of the corruption we had here,” said Assistant U.S. Atty. Joe Allen, who used Rodriguez this year to successfully prosecute four senior police officers in the suburbs of Detroit for taking drug-protection money.

“It would take years and years and years to make a case like this without a person at [Rodriguez’s] level in the drug world,” Allen said.

How the brash and enterprising Rodriguez reached that level, bringing along his younger brother, helps explain how the drug underworld has flourished in the Western Hemisphere.

Rodriguez’s lawyer declined to make him available for an interview. Marcial gave a brief interview outside a Miami courtroom last week, confirming his undercover role and saying it has left him feeling at peace--despite the price he said the drug underworld has put on his head.

The brothers have told their story separately and in detail under oath on witness stands during trials this year in Miami and Detroit. Those details were also confirmed in testimony by Minelli, who has supervised the brothers since they switched sides in the drug war.

Federal drug enforcement officials say Rodriguez was among Southern California’s major cocaine dealers when he was caught in 1989 delivering more than 100 pounds of the drug.

A legal immigrant who stated that he came to Los Angeles from Havana as a child six years after Fidel Castro’s revolution in 1959, Rodriguez testified that he had been dealing drugs throughout Southern California since 1977--an enterprise he later estimated had netted him as much as $3 million through the years.

Even after his 1989 conviction, Rodriguez continued to deal cocaine during a court-approved leave. He was caught selling 44 pounds of the drug to undercover drug agents at a Temecula hotel as he attempted to recover his financial losses from the earlier arrest.

“You engaged in another drug transaction to pay for the first one?” prosecutor Allen asked Rodriguez on the witness stand in Detroit in February.

“Yes.”

“And when you got caught, you fled the country?”

“That’s right.”

Rodriguez testified in the Detroit case that he fled to Miami, then to the Dominican Republic, Panama and finally Costa Rica, where a doctor operated on his hands to surgically alter his fingerprints.

Rodriguez said he paid for the operation with a $10,000 Rolex watch. He testified he had hoped to stay in Costa Rica and start a new life with his wife and three children but panicked and fled to Colombia when he learned that Interpol was investigating him.

Odyssey Continues With Colombia Cartel

He didn’t leave alone. While in Costa Rica, Rodriguez befriended another Cuban-born drug dealer, Jorge Hernandez, who had undergone the same fingerprint surgery as Rodriguez.

In 1991, the two men traveled to Cali, where Rodriguez ingratiated himself with the leaders of Colombia’s most powerful cocaine cartel.

He and Hernandez formed a partnership that would supply hundreds of pounds of Cali cocaine to major U.S. cities in the years that followed. The partnership ended only when Hernandez--who has pleaded guilty in Miami to charges of drug trafficking and in Los Angeles to attempted murder--threatened, as Rodriguez later recounted on the witness stand, “to put a bullet in my head.”

It was during their partnership that Rodriguez’s brother became a major player in the two partners’ cocaine operation.

Marcial testified at a trial in Miami in January that, unlike his brother, he had immigrated to Los Angeles illegally--a yearlong journey from Havana through Panama, Costa Rica and Mexico that cost $4,000 before he finally crossed the U.S. border at Tijuana in 1987.

Marcial stated that Rodriguez started him in the drug business soon after, and he moved up through the ranks as his brother rose in stature with the Colombians and the Mexican cartels that transship cocaine into the United States.

“I was the pickup guy, the one that picks up the dope and puts it in the stash house,” Marcial testified in Miami.

Later, Marcial said, he graduated to “cocaine driver,” running dozens of loads of at least 200 pounds each from Los Angeles and southern Texas to New York, Chicago and Miami.

41 Family Members Were Relocated

The brothers later testified separately that their key contacts were in Mexico, Chicago, New York and Miami. Those contacts were so powerful, in fact, that the U.S. government has spent more than $150,000 relocating at least 41 members of Rodriguez’s family from California and Colombia, according to court documents and testimony.

Rodriguez testified that the family members received death threats after the brothers began cooperating with drug enforcement agents after Marcial’s capture in May 1995. Marcial was arrested, along with four other people, while delivering 30 pounds of cocaine to a suburban Miami apartment complex.

Among the powerful drug distributors who were later convicted as a result of the brothers’ undercover work and testimony was Francisco Medina, a Chicago-based cousin of Amado Carrillo Fuentes. U.S. and Mexican authorities had labeled Carrillo Fuentes the most powerful drug lord in Mexico until his death after plastic surgery in 1997.

Marcial’s cooperation also resulted in the arrest and guilty plea of Ruben Carillo Rosales, a major Colombian cocaine distributor in Manhattan who later helped U.S. authorities break up a smuggling operation that used Colombian air force cargo planes to bring cocaine into the United States.

And the brothers’ undercover work, aided by Carillo’s subsequent cooperation, led to the conviction of Luis H. Cano, a Mexican American businessman who was found guilty by a federal jury in Miami this year of heading a vast cocaine network that imported more than 10 tons of the drug into the United States during the past decade. Cano, who is appealing the verdict, was sentenced to life in prison.

U.S. authorities are trying to extradite two Dominican businessmen also indicted for money laundering in that case.

Through it all, the brothers later testified, official corruption was the subtext that allowed their smuggling operation to flourish.

Marcial helped federal authorities win a guilty plea to drug-conspiracy charges from his prominent Miami defense lawyer, former Assistant U.S. Atty. Michael Burnbaum. After Marcial’s 1995 arrest, he secretly recorded a jailhouse conversation in which Burnbaum was concerned only with locating a 300-pound cocaine shipment that Marcial hid in the Chicago suburbs.

Marcial, who testified that his attorney’s actions helped persuade him to cooperate with the DEA, also went undercover earlier this year to expose drug trafficking by Willie Young, who was vice principal of a middle school in Miami at the time. Marcial was the key witness in September against Young, whom he described as a buyer and seller of cocaine, before a federal jury that convicted Young of drug trafficking.

Young is scheduled to be sentenced Monday and faces up to life in prison.

It was Marcial’s elder brother, though, who helped prosecutors win the federal case against the four police officers in suburban Detroit. Such cases, U.S. authorities say, are among the most difficult forms of official drug corruption to expose because the lawbreakers are also the law enforcers. The accused ranged in rank from sergeant to deputy chief.

Rodriguez testified at the Detroit trial of one officer that the four police officials from Highland Park and Royal Oak Township had taken a total of several thousand dollars in bribes to protect cocaine shipments that Rodriguez brought into their towns for the Colombians. The officer was convicted, and the other three pleaded guilty, to drug-conspiracy charges.

Asked during that trial why he decided to switch sides in the drug war, Rodriguez first cited what he said was a murder contract put out on him by “the thugs in Detroit.” However, later in his testimony, Rodriguez gave the same answer his brother has offered in several trials during the past year: the trust and friendship they gradually forged with DEA agent Minelli.

Going After Top Distributors

For a year after Marcial’s 1995 arrest and decision to work undercover for the DEA, Rodriguez testified that he had several telephone conversations with Minelli.

“The understanding between me and Minelli was that if he was to see me, he was to arrest me,” Rodriguez stated.

Meanwhile, Rodriguez added, he helped Minelli make a case against Hernandez, his former partner, who had been arrested with Marcial.

Finally, in January 1997, Rodriguez met Minelli for the first time--for breakfast at a Cuban cafe in North Miami Beach--and surrendered. For the next two months, he worked undercover. Wearing hidden microphones and cameras, he led Minelli to some of the top cocaine distributors in the United States.

As Marcial said on the witness stand in Miami when asked why he decided to cooperate with federal authorities: “I talked to my brother, and I told him about Mr. Minelli. I convinced him to surrender himself. . . . I told him I know an agent, and he is honest, and he can trust him with his life.”

Minelli, a 14-year veteran of the drug fight, last month was awarded one of the Justice Department’s highest honors for his lead role in the Cano case. He has won high praise from state prosecutors in Chicago, who say he and his key witnesses solved a contract murder there earlier this year.

Meanwhile, Marcial has pleaded guilty to drug-conspiracy charges and is scheduled to begin serving a nine-year prison term later this month. And Rodriguez is in federal prison serving a 17-year term for his two drug convictions in Southern California, although his attorney, Minelli and other federal agents have indicated that they will formally appeal for a reduced sentence later this year.

Looking back last week, Marcial, who also hopes to have his sentence reduced in the coming weeks, said one of the best days of his life came when he was arrested--and decided to “do the right thing.”

“I’m glad I got caught,” he told The Times. “That day they put the handcuffs on me, something left my body--some kind of heavy stuff. It was like, that’s it. It’s over.”