“I’ll grant you, they had bad taste in clients,” he continues. “But the prosecution is trying to go down a new path with a giant leap. They are taking what was a service relationship and painting it as part of some broad conspiracy. That will fail. Most money launderers are encouraged to spend as much money as possible. We will demonstrate that Santacruz wanted them to spend as little money as possible.”

Civil libertarians and advocates of drug-law reform assert that if the two men are convicted, anyone who receives any money from a drug dealer for any reason could be prosecuted for money laundering. “Through the warped glasses of the drug war, suddenly, normal business transactions have become money laundering,” said Kevin Zeese, president of Common Sense for Drug Policy in Washington, D.C.

Jason Solotaroff also questions the prosecution’s motive for bringing the case, claiming that they’ve gone after his clients partly to gain access to their riches. There is no question that the Eastern District stands to benefit if the two men are found guilty: at a time when all law-enforcement agencies are under increasing pressure from the Justice Department to increase their seizures to supplement tightening budgets, a significant percentage of Blarek and Pellecchia’s $6.4 million in forfeited assets would go to finance the district’s own law-enforcement activities. The prosecution, not unexpectedly, scoffs at this assertion.

One matter not under dispute is that Santacruz ran one of the most successful drug enterprises in New York history. “Santacruz Londoño,” according to DEA Intelligence Analyst Kenneth Robinson, a former NYPD detective and a twenty-year veteran of the Chepe chasers, “was without a doubt the largest distributor of cocaine in the New York area.”

According to the DEA, throughout the late eighties and early nineties, Santacruz was responsible for exporting as much as 800,000 grams of cocaine a week into New York, where it was stored and distributed through a network of safe houses in Queens and Brooklyn. Santacruz’s cocaine empire was vertically integrated: he and another faction of the Cali cartel controlled production, processing, distribution, and sales. Retail hubs were centered in Miami, Houston, Los Angeles, and New York. Santacruz himself displayed quite an affinity for New York City; until 1992, he maintained an $8,365-a-month apartment on West 57th Street.

Though the Cali cartel was far more businesslike than its brutal Medellín counterpart, Santacruz was not above resorting to murder when necessary. In 1992, he ordered the execution of the New York-based journalist Manuel de Dios Unanue as retribution for a series of groundbreaking reports in El Diario about Colombian drug operations. Unanue was shot in a Jackson Heights restaurant that year after Santacruz put a $50,000 price on his head.

Colombian police also consider Santacruz responsible for the explosive violence associated with the Cali cartel’s attacks on the Medellín cartel as the two drug organizations fought over territory. That war extended into the lucrative New York market and was one of the underlying reasons for much of the drug-related violence in this city in the late eighties and early nineties.

If Blarek and Pellecchia were laundering money for Santacruz, they were a puny part of his operation. In 1988, at the height of their alleged conspiracy, the DEA busted a Santacruz employee, Luis Ramos, at a safe house in Queens, where they confiscated $7.8 million in cash; later that month, another Santacruz courier was found in possession of 2,000 kilograms of cocaine and $2.2 million in drug proceeds. Overall, the DEA claims that the cartel shipped billions of dollars in drug profits back to Colombia; Santacruz himself was reportedly worth a quarter of a billion dollars when he was shot.

In Colombia, Santacruz plowed his profits into legitimate businesses. The drug lord fancied himself a real-estate mogul: he owned hundreds of homes, apartment buildings, and office complexes in and around Cali, as well as a huge cattle ranch and restaurants, lending a veneer of legitimacy to his enterprise and generating millions of dollars in non-drug-related income.

It was a visit to one of those homes, back in 1979, that originally brought Alexander Blarek to the attention of Santacruz. Blarek, who ran his own interior-design business in Miami, had been invited for a social visit to the wealthy Ciudad Jardim neighborhood in Cali by a friend who had family in Colombia. He noticed a home being constructed nearby and paid a visit to the site, where he struck up a conversation with the guard overseeing the property. Shortly afterward, the guard introduced him to Santacruz’s wife, Amparo Castro Meza Londoño. Such chance meetings were not inconceivable back in the heady days when dealers and their families lived openly inside Colombia. A photo of Señora Santacruz obtained by the Colombian Security Service shows an elegantly dressed and ample woman in her mid-50s who looks exactly like what she was -- a wealthy housewife. Amparo introduced Blarek to her husband, who promptly hired him for his next project: a 30,000-square-foot mansion on the outskirts of Cali.