Cali cartel

Cali cartel   (Drug cartel)
Founder	•  Gilberto Rodríguez Orejuela •  Miguel Rodríguez Orejuela •  José Santacruz Londoño •  Hélmer Herrera
Headquarters	Cali

The Cali Cartel (Spanish: Cartel de Cali) was a drug cartel based in southern Colombia, around the city of Cali and the Valle del Cauca Department. Its founders were the brothers Gilberto Rodríguez Orejuela and Miguel Rodríguez Orejuela, and José Santacruz Londoño. They broke away from Pablo Escobar and his Medellín associates in the late 1980s, when Hélmer "Pacho" Herrera joined what became a four-man executive board that ran the cartel.

At the height of the Cali Cartel's reign from 1993-1995, they were cited as having control of over 80% of the world's cocaine market and were said to be directly responsible for the growth of the cocaine market in Europe, controlling 80% of the market there as well. By the mid-1990s, the Cali Cartel's international drug trafficking empire was a $7 billion a year criminal enterprise.

Russian state connections

According to Felipe Turover Chudínov, who was a senior intelligence officer with the foreign-intelligence directorate of the KGB, Russian prime minister Viktor Chernomyrdin secretly decreed in the early 1990s that Russia would become an international hub through which narcotics are trafficked including cocaine and heroin from South America and heroin from Central Asia and Southeast Asia. Yuri Skuratov supported Turover's statements and began numerous investigations into corruption with high ranking Russian government officials. Alexander Litvinenko provided a detailed narcotics trafficking diagram showing relationships between Russian government officials and Russian mafia and implicating Vladimir Putin and numerous others in obschak including narcotics trafficking money. Following Operation Troika which targeted the Tambov Gang, Spanish Prosecutor José Grinda concurred and added that to avoid prosecution numerous indited persons became Deputies in the Russian Duma, especially with Vladimir Zhirinovsky's Liberal Democratic Party and gained parliamentary immunity from prosecution.

Saint Petersburg Immobilien und Beteiligungs AG, SPAG, a real estate company registered in Germany in 1992 is reported to have been investigated by German police on suspicion of facilitating Saint Petersburg mobsters, Colombian drug lords, and transcontinental money laundering. A co-founder of the company, Rudolf Ritter, was arrested in Liechtenstein for laundering cocaine cash for the Cali cartel.

Former Ukrainian presidential bodyguard Nikolai Melnichenko bugged the following conversation between Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma and his security chief Leonid Derkach about SPAG:

Leonid Derkach: Leonid Danilovich. We've got some interesting material here from the Germans. One of them has been arrested.

Leonid Kuchma (reading aloud): Ritter, Rudolf Ritter.

Leonid Derkach: Yes, and about that affair, the drug smuggling. Here are the documents. They gave them all out. Here's Vova Putin, too.

Leonid Kuchma: There's something about Putin there?

Leonid Derkach: The Russians have already been buying everything up. Here are all the documents. We're the only ones that still have them now. I think that [[[FSB chief]]] Nikolai Patrushev is coming from the 15th to the 17th. This will give him something to work with. This is what we'll keep. They want to shove the whole affair under the carpet.

Later in the conversation Derkach states that "they've bought up all these documents throughout Europe and only the rest are in our hands".

Willem Matser

Full article: Willem Matser

In 2003, Willem Matser was a "key adviser" to NATO Secretary General George Robertson, and saw him on a daily basis. He was charged together with two (or three) others, including "an Italian crime boss", Pietro Fedino, who was "suspected of having conducted business over many years with the Cali cartel, an infamous crime gang based in Columbia." Matser and two co-accused were found guilty of fraud in 2004 and sentenced to time served plus 3 years probation.

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