How Colombia’s most notorious drug cartel went underground in the UK
Last week’s church shooting has shone a light on still-active members of the forgotten Cali syndicate. Gordon Rayner and Martin Evans report
The drive-by shooting of six mourners at a London memorial service a week ago represented a low point in the gun violence that is on the rise in most parts of the UK.
The sense of alarm in the capital was only increased further when it emerged that the two women being commemorated were related to a member of the Cali drug cartel in Colombia.
The Metropolitan Police moved swiftly to dampen speculation that South American drug lords might be involved in turf wars in Britain, and while it is certainly true that Albanians, not Colombians, dominate the growing cocaine trade that blights this country, traces of the notorious Cali cartel remain, in the form of highly valued “fixers”.
Their services are sought by drug dealers, people traffickers and arms dealers alike. Some have been operating under the radar for more than 20 years, investigators believe, trading in knowledge, rather than drugs or violence, and staying well behind the front line of the drugs war where they would risk exposure to the police, or rivals, or both.
According to one internationally renowned expert on organised crime, the shooting in Euston should act as an “amber alert” to Scotland Yard that a wave of gun violence might be about to break over the capital.
It was in 2009 that the Cali cartel’s UK money launderer, Carlos Arturo Sanchez-coronado, was exposed, after he was extradited from Colombia to the UK, and pleaded guilty to charges involving faked documents and laundered money.
He died last year and months later his widow, Fresia Calderon, died from a blood clot after flying into Heathrow from Colombia, where she had been visiting her late husband’s family. Their daughter Sara Sanchez died three weeks later from leukaemia.
Last Saturday, at a memorial service for the two women at St Aloysius Roman Catholic Church near Euston Station, a gunman fired into the crowd of mourners from a black Toyota which was passing at 1.30pm. Four women and two girls were hit by the shotgun blast, the worst affected was a sevenyear-old girl who remains in hospital with “serious” injuries.
Scotland Yard has said it is still trying to establish who the intended target of the attack was. A 22-year-old man was arrested and later bailed by police, whose investigations continue.
Whatever the outcome of the Yard’s inquiries, the shooting has brought the dormant name of the Cali cartel back to the surface.
Named after the Colombian city in which it was based, the Cali cartel was said to control more than 90 per cent of the entire global market in cocaine in the mid-1990s, before the US Drug Enforcement Administration and Colombian police managed to round up its leaders in a series of raids over a two-month period.
The cartel controlled such a huge share of the UK drugs supply that when it was dismantled the price of cocaine in the UK rose by 50 per cent.
Some of its remaining members joined the Norte del Valle cartel in nearby Buenaventura, but others, left stranded in Europe, reinvented themselves as freelance fixers for other organised crime gangs, according to Martin Verrier, a research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute.
“Several individuals who were involved [in the Cali cartel] in the UK are still operating in the UK but are self-employed,” he says. “The Albanian gangs now control the drug trade in Britain – everything from the supply chain across the Atlantic to the county lines runners – but in order to import cocaine you need a local fixer, someone who knows all the right people.
“These fixers are crucial to the gangs, because without them it would be very difficult to get access quickly to all the criminal services you need, like fake documents, money laundering, front companies.
“They include former members of the Cali cartel, who are highly respected because the cartel was more sophisticated than its rivals. They were known as the KGB of the Colombian cartels.”
Like the IRA during the Troubles, the Cali cartel operated in independent cells, each of which had no knowledge of the next. Its leaders were known as the “Gentlemen of Cali” because they were more middle class and better educated than rivals.
One senior UK law enforcement source confirmed that while South Americans do not have a significant footprint in UK organised crime groups, they retain an interest.
“The majority of crime groups in Britain are homegrown, but there are groups from other countries, significantly Albania, Romania, Russia and Vietnam,” the source says.
“They are mainly involved in the supply and distribution of drugs and that is where the link to South and Central America comes in. With much of the world’s cocaine still coming in from that region, there are bound to be individuals in the UK working as liaison contacts with the other organised crime groups. They may also need to have a presence here to ensure money laundering operations run smoothly.
“Even the most ruthless organised crimes groups try to maintain a low profile. Violence and chaos is bad for business. It attracts attention from the authorities and disrupts commerce. So while the cartels may be operating here in the UK it is rare that they will come to public attention.”
Intriguingly, Verrier says, shootings at religious ceremonies are a hallmark of South American gangs.
“Religion is incredibly important in the South American cartel culture,” he says. “It’s not unusual for attacks to happen at funerals and religious events. The number of people who turn out at them is a show of force by one side, and so they make prime targets for the other side.”
Verrier says the Euston shootings should be a warning to police that more violence may be in the offing.
“The UK is one of the most developed cocaine markets in the world,” he says. “It has some of the purest and cheapest cocaine in Europe, which is a sign of the huge volume of cocaine flowing into Britain right now.
“When you have that sort of situation, violence sooner or later appears. We have seen it in other countries like the Netherlands and Belgium, since northern Europe overtook southern Europe as the main point of entry, and if the gangs think they can increase their market share by using violence, they will do it.”
In 2010, Spain was the main entry point for cocaine coming to Europe from South America. A decade later, Belgian ports were handling double the tonnage of cocaine that Spain was handling. Cocaine seizures in Belgium stood at 70.2 tonnes in 2020, compared with 36.9 tonnes in Spain, while 48.9 tonnes were seized in the Netherlands.
The ports of Antwerp and Rotterdam are now favoured by the gangs, because they get the drugs closer to the main markets, most notably Britain. By 2021, cocaine seizures in Antwerp alone stood at 90 tonnes, with a street value of
£11 billion.
They arrive on container ships, on cruise liners, and even strapped to the hulls of merchant ships, which have to be checked by divers for drug packages below the water line. No matter how much is seized, plenty gets through, and losses can quickly be made up simply by increasing the price to the ever-eager consumers.
The Albanians have managed to wrest control of the drug routes from cartels and from the Mafia not simply by being the most ruthlessly violent, but largely by being more professional than their often chaotic rivals.
By applying business methods to the drug trade, undercutting rivals and making their operations more efficient, they can offer a better price to manufacturers in Colombia and Ecuador. Once the cocaine leaves the factories, Albanians take charge of everything from loading the shipments to getting them into the hands of customers. They also prefer to avoid violence, as it brings unwelcome attention – threats of violence often suffice.
Gun crime in London has halved over the past decade, but in most other parts of England and Wales it is on the rise, largely because of “county lines” drug-trafficking gangs.
According to Dame Carol Black’s 2020 review of the illegal drugs trade, commissioned by the Home Office and Department of Health and Social Care, the cocaine market in England and Wales is worth around £2billion per year, with almost one million active users. Drug-related shootings remain comparatively rare: the latest Home Office figures show 35 gun homicides in England and Wales in 2020/21, compared with 61 in 2011. Colombia, which has a smaller population than the UK, has more than 13,000 gun deaths each year.
The true toll of the drugs trade, of course, can only be measured when the number of deaths among users is taken into account.
Cocaine deaths have risen every year for the past decade. In 2011, there were 112 deaths involving cocaine in England and Wales. By 2021, that figure had risen to 840. Regardless of whether their drugs were handled by Colombians or Albanians, the pain felt by their families will be the same.