USA TODAY International Edition
THE DESIGNERS AND THE DON
How two interior decorators took the fall for the Cali Cartel
The bullet- riddled corpse, lying face- up on a street in Medellin in March 1996, was that of a large man with a big, bovine head and scraggly beard.
As the Colombian president took to the airwaves to brag of the killing of his nation’s most wanted man, in New York, a skeptical group of American law enforcement agents scrambled to verify the news.
They had spent nearly two decades investigating the master criminal. When they matched fingerprints on file to those of the body in Colombia, there was no denying it: Don Chepe was dead.
Real name José Santacruz Londoño, he was one of the four chiefs of the Cali Cartel, the multibillion- dollar cocaine syndicate that fueled an American epidemic of addiction. The task force of New York- based cops had pursued him since the late 1970s, earning them the nickname “Chepe Chasers.”
They had missed anniversaries and kids’ birthdays for stakeouts and car chases, risked taking bullets during raids on stash houses, seized and decoded financial ledgers, and traced billions laundered around the globe. They had rolled up key cartel operatives and
The saga of the two stand- ins for one of the most prolific criminals in history has never before been told in full.
hidden them under government protection with the hope that they would testify in a blockbuster trial of their former boss.
And then, with Santacruz finally on the ropes, he had the nerve to die.
But in the months to follow, a wild legal proposition formed – a Hail Mary to put Santacruz on trial despite being deceased. It was perhaps the boldest, most ostentatious and fabulous back door in the history of federal drug prosecutions.
They would indict the cocaine kingpin’s interior designers.
Out of nowhere, a gun to the head
On an early Wednesday in San Francisco, a year after Santacruz’s death, Alexander Blarek and Frank Pellecchia were awakened by a ringing phone, indicating somebody was at their front gate.
Frank went to check on it while Alexander lazed in 1,200- count Egyptian cotton sheets under windows overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge.
When Frank didn’t return, Alexander grew impatient. He left their custom- designed Art Deco- style bed and padded downstairs, wearing only a boutiquepurchased robe. He passed a vintage Biedermeier Secretary desk with the value of a new Mercedes, a Picasso etching, floors heaped with Persian rugs, chairs upholstered in mohair, and raw linen couches filled with so much down “they felt like sitting on a cloud,” as Alexander later wistfully recalled.
He reached the kitchen and felt an object being placed against his head as a voice yelled at him to freeze and put his hands behind his back. Alexander realized that the object was a gun.
Survival, or betrayal
With federal agents gripping him by his arms at the home’s front gate, Frank had a view of the law enforcement spectacle that had descended on the normally staid, exclusive neighborhood of Sea Cliff.
“Villa Vecchia,” as he and Alexander had dubbed their Spanish- Mediterranean- style mansion, was a few doors down from comedian Robin Williams’s house. Now it was under siege by a halfdozen heavily armed drug agents backed up by roughly 30 more law enforcement officials whose vests showed off an alphabet soup of government force: DEA, IRS, SFPD.
Federal officials dragged Frank back to a den inside and seated him at a table. A Brooklyn native, Frank observed that these guys had thicker New York accents than his own. He later learned that they had flown across the country to wrest control of a case that federal prosecutors in California had rejected as a sure loser in court.
One of his interrogators was an obsessive New York City detective turned DEA analyst who Frank would learn was the central reason his and Alexander’s retirement plans had just been shattered. The analyst thrust at him a 29- page indictment and laid out Frank’s two options.
Frank could save himself by confessing everything and testifying against Alexander, his lover and business partner of more than 15 years. Or, the analyst explained in a cheery Staten Island brogue, Frank could die in prison.
‘ Scarface’ meets ‘ The Birdcage’
Before his death, José Santacruz’s payroll included some of the most violent and sophisticated criminals on the planet, from killers who used battery acid and plastic bags to torture and dispatch enemies to Ivy League- educated attorneys who laundered billions through global shell holdings and shadow accounts.
Alexander and Frank were two of his closest and longest- tenured employees, but their skills were of a completely different – and one might think legal – variety. Their work for Santacruz, even in the acknowledgment of the American government, amounted to the application of tasteful high design.
Federal prosecutors would allege, however, that by agreeing to decorate roughly two dozen of Santacruz’s properties, the designers had transformed his American cocaine profits into objects of value in Colombia.
It was money laundering, they argued, and an essential cog in the operations of a cartel that the head of the DEA had called “the most well- organized and wellfinanced crime organization in history.”
Now, through the use of federal organized crime statutes, blame and punishment for the cartel’s reign was aimed at two men who knew nothing about drug trafficking but lots about which Italian quarries produced the finest granite to top a kitchen counter.
For Mark W. Lerner, then a prosecutor in New York’s Eastern District, building the case against the designers was important enough to override his federal colleagues’ determination that the case was unwinnable, and to recruit hardened cartel operatives – including a confessed contract killer – to testify against two defendants whose previous criminal history was a speeding ticket.
In a recent interview, Lerner called the case a “warning shot” to the business community that even if their services were legitimate, they could be prosecuted for having drug traffickers as clients.
“Nobody was saying that the decorators pointed knives and guns and pulled triggers and stuff,” said Lerner, now a partner at a New York law firm. “What we were saying was they were the bagmen for this organization.”
Jason Solotaroff, then one of the designers’ attorneys, regards the Clintonera case as not only the “high- water mark” of the frenzy of the American drug war but also indicative of an era when a gay couple could more easily be made test subjects in a prosecution he calls unprecedented in its aggressiveness.
“There was something a little ‘ less than,’ a little unequal, in how they were treated,” Solotaroff said. “The prosecution itself was just such an overreach. Even worse than the idea of prosecuting them was how badly they were overcharged.”
The law enforcement officials involved in their prosecution deny that sexual orientation played any role.
But the officials openly acknowledge that prosecuting the designers served as a consolation prize after the disappointment of Santacruz’s death.
Robert Michaelis, a since- retired DEA agent who was a member of the Chepe Chasers, said in a recent interview that by prosecuting the slain kingpin’s interior designers, “we, in a way, got to put ( Santacruz) on trial.”
For Alexander and Frank, who were 56 and 49 respectively at the time of their arrest, their role as stand- ins for one of the most prolific criminals in history capped a saga, never before told in full, of employment for Santacruz that had spiraled into a cocaine- coated melodrama featuring $ 2,400 bejeweled forks and the dawning realization that their boss was a homicidal sociopath.
It was serious business for authorities probing the limits of relatively new money laundering statutes.
United States v. Blarek lives on in the courts, cited as a precedent in such highprofile cases as the recent conviction of former New York state Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver on corruption and money laundering charges. Though legitimate businesspeople before and since have been prosecuted for financial dealings with criminals the scale of the criminal empire for which Alexander and Frank were implicated is unmatched.
The cops and prosecutors considered the case a test of their power to squelch the financial reach of major drug traffickers. But to Alexander and Frank, it was a test of their love.
Act One: The dream client
On a Sunday afternoon in 1979, Alexander was bouncing along a country road outside the city of Cali in Colombia when he spotted a perfect specimen of contemporary architecture. He ordered the chauffeur of his friend’s Chrysler to pull over so he could investigate the huge, under- construction home.
Alexander said it was pure chance that brought him to Los Caños Gordos, the upscale neighborhood named for plump sugar canes once harvested there.
Alexander studied architectural interior design at the University of Marquette and University of Denver but got bored with theoretical projects, left school and in 1973 became an associate at a Miami design firm.
Alexander said that even in the late 1970s, “being gay never occurred” to him. He was in a dalliance with a Germanborn decorator named Eva, and he accompanied her to visit relatives in Colombia. It was after a day spent at a nearby country club that he saw the house.
He recounted to the guard outside his credentials as an American interior designer. The house’s owners were there, and the guard announced the couple who had agreed to receive him: Señor y Signora José Santacruz.
The pair, in their mid- 30s, had an air of casual class to them. Amparo was stylishly adorned in a silk dress and wore a diamond tennis bracelet and Rolex. José spoke softly and slowly, with a limp handshake that seemed paradoxically to convey confidence.
The Santacruzes gave him a tour of the home- in- progress, which sat on 14 acres. They complained that their interior designer had absconded with their retainer. Seeing his opportunity, Alexander offered his own services.
Alexander said he had no reason to disbelieve Santacruz’s claim that his trade was construction, among other legal industries. “I didn’t even know there was a Cali Cartel,” Alexander said.
Alexander spent the rest of his trip negotiating terms with the Santacruzes. He agreed to finish the home in just over a year, in time for their oldest daughter’s quinceañera, or 15th birthday bash.
The budget was half a million dollars, plus Alexander’s $ 135,000 cut. He flew home with a $ 25,000 retainer check signed by José Santacruz.
Number that stumped detectives
At an Italian linens boutique in Manhattan, Alexander and Amparo Santacruz, Don Chepe’s wife, dropped $ 48,000 on bed sheets monogrammed with an “S” for the family name.
New York City detective Kenneth Robinson, who made less than that in a year, was in his Midtown cubicle a crosstown bus ride away, trying to figure out who was flooding the outer boroughs with seemingly endless amounts of cocaine.
Robinson was square- chinned, with neatly parted salt- and- pepper hair and a devotion to his work that verged on unhealthy. He was a member of a newly formed multiagency cocaine task force, earning him ridicule from colleagues who derided the narcotic as a “kiddie drug” compared to heroin.
Alexander’s claim that he didn’t know about the Cali Cartel was undoubtedly true, because at that point, even Robinson – one of the few American law enforcement agents on its trail – didn’t have a name for it either.
All he knew was that while his colleagues were distracted by the firebombing, machine- gunning tantrums of Pablo Escobar, head of the Medellin Cartel, traffickers from a Colombian city to the south appeared to have quietly made Jackson Heights, Queens, their central hub for the American distribution of tons of cocaine.
“Nobody really realized that there was a more sophisticated group working in Cali,” Robinson said in a recent interview.
He learned that in their efforts to thwart law enforcement, the Cali traffickers maintained fleets of identical vehicles with similar plate numbers, listened to radios tuned to law enforcement frequencies and were early adopters of beepers and cellphones.
Robinson’s task force ultimately included Michaelis, a fresh- out- of- theacademy DEA agent, and Jerry McArdle, a state trooper whose prior drug experience was limited to uncovering stashes hidden in the cars of people he pulled over.
Robinson was the group silverback, calling the shots even after his pursuit of the Cali traffickers outlasted his NYPD career. The Monday after he retired from the force, he was back at work as a civilian DEA analyst doing virtually the same job.
Robinson struggled at first to uncover the identity of the figure behind the Cali group’s New York operations. He followed unpaid parking tickets to areas where his targets may have lived, scaled a fence at night to read a parked car’s vehicle identification number – “which was against the law, by the way,” he said – and paid a wedding photographer for prints from a cartel ceremony in Queens.
He ultimately obtained a mug shot of a man who seemed to be involved in every layer of the organization: Victor Crespo.
Robinson’s group later learned that Crespo was only one of many aliases for a chameleonic Cali businessman named José Santacruz Londoño.
As he closed in on the upper ranks of the Cali group, Robinson set up a pen register – a device that tracks numbers dialed on a target’s phone – on one of Santacruz’s top lieutenants, Freddie Aguilera.
Robinson studied the results from the pen register on Aguilera’s phone, using index cards to connect the numbers to known Cali bad guys, men with nicknames like “The Jaw,” “Big Head” and “Khadafy.”
But one Miami- area phone number left him stumped.
Why was a top international drug smuggler placing calls to an interior designer?