Drug baron on trial in US

THE founder of a Colombian drug cartel that became the world’s chief supplier of cocaine in the 1990s is set to appear in court in Florida today after being extradited to the US.

Gilberto Rodriguez Orejuela, aged 65, landed before dawn on Saturday in a US government plane and was driven to a downtown Miami jail.

Rodriguez Orejuela is charged, along with his brother, Miguel, with running a drug network responsible for producing 80% of the US cocaine supply in the 1990s. The brothers have been jailed in Colombia for nearly a decade.

Eleven others also face charges in the conspiracy, but Rodriguez Orejuela is the first defendant to be extradited to the United States. He faces life in prison if convicted.

The cartel became renowned for its ingenious methods of hiding tons of cocaine in everything from hollow lumber and concrete fence posts to chlorine cylinders, frozen broccoli and okra.

Investigators believe a 15-ton seizure of cocaine-stuffed fence posts in Miami in 1991 followed more than 20 similar shipments that passed through undetected.

“The way the cocaine is concealed, it’s brilliant,” said Tom Cash, head of the Drug Enforcement Administration in Miami during the cartel’s heyday in the 1990s.

“If you go back and think of all the major traffickers from certainly the ‘90s and even into the 2000s, there’s nobody in their class. They’re in a class by themselves,” Cash said. “By magnitude, by money, by class of corruption.”

Prosecutors said Miguel Rodriguez Orejuela was the brains behind the concealment techniques, while Gilberto, nicknamed “The Chess Player,” ran the family’s financial empire, which included 400 discount drug stores in Colombia and a fence-post plant and lumber mill.

The brothers were arrested in Colombia in 1995 but continued to control the cartel from jail, prosecutors allege.