OUTWITTING CALI'S PROFESSOR MORIARTY

Despite having bank accounts that have ranged as far afield as Hong Kong, in the past few years Josa Santacruz Londono has rarely ventured outside Cali, Colombia's cocaine capital. In recent weeks, though, word leaked that the reputed mastermind behind the world's No. 1 drug cartel had fled to Bogota, flushed from cover by an elite government strike force that had been chasing him for months. Santacruz is sometimes called "El Gordo" -- the Fat One -- and knowing he likes to eat, General Rosso Josa Serrano Cadena, chief of the Colombian National Police, ordered his men to stake out several of the good restaurants in the northern part of the city. Last Tuesday night Santacruz and three business associates dropped by a steakhouse called Carbon de Palo.

Santacruz was drinking lemonade when two police officers spotted him. When Serrano was informed, he realized the restaurant was only nine blocks from his home, and immediately ordered the bodyguards watching over his own family to arrest Santacruz. They arrived in three or four minutes and took the druglord into custody. "He was a bit fatter than in the pictures and videos we had of him," says Serrano. "He was in a very shocked state."

Understandably so. The police crackdown has now put most of the Cali cartel's alleged leaders behind bars. Some have been arrested, while others have felt the pressure and surrendered. After Santacruz's capture, Phanor Arizabaleta Arzayuz turned himself in. Known as a particularly violent cartel leader, he is suspected of, but not yet charged with, involvement in the murder of a police intelligence officer. Arizabaleta says he is innocent, and gave himself up only to clear his reputation.

Only a year ago the Cali kingpins were freely gadding about, unhampered by both the Colombian authorities and the rival Medellin cartel, which died along with its chief Pablo Escobar in 1993. The Cali cartel now handles 80% of the world's cocaine traffic, with a $7 billion gross last year in the U.S. alone. "This is probably the biggest organized-crime syndicate there has ever been," says Thomas Constantine, head of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. "For their impact, profit and control, they're bigger than the Mafia in the U.S. ever was." Santacruz lived as a cocaine baron should, throwing lavish birthday parties for his children, buying ranches and cavorting with his mistresses.

Then last March, the U.S. State Department accused the government of Colombian President Ernesto Samper Pizano of lacking the political will to go after Cali's bosses. Though the State Department stopped short of suggesting that the U.S. cut off aid to Colombia and veto loans from institutions such as the World Bank, the rebuke apparently rocked Samper, whose presidential campaign was alleged to have been partly financed by the cartel.