OUTWITTING CALI'S PROFESSOR MORIARTY

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Anxious to forestall further criticism that might jeopardize both his own reputation and his nation's ability to court foreign investment, Samper ordered his national police chief, a man with a ferocious antipathy toward corruption, to destroy the cartel. Serrano was determined to do so swiftly, given reports that the organization was making plans for a nationwide terrorist campaign. When the Medell’n cartel launched a similar offensive in the mid-1980s, blowing up schools and offices, public outcry eventually forced the government to mount a bloody nine-year offensive that broke the cartel.

Serrano turned up the heat. For the past four months, his 6,000-man Special Forces have been aggressively busting up cartel-owned businesses, seizing hundreds of records, ledgers and computer discs. Investigators have been able to trace the cartel's financial empire and freeze some bank accounts, cutting the cartel's cash flow in half. But it was the relentless surveillance and raids that on June 9 led to the arrest of Gilberto Rodriguez Orejuela, one of Cali's chiefs. Ten days later, Henry ("The Scorpion") Loaiza surrendered. He was the cartel's military leader and has been linked to, among other crimes, ordering the massacre of 107 peasants and the dismemberment of their bodies with chain saws. With Santacruz and Arizabaleta in custody, only two of the seven cartel bosses remain at large. "If you told me two months ago that they would arrest the two key figures in the Cali cartel [Rodriguez and Santacruz]," says the DEA's Constantine, "I would have said it was impossible."

Of the seven leaders, Santacruz is perhaps the least dispensable. "He's the biggest," says a DEA agent. "He started it all." Veteran agent Bill Mockler calls Santacruz "my Professor Moriarty." Santacruz got into cocaine during the 1970s when, as one of the first to recognize the drug's lucrative potential, he forged connections with coca suppliers in Peru and Bolivia. He soon helped to design elaborate smuggling methods -- transporting the product by concealing it inside everything from hollow mahogany boards to blocks of chocolate. By the late '70s, while Medellin's cocaine cowboys were swaggering around Miami, Santacruz was coolly staking out an empire on the streets of New York City.

He seemed to commute invisibly between the U.S. and Colombia, and attained a measure of legend in the New York underworld for his habit of occasionally putting in a surprise personal appearance at a drug deal, trading a few pleasantries with the buyer, then vanishing. In 1983, DEA agents discovered that Santacruz had been occupying a luxury apartment from which he could see the agency's Manhattan field office, then at West 57th Street. Only once was he ensnared by the law in the U.S.: in 1977 he was arrested on a weapons charge. He was let out on bail, which he jumped, and did not see the inside of a police station again until last week.

Given his wiliness, the ease with which Santacruz was arrested led some DEA agents to wonder if his capture had been orchestrated by the Samper government as part of a deal. "Everybody says how astute he is on surveillance," says a U.S. official who has followed Santacruz for years. "It just sounds strange that he would go into a restaurant like that in Bogota." Serrano unequivocally dismisses such speculations. "There has been absolutely no negotiation," he says.