THE CAPTURE OF AMERICA'S MOST WANTED

IN THE TOWN OF VILLA JUAREZ, just south of Monterrey, 15 Mexican drug agents spent most of Jan. 14 crouched outside a walled ranch house. The agents had received a critical tip: Juan Garcia Abrego, one of Mexico's most powerful drug dealers, was inside. At 7 p.m., the team moved in. They smashed through the front gate in a minivan, taking Garcia Abrego and two bodyguards by surprise. As the druglord dashed out a back door and tried to launch his portly frame over a fence, agents grabbed him by the shirt. Twenty minutes later, the man who had shipped perhaps a third of the cocaine consumed in the U.S. during the past decade was in handcuffs and on his way to Mexico City.

At first, he remained calm, joking with his captors that "you're going to be hearing from me." But by the time Garcia Abrego reached the capital, President Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de Leon had already decided against keeping him in Mexico. Instead, the President ordered him hustled onto a jet and flown to the U.S., where he is wanted on 20 charges, including drug trafficking, money laundering and murder, and is featured on the FBI's 10-most-wanted list. (He is the first international drug dealer ever to make that dishonor roll.) When he realized where he was headed, Garcia Abrego lost his composure. At the Mexico City airport, agents had to drag him from the car and hoist him up the steps to the plane. On board, he looked at the eight agents escorting him to Houston and told them, "You are all dead men."

Garcia Abrego is a prize trophy in Mexico's campaign against drug dealing. For most of the past 10 years, he has been serving the Colombian cartels by smuggling their cocaine from Mexico into the U.S., distributing drugs in half a dozen American cities and earning as much as $2 billion a year in the process. Ruthless, violent and vain (last year he underwent an operation to trim back his bulbous nose), he spent millions each month bribing a network of corrupt officials in the government. Those payments made him untouchable during the administration of former President Carlos Salinas de Gortari. Now, however, they make him dangerous: the list of public officials in his pocket could cause a scandal of enormous proportions.

That may help explain why he was dispatched to the U.S. with such haste. The Mexicans say they expelled him because they feared they could not prevent him from running his business while awaiting trial. But there is also the issue of the judges, police officials and possibly even Cabinet members who may have been accepting his bribes. In Mexico the pressure to suppress Garcia Abrego's information about corruption could be overwhelming, so it is more likely to come out in a U.S. court. The expulsion may thus be a reflection of Zedillo's commitment to rooting out corruption. "There is a better chance that the truth will emerge in the U.S.," says a senior Mexican official. "We aren't afraid of that happening."

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