Mary Dear - Redux Page 15

  Death is a frequent visitor to a prison full of murderers and rapists, so when they found Mario Montalban, one of their hardest inmates, dead, they were not exactly surprised; after all there was no shortage of candidates who wanted him dead. The way he died, however, meant that whoever was responsible was capable of exceptional brutality and, what was worse, he seemed to have enjoyed it. Even in the hellhole of a prison they inhabited, that still had the power to shock. The Mayor promised a full investigation but he knew that it was something that nobody wanted. Not he, not the Warden, not even the politicians and local do-gooders. Fact was, Montalban was a lifer, a no good piece of shit that was best dead. Whoever had done it had done the town a favour and, as far as the Warden and his staff, it was one less son-of-a-bitch to worry about. Montalban was scraped off the floor and his body and severed head buried in the prison cemetery with the rest of the dregs of society that ended up in Bella Vista.

  Esteban had learned his lesson—prisons are hard places and violence is respected. He soon came to the attention of Rodrigo Ochoa, a violent criminal, gang leader and distant relative of the Ochoa brothers who’d founded the Medellin Cartel. Rodrigo, who was coming to the end of a seven-year stretch, took the young Esteban under his wing, suggesting that he got in touch when he came out of jail.

  When Esteban finally left prison five years later he was transformed. Gone was the young boy that had seen his parents brutally murdered and his sister raped. In his place stood a hard man not unlike those who had put paid to his childhood. His uncle Raimundo was there to collect him and take him back to the family home where a welcome home party had been arranged. Esteban was in no mood for parties but couldn’t say no; his family had stood by him through his time in prison, never once deserting him.

  As soon as he was able he located Ochoa and went to visit him. Rodrigo greeted him like a long lost son and told him that working like a dog for his uncle was a mug’s game and that, if he joined his gang, he could make his fortune; besides that, no one would ever trouble his family again. People knew him and anyone under his protection never came to harm. This thought appealed to Esteban who saw himself as the man of the house, so far as his sisters Flor and Irene were concerned. He told his uncle that he had found a job that paid better and that he needed to do something to make a life for himself, repay his kindness and look after his sisters. Raimundo was not pleased with his decision but there was little influence he could exercise on Esteban, who grew stronger by the day.

  It was not long before Esteban Blanco was running Ochoa’s gang ‘Los Lobos’, and stories of his violent nature became local folklore. The gang’s main activity was trading in drugs and pretty soon he had more money than his uncle. The years that followed saw him grow richer and crueller. His reputation came to the attention of a drugs dealer in Miami who approached him suggesting he became his supplier and offering him funding so that he could buy the coca leaves and process the product himself. A deal was struck and Blanco joined the major leagues.

  He started with cocaine sulphate known as pasta or basuco. This sulphate, halfway between the coca leaf and the finished cocaine hydrochloride crystal, was low-grade stuff that Blanco sold in the slums of South America while the pure cocaine hydrochloride ended up in Miami where it was used as a popular recreational drug amongst the young.

  When the DEA arrested Jorge Ochoa and interviewed him the world got a glimpse of the business that Esteban Blanco was in and the kind of money that was involved.

  It had all started gradually with the first exports to the United States being a maximum of 20 kilos. The DEA were more worried about Marijuana and spent much of their time in the north of the country but, as soon as Marijuana production started in America, their emphasis switched to cocaine. Little by little it became a huge multi-million dollar business, bigger by far than the trade in Marijuana had ever been. By now Blanco’s business was a multi-million-dollar industry; Esteban was part of the Medellin Cartel and partners with Pablo Escobar and Carlos Lehder.

  In the beginning Esteban and his partners used Norman’s Cay—an island in the Bahamas owned by Carlos Lehder—as a bridge to get the cocaine into the U.S., flying it in using some pilots just out of Vietnam who’d got involved with the drugs trade.

  Esteban and his partners, along with lots of other dealers, started buying drugs from Tranquilandia, which was a bit like a cooperative run by many different people. In 1984 that all came to an end when Mexican security agents arrived by air and took the place without firing a single shot.

  The cartel could have defended it by force but they decided to let them take it. After all, it was not the only facility. But after Tranquilandia things got really violent. You could say it was the start of the drug wars in Colombia, and by now Esteban was making a fortune. When things started heating up at Norman’s Cay, Esteban and his partners decided to switch to Cocos Island as a good alternative.

  In 2000 Esteban bought ‘La Cañada’, a 20,000-acre estate near Medellin with a sprawling colonial house, and he moved his sisters in with him. Flor and Irene did not know exactly what their brother did; he had American business partners, made a lot of money and gave them expensive gifts. He bought a large apartment in the exclusive Bal Harbour area of Miami and a Falcon 400 private jet to take them there whenever the mood took them. Hadn’t they been through enough heartache to last a lifetime? They were proud of their brother. What the young girls did not know was that Esteban’s position was due to a ruthless bunch of men under his command that did not hesitate to execute their bosses wishes at a moment’s notice, and that meant that people died, disappeared or were tortured irrespective of their age or gender—so long as it suited Esteban’s purpose.

  Chapter Eleven

  The DEA and Scotland Yard’s drug squad were conducting a massive joint operation that included the CIA, designed to dismantle the largest and most destructive drugs cartel of recent years. Esteban Blanco had been on their radar for a long time.

  Andrew Renfrew was Scotland Yard’s drugs’ Tsar who had played host to Edward Garrett of the DEA on many occasions; the level of cooperation between these two men was due more to their personal friendship than mere professional collaboration.

  Stories of Esteban Blanco’s cold-blooded nature had started some years ago when he killed a servant just because he had kept him waiting for his mount.

  Blanco had worked himself into a rage by the time the hapless Eliseo Pereira finally brought his mount around. Pereira was so nervous that he failed to hold the animal steady, and the horse reared, throwing Blanco to the ground; he shot Pereira at point blank range.

  Blanco’s men had disposed of the body, and he also banished Pereira’s wife and their young daughter from their home on his estate. There had been no police investigation and Blanco had not even been questioned.

  Reportedly, he was irrational, unpredictable and capable of great cruelty all of which made him extremely dangerous—but there was another side to his nature. When he was not flying into uncontrollable rages he gave huge parties, donated money to the local community, was invited to special events and fêted by the hangers on and sycophants that were always to be found by his side.

  While Blanco dealt in drugs, he was not a user. When he was in prison, he had seen what drugs did to people; he was not going to have any of that happen to him or the people he loved, which in his case were his two sisters.

  In common with many rich criminals, Blanco aspired to respectability. He had found this by his generous patronage of the arts. He was often to be seen at all the important auctions around the world and, when in London, was equally at home in Sotheby’s or Christie’s buying up Russian icons as they came on the market, to add to his already large collection.

  He had managed to distance himself from direct involvement with his illegal activities by means of dummy corporations and middlemen so that, when the authorities investigated, they were inevitably led to dead ends. The law enforcement agencies in London and the U.S. were desperate to l
ink him to any of the many drug busts they were involved with. What they needed was a lucky break and when just such a break presented itself they grabbed it with both hands.

  On May 21 2001, the Colombian drug traffickers suffered a major setback when a Peruvian military jet, operating with spotters contracted by the CIA, shot down one of their planes. The operation, backed by Washington, Lima and Bogotá, was part of the plan to get tough on the drug criminals who were exporting cocaine into the U.S..

  A major cocaine shipment had been halted, disrupting the drugs traffic into the U.S. for a while. It had taken the drug barons a lot of time and effort to get things back on track.

  Blanco was on an airstrip that had been cleared in the middle of the Colombian jungle, standing next to a very special plane. The PBY-5A Catalina, whose maiden flight took place in 1935, was one of those iconic aircraft from World War II. Blanco, through an intermediary, had paid good money to a Russian who had done a fine job of restoring it to its original condition. The Soviet version was built under license and powered by two Mikulin M-62 piston engines. It had hydraulically actuated, retractable landing gear for amphibious operation, and tail gun position with a bow ‘eyeball’ turret equipped with twin .30 machine guns. On this occasion the Catalina was being used for a less noble purpose than the defence of its country.

  Blanco and his partners ran a neat little operation ferrying cocaine by sea all the way to Cocos Island. From there the cocaine travelled in dummy aqualungs carried back to the mainland, in one of the many scuba diving vessels that operated in those waters, and then, by countless different methods, on to the U.S.. It was a perfect moonless night and the paraffin torches that lined the runway lit the bushes, casting long shadows along the temporary airstrip. They would be moving on soon—it was the only way to keep one jump ahead of the DEA. Esteban was making a rare appearance at the site of one of his illegal activities; this was a special occasion that required his personal attention.

  The pilot came over to him and they exchanged a few words before he boarded the plane and started the twin piston engines. Blanco looked on as the strange seaplane, its wings fixed atop its boat-shaped fuselage, started to pick up speed. It took off and banked to the left, the pontoons, hanging down from each wing ready to steady it when landing on water, were clearly visible. The Catalina climbed and was gone, disappearing into an inky black sky.

  Blanco’s men extinguished the lantern lights and removed them. Trucks moved in pulling large camouflaged tarpaulins so that traces of the runway would be more difficult to see by the DEA’s spotter planes though, sooner or later, they would be found. They always were which was why they had to keep on the move constantly. Once the Catalina was airborne with its deadly cargo on board, the pilot set a course for Cocos Island.

  For your average pilot, night flying with takeoffs and landings from makeshift runways was always dangerous, but Jim McFadden was no ordinary pilot. He sighted the Island at around 3am and brought the seaplane down, its landing lights turning the wake below the plane’s keel into a silvery spray that sparkled like a tray of diamonds. He landed far enough from the dive site known as ‘Lone Stone’ that the sound of the engines would not be heard. He knew the routine off by heart, after all, this was not the first time he’d visited the island except that, this time it was special. He settled down to wait.

  Soon it would all be over. As he waited, his mind drifted back to 1991. He had just landed his F-16 fighter, returning from a sortie with his squadron supporting coalition ground troops in Iraq. He was going to the debriefing with the rest of the pilots when his Commanding Officer called him over. Jim learned of his younger brother Ben’s death as a victim of a drugs overdose in Glasgow. Ben had taken time off from his studies in the U.S. and gone back to spend a year with his mother’s family so they could get to know each other better. He’d got involved with the wrong crowd and his first experience with drugs turned out to be his last. He had been found in a doorway by a passer-by who had called an ambulance and he‘d been taken to Glasgow Royal Infirmary where he had been pronounced dead on arrival. He was twenty.

  Jim was devastated by his brother’s death and that same year he left the Air Force. He took some time off and stayed with his parents in their New York apartment, helping them through this terrible time. His mother, a Scot who had married an American ex-Vietnam Navy veteran, had taken Ben’s death particularly badly, blaming herself for suggesting the visit in the first place.

  Six months went by before Jim decided to join a friend who worked for the Los Angeles Fire Department flying the specially adapted Catalina seaplane fighting forest fires, as a way to exorcise his demons. It didn’t work.

  In 1993, Jim approached the U.S. Department of Justice’s Drug Enforcement Administration in Washington. He offered his services to the DEA as an ex-Air Force pilot with experience in a variety of planes—and proven nerve under fire—but it was his experience with the Catalina that had interested the DEA. Jim had been added to their armoury in their fight against the drugs cartels. It was thus that a year later they had arranged for McFadden, through a series of trusted underground contacts, to become a DEA deep cover operative working for Esteban Blanco in Medellin.

  Now sitting in the cockpit of the Catalina bobbing gently in the sea around Cocos Island on a moonless night in 2007, he knew that all those years of dedicated work and holding back his anger while being forced to help his brother’s killers ply their evil trade was about to pay off.

  A burst of light from the shore brought him back to the present. Someone in a small Zodiac was signalling and McFadden answered with three short bursts of light from a hand-held halogen torch. In response, the Zodiac’s engine started and a few minutes later came alongside. A dark figure threw him a line that he secured to the Zodiac. The same shadowy figure then towed the Catalina to a safe harbour where it could be offloaded away from any prying eyes. Not that there would be any at that time of night and on that side of the Island.

  Natalia Dzhabrailova left Chechnya in 1991, aged fifteen, during the collapse of the Soviet Union, with her parents and her younger sister Zamira. They were granted asylum in the UK and settled in Weybridge, an affluent town in the county of Surrey. Her father, Dmitry, was a wealthy businessman who had prepared well in advance having, so to speak, read the writing on the wall. He had managed to take enough money out of the Soviet Union and deposited it in a numbered Swiss bank account, thus ensuring him and his family a comfortable life in their adopted country. Their house in St George’s Hill was large, secure and impressive.

  Natalia’s father had ensured that she was well provided for. She had used the funds at her disposal and her considerable beauty, charm and good manners to get a job in Sotheby’s in the Russian department. She had worked, trained and studied hard and left Sotheby’s at the age of 22 to set up on her own as an expert specializing in Russian icons. Natalia made a good living but, having inherited her father’s genes, she was ambitious and, wanting to amass great wealth, had conceived a little sideline.

  It had started when one of her compatriots had shown her a particularly fine, late 16th century icon of doubtful provenance. Her fellow countryman had explained that he needed to convert the icon into cash and had asked for Natalia’s help. She knew well what a Pandora’s box she’d be opening and that once opened, like the genie in the bottle it would be no more possible to close it than put the genie back. Her natural sense of adventure and risk-taking, coupled with her desire for wealth and power had won the day. She had arranged for the icon to be sold to a collector who was not particular about matters relating to origin. Natalia had been paid a handsome commission and, more importantly, her private clientele had grown, informed by an insider’s network that functioned by word of mouth and special recommendation. She was extremely happy because, not only did she get all the special transactions that could not be routed through the usual channels, she was also protected by her powerful clients anxious to look after a valuable asset—in a way that is more c
ommonly reserved for heads of state, rock stars and Hollywood royalty.

  Elliott first saw Natalia in May of 2006. He’d been accompanying a friend who’d had dealings at Sotheby’s and they were just going in through the auction house’s back entrance in George Street when an astonishingly beautiful woman was coming out. She walked past them without as much as a look in their direction, said goodbye to Tom the commissionaire, and got into the Swiss registered, tungsten silver, left-hand-drive, Aston Martin Vanquish that was parked on a yellow line by the back door. Elliott and his friend stared as she dropped into the plush red leather driver’s seat and, knees together, swung her long legs gracefully into the car and closed the door. The whole procedure had taken five seconds to accomplish but Elliott was still seeing it in slow motion. The Aston’s engine roared into life and she drove off in the direction of Hanover Square.

  Elliott followed the car until it was out of sight and, when he turned around, he noticed that the commissionaire was looking at him and chuckling.

  ‘She has that kind of effect on all the fellows round here, don’t worry, you’re not alone.’

  ‘Who on earth is that?’

  ‘That, sir, is Natalia Dzhabrailova, and she’s a frequent visitor to Sotheby’s,’ said Tom, making a valiant effort to pronounce her surname. Elliott nodded and walked into the famous auction house accompanied by his friend.

  Peter was an old mate and Elliott liked his dry sense of humour so he just smiled when he’d said, ‘I’ll not be long,’ adding, ‘try not to touch anything,’ before going through a door marked ‘private’. Elliott was left in the elegant waiting room surrounded by auction catalogues neatly arranged on an antique mahogany table.