Mexican Fugitive Kingpin Caro Quintero Stashed Billions In Secret Overseas Accounts

When Mexican drug lord Rafael Caro Quintero ordered the kidnapping, torture and assassination of DEA agent Enrique Camarena in 1985, he was the leader of a billion dollar criminal empire, according to a former DEA agent. “Caro Quintero had billions of dollars stashed in secret bank accounts in Luxembourg and in Switzerland,” former DEA agent Hector Berrellez told me in a telephone interview. “The one in Luxembourg had $4 billion and the other one had even more.” Berrellez claimed that he saw with his own eyes those accounts in electronic statements in 1995 while investigating the Mexican trafficker at the DEA headquarters. Berrellez retired in 1996. The U.S. government, he explained, was unable to seize the accounts because of the banking secrecy laws in those countries. He said the accounts were listed under the alien name that Caro Quintero, a major drug trafficker and fugitive from U.S. justice, used to do business with Mexican banks. “To my knowledge they were never confiscated,” Berrellez said. Caro Quintero continued his activities from behind the prison walls where at one point he lived like a king. In 1989, The Washington Post reported that Caro Quintero and a fellow kingpin had taken over two entire cellblocks designed for 250 inmates and remodeled them, installing kitchens, living and dining rooms, offices, marble bathrooms and, for Caro Quintero, a carpeted master bedroom with satin sheets and closets full of silk shirts, cowboy boots and cowboy hats. The kingpins had guns, cell phones, fax machines and other communications gear. According to U.S. law enforcement Caro Quintero never lost control of his drug business...more