Back in the days when I was a court reporter, I covered the trial of a Colombian drug importer who had made a fortune bringing South American cocaine to this country and selling it to more-than-willing clients.
Gregory Bean is executive editor of Greater Media Newspapers. You can reach him at [email protected]. The feds busted him, not after a long undercover investigation, but after an angry ex-employee tipped them off that he had a kilo of cocaine in his apartment.
He’d been doing business for years, and if it hadn’t been for that tip, he might still be doing it. In other words, they caught him by fluke.
He’d managed to stay below their radar for so long because he worked at blending in to American society and making himself inconspicuous. He lived in a modest apartment, drove a 5-year-old sedan with dings and rust spots, never carried anything bigger than a $20 bill, dressed like he bought everything at the work warehouse and had a wife who could politely be called plain and impolitely called semi-homely and seriously overweight. She didn’t buy her dresses from Dior or Saks Fifth Avenue, because those pricey places don’t sell the muumuus she typically wore, along with the rubber flipflops she preferred to designer heels.
During his trial, when the prosecutor asked the drug dealer what he did for a living back in Colombia, he said he’d been a “chicken farmer.” In America, he said, he’d been living off the proceeds of the sale of his chicken farm, and he stuck to that story like Gorilla Glue on your fingertips.
In the end, the government convicted this dealer for the cocaine they’d found in his apartment, but they couldn’tmake their trafficking or importing charges stick. For all I know, he’s out of prison by now and back to chicken farming, but I also heard a rumor that he went back to Colombia and was gunned down by a rival.
Either way, I still remember something the prosecutor said when I interviewed him after the trial. “I like it a lot better when they make it easy for us,” he said. “That ‘chicken farmer’ didn’t make it easy.”
You’ve got to wonder what that prosecutor would have to say about Vicente and Chantal Esteves, who were arrested and charged recently for running a cocaine operation in Manalapan that allegedly brought in a million bucks a week.
Mr. and Mrs. Esteves, along with seven other people so far, were arrested after an investigation that began in 2007. Dubbed Operation Unbounded for some inexplicable reason, it was a joint federal and county investigation that netted, in addition to the arrests, 150 pounds of cocaine and $2 million in cash.
Spokesmen for the federal Drug Enforcement Administration and the office of Monmouth County Prosecutor Luis Valentin were understandably proud of the bust, but you still have to ask: What took them so long?
The drug operation had apparently been going on for a long time and Valentin said that at its peak, it was distributing more than 2,000 pounds of cocaine a month – and generating lots and lots of money.
And with that money, the Esteves spouses were making the concept of conspicuous consumption into an art form.
I remember driving by the house they were building at the corner of TaylorsMills and Tennent roads as it was going up, and wondering who the heck could afford to build such a huge and overdone monstrosity. I even drove visitors to New Jersey past when they came to visit, as an illustration thatmoney does not automatically guarantee taste or common sense.
“That place is a single-family residence,” I’d tell them. “I kid you not.”
None of them really believed me, and most thought it was a hotel.
The place looked like a big fortress, and inside, it was ostentatious, with its own weight room, dance floor and home theater with stadium seating. Authorities confiscated about $1million in jewelry, including 100 Rolex watches. What, in God’s name, do you do with 100 Rolex watches? Even if you wear different ones on each wrist, each ankle and one around your neck every day, it would still take a month to get through the collection. And Mrs. Esteves evidently had so many Prada shoes in her closet she had to tape photos of the footwear on the boxes so she would know what was inside.
These were not people living inconspicuously. These were people living large and in your face. Some of the neighbors thought Estevesmust be a plumbing contractor, and knowing what I’ve paid plumbers to fix leaky toilets, I can see how they made that assumption. I figured the place was probably owned by a Monmouth County politician. At that time, there was somuch bribe money being handed out to county politicians in paper bags, I figured one of them could afford it.
But even if the neighbors and tourists couldn’t figure it out, somebody in the drug enforcement business should have noticed these peacocks before they did. They were practically crying out for attention, after all. If you’re not desperate for attention, you don’t live in the biggest house in town on one of the busiest corners. You don’t walk around wearing a new Rolex or pair of Prada heels every day. And you sure don’t have parties that keep the neighbors awake at night and call attention to you.
I think they wanted to get caught, were actually begging for it. In the words of that prosecutor I mentioned earlier, they made it easy. And if they’re convicted on all the criminal counts they’ve accumulated, they’ll have 20 years or so in the slam, with nothing to do but think about where they went wrong. If they have doubts, all they have to do is look at the photographs of their house that went with the story of their bust for a hint. If you want to hide out, you don’t hide in the Taj Mahal.
Somewhere, Vincent “Chin” Gigante, the mafia don who drove the feds up the proverbial wall and used to wander New York City in his bathrobe pretending to be a crazy man, is laughing himself silly. • • • Note to the nice readers who e-mailed to ask why my column was not in last week’s paper, and the one who wrote to say he was glad it wasn’t: I was on vacation, camping with my son at a living history encampment in New Hampshire. I’d explain what one of those is, and why grown men and women dress in 19th-century clothes and sleep in tipis to educate visitors and school kids, but it would take more space than I have here. If you’re interested, you can read a story about our wonderful adventure on the Web at:
http://www.fosters.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article? AID=200883068159. The half-naked guy competing in the highland games in the lead photo ismy youngest son (he won, and made his mama proud). I can’t wait to do it again.