ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, November 9, 1996 TAG: 9611110016
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SERIES: A DEAL WITH A KILLER
SOURCE: JAN VERTEFEUILLE STAFF WRITER
Javier Cruz insists he is a legitimate businessman now, a reformed drug trafficker who was given a chance by the government to redeem himself and took it.
"From the bottom of my heart, I changed in five years," he said recently at Temptations, the restaurant he and his wife run on Virginia 419 in Roanoke County.
"I know what I do [as an informant] is good for people out on the street. I know how bad drugs are. They destroy lives. They destroyed my whole family, my marriage before."
Cruz, a 39-year-old native of Colombia, is an informant in an international investigation that began in 1989, when Roanoke drug agents started looking into cocaine trafficking by several used-car dealerships in Western Virginia. Cruz had opened Like New Inc. on Melrose Avenue Northwest under an assumed name in 1990 and soon became a target of the investigation.
When agents realized who Cruz was, the Drug Enforcement Administration knew it had hit the big time. After his arrest, Cruz agreed to become an informant and led agents into the secretive workings of the Cali cartel. The cartel, named for the city in Colombia where it's based, is believed to supply most of the world's cocaine.
Cruz was in charge of distribution for a major trafficker with ties to the cartel, dispatching drivers from Roanoke to pick up hundreds of kilograms of Colombian cocaine at a time that came across the Mexican border, according to an affidavit filed in Roanoke federal court by the DEA. The drivers delivered the powder throughout the U.S. and Canada.
Cruz has narcotics trafficking charges and a mandatory life sentence hanging over his head, charges that won't go to court until the DEA's case is over. The only way to get less than life if he's convicted is by cooperating - which, he said, he has done in abundance. He said he has repaid his debt to society by his work as an informant, work that included putting his life in jeopardy during trips to Colombia to meet with cartel leaders.
"It's already paid," he said. "There are more than 200 or 300 people in jail."
Cruz said he also is responsible for giving the DEA the locations of several cocaine-manufacturing laboratories in Colombia "with tons, tons of coke" that law enforcement then bombed. He said 1,000 to 2,000 kilograms of cocaine - one to two tons - have been seized as well.
He takes pride in his informing. "Most of my part was to be kind of a spy. You have to know what you're doing."
He said he had to think fast sometimes. There was the time he sat down with one of the leaders of the cartel, "the biggest guy in Colombia," who accused him of being an informant for the DEA, Cruz said. He bluffed his way out by accusing the other man of working for the FBI. The two laughed about it, and the matter was dropped.
Cruz, 39, said his actions during the past five years are proof that he has changed. When the DEA put him on a plane to Colombia to go undercover several times, he could have stayed there, he said, because the South American country doesn't have an extradition treaty with the United States.
"I believe in the United States government. I never betrayed you guys," he said. "I came back because I'm a man. Nobody [would] find me in the jungles of Colombia. I could have stayed down there with millions and millions of dollars, sending drugs back [to the U.S.] and say, 'Forget you, gringos.' I stay here because I'm a man."
Life as an informant
Cruz grew up in Colombia, in an environment where drug dealing was considered ordinary. "If you are born in Colombia, you talk about drug deals. It's common every day. It's difficult to say no. It's their lifestyle. I do this because I can make money."
Cruz's account of his informing could not be confirmed. The DEA will not comment on the case because it is pending.
The DEA seized nearly half a million dollars' worth of assets and cash when he was arrested in 1991. He emerged from jail in 1992 penniless, he said.
His first marriage, to a North Carolina native, ended and he remarried a Colombian three years ago. He said his new wife knew nothing of his work as an informant until they had been married a year.
She opened Temptations, a Colombian restaurant and nightclub, last year. Cruz serves as host on busy nights and mingles with patrons who sit in the sports bar or sway to the Macarena on the dance floor.
He insists that the restaurant was started with his wife's money and that it is his effort to go straight. She is from an old family in Colombia and is vehemently anti-drug because her father was killed by traffickers, he said. It's her money that bought his $57,000 Mercedes and a $60,000 Lexus sport-utility vehicle.
Cruz said he worries more about the effect publicity about the case will have on the business and on his wife than about his safety. Tears filled his eyes as he talked about the restaurant. He hopes his wife's reputation won't be hurt.
"What are we going to do?" he asked. The restaurant is "what we've got. I work hard here every day."
Family's reaction
Cruz said he collected $40 million in drug money from traffickers during his work as an informant, and that he handed it over for the DEA to launder for the cartel.
While details are sketchy about this investigation, other DEA operations around the country that have centered on money-laundering involved agents running dummy businesses, investment firms and banks willing to do business with questionable partners. In such cases, the DEA relies on well-connected informants like Cruz to introduce agents to traffickers in need of financial services. Agents then launder the money for drug traffickers, funneling it through seemingly legitimate businesses and depositing it in the cartel's bank accounts.
In this way, agents learn how an organization works and where it keeps its money. Although the DEA helps traffickers by laundering their money during such investigations, the agency justifies it by pointing to the drugs and assets that are seized at the end of an operation.
Cruz said he agreed to become an informant first and then worked on his boss, Leonardo Rivera-Ruiz, as the two served time together in the Salem-Roanoke County Jail. Rivera - whom Cruz described as the largest trafficker for the cartel in the United States - was awaiting trial in Miami. He was harder to persuade, Cruz said. After they both had agreed, they went to work for the DEA setting up deals.
In exchange, the DEA got a first-degree murder charge against Cruz in North Carolina reduced to involuntary manslaughter. Cruz killed Mark Garrett, a friend from work, during an argument in 1987.
Cruz said he was trying to protect Garrett's date, whom he claims Garrett was choking. Cruz pulled a gun, and there was a struggle. Garrett, 25, was shot in the back of the head and his body dumped on a back road in Mecklenburg County, N.C.
Garrett's family was angry with Cruz's plea agreement, but took solace in the belief that his undercover work would help bring down major drug dealers.
"We were going by what the federal government was telling us. It [gave us] a little bit of relief that something good was coming out of this," said Todd Garrett, Mark's youngest brother and a sergeant in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department. "Up to that point, everything had been bad. They were going to get a lot of drugs off the street. That was our hope, that maybe it would save someone else's life."
Now, though, they feel betrayed by a judicial system that they thought was there to help victims. And they don't accept the argument that Cruz's actions needed to be overlooked because of his role in the larger war on drugs.
"I've got a son risking his life as a police officer, every day out there on the streets, catching people like this," said Glenda Garrett, Mark Garrett's mother. "And what good does it do?"
Todd Garrett sees the case from the perspective of both law enforcement and the victim's family. He believes that, despite Cruz's efforts over the past five years, he should serve time.
"There's a lot of people out here doing serious crimes that are probably privy to a lot of good information that federal or local law enforcement could utilize," he said. "We [should] stick with our usual way of handling things, and that is to make the appropriate charges."
His mother has a more visceral reaction. When Cruz was on the run, she longed to get a call from police - not that he was caught, but that he was dead.
"I kept hoping one day somebody would kill him," she said. "I didn't want them to find him alive. I wanted him to die."
LENGTH: Long : 155 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: DON PETERSEN/Staff. 1. Javier Cruz. 2. Larry and Glendaby CNBGarrett visit the grave in Charlotte, N.C., of their son, killed by
Javier Cruz. color.