Bernal himself is on the sidelines for now, locked up in a maximum-security Colombian prison and fighting efforts to extradite him to the United States. A federal grand jury in Florida has indicted him on charges of money laundering and conspiracy to smuggle cocaine. He also declined to answer a list of written questions. In a single night, some 30 of Colombia's most wanted individuals were rounded up, including Fabio Ochoa Vasquez, a leading member of Medellin's reputed first family of cocaine. Even so, Bernal was the one who got top billing in the DEA's announcement of the mass arrests.
Law enforcers call Bernal anything but a common criminal.
They declared war on their own country, planting car bombs outside law-enforcement headquarters and hiring assassins to rub out troublesome judges, cabinet ministers and presidential candidates. In Bernal's earlier years, investigators say, one of his mentors was the notorious Pablo Escobar. Before his death in a 1993 police shootout, the Medellin godfather once ordered a Colombian airliner blown out of the sky, killing 110 passengers, because he thought two police informants were aboard. The drug bosses ultimately brought destruction on themselves. By the mid-1990s many of them were dead or behind bars, and the cartels they had built were in ruins.