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Babylon the Great
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11518 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
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10 / 1986 |
4,470 Words |
| Author
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Patrick M. Clawson
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It was about 7:30 in the morning on July 31, 1986, the beginning of another steamy Colombian day in Bogota. Colombian Supreme Court Justice Hernando Baquero Borda was en route to his office for another tough day of administering justice in a nation that teeters on the brink of anarchy. As his limousine stopped at a traffic light, a man with a submachine gun calmly walked up and began blasting away. The attack lasted only seconds, just long enough to snuff out the lives of the judge, a bodyguard, and an innocent 17-year-old motorcyclist who simply happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Three others were wounded, including Borda's wife. The executioner escaped.
Baquero Borda had angered the cocaine barons of Colombia by extraditing drug-trafficking suspects to the United States. A short time after the attack, Colombian President Belisario Betancur, his voice trembling, announced to the press that the justice had been cut down in cold blood "by organized crime's hired assassins." The president of the Colombian Supreme Court somberly told reporters that several other members of the court had recently received death threats.
The attack on the justice took place less than a mile from the spot where Justice Minister Rodrigo Lara was mowed down by a submachine gun two years earlier - another murder President Bentancur attributed to drug traffickers. That murder had inspired Bentancur to "declare war" on the coke kingpins and initiate the first extraditions of drug suspects to the United States.
On the afternoon of August 11, 1986, residents of a South Philadelphia neighborhood telephoned police to complain about a foul odor emanating from a parked Cadillac Seville. When investigators arrived, they popped open the flashy gold luxury car's trunk and discovered the decaying bodies of Ronald Martines, 27, and Larry Formosa, 28, clad in Bermuda shorts and bloody T-shirts. Each had been shot twice in the head at close range with a. 22-caliber gun - the preferred weapon of underworld executioners.
Police officials identified Martines and Formosa as low-level drug dealers who grossed about $10,000-a-week selling methamphetamine - "speed," in street lingo. The lawmen speculated that the two were gunned down in the prime of their youth because they had resisted paying a "street tax" to the Philadelphia Mafia family in order to be allowed to operate.
Ironically, Martines was the son-in-law of Frank D'Alfonso, a Philadelphia Mafia figure who had been gunned down one year earlier in a bloody factional mob war for control of Philadelphia's underworld.
A Colombian Supreme Court justice and two small-time Philadelphia dopers: separate executions in a struggle for control of income and influence. These two attacks, two weeks and thousands of miles apart, may appear on the surface to be completely unrelated, but both provide grim reminders of the menace posed by international organized-crime drug syndicates that have become so powerful that they now threaten our institutions and our way of life.
Drug-fueled industry
Organized crime has changed dramatically in the past decade. Fueled by the trade in "grass" (marijuana) and "snow"
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