The_Info_Web/10 - PEOPLE/(N-S)/Gilberto Rodriguez Orejuela.md

category	tags	summary	born	died	location	relations	created	updated
Organized Crime	Person OrganizedCrime CaliCartel Colombia Extradition	Co-leader, with his brother Miguel, of the Cali cartel, whose lawyers Michael Abbell and William Moran were convicted of laundering the organization's money.	1939-01-31	2022	Mariquita, Tolima, Colombia	type with role fn head_of Cali Drug Cartel with his brother Miguel 2 type with role fn relative_of Miguel Rodriguez Orejuela brother 2	2025-08-05	2026-09-22

Gilberto Rodríguez Orejuela and his brother Miguel Rodriguez Orejuela were the heads of the Cali Drug Cartel.¹

Arrests and Extradition

Rodríguez Orejuela was arrested in Spain in November 1984 and extradited from Spain to Colombia in 1986; while he was in a Spanish prison he met the lawyer William Moran, who was visiting another client, Jorge Luis Ochoa, and who represented the brothers in the United States from then on. He was indicted in the mid-1980s in the Eastern District of Louisiana, and the United States asked Colombia to extradite him; in 1990 the Colombian Supreme Court declared the extradition treaty with the United States unconstitutional. He was added to the Miami case United States v. Austin by a superseding indictment of September 28, 1994. As of 1997 he had never appeared before an American court.¹ According to Cheri Seymour, he and Jose Santacruz Londono had been targets of the DEA's Centac 21 task force, which obtained indictments in Los Angeles and New York in 1978 that went no further; the task force was disbanded, and some DEA agents suspected a Central Intelligence Agency connection. She also wrote that he led a delegation to a "cocaine summit conference" in Panama City in the early 1980s, that his name was later removed from DEA reports, and that he owned the Northside Bank of Miami.²

The Lawyers

Rodríguez Orejuela and his brother were clients of Michael Abbell, a former director of the Department of Justice's Office of International Affairs, and of Moran. A Customs affidavit of 1994 described their lawyers as defending arrested employees "in order to assure the organization that these individuals will [sic] not cooperate," passing on information about the government's investigations, paying the families of those arrested and obtaining affidavits "which falsely exculpate Miguel and Gilberto Rodríguez-Orejuela." Abbell was convicted in 1998 of conspiring to launder the organization's money.¹³ Michael Riconosciuto told Seymour that Robert Booth Nichols had paid Abbell to "crowbar" the extradition of Rodríguez Orejuela and Santacruz Londoño because they were "intelligence people."²

Politics

The Colombian president Ernesto Samper Pizano was accused of accepting 3.7 million dollars in campaign funds from Rodríguez Orejuela.²

Footnotes

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1. United States v. Abbell, 963 F. Supp. 1178 (S.D. Fla. 1997), notes 22 and 24. https://openjurist.org/963/fsupp/1178 ↩︎

2. Seymour, Cheri. The Last Circle: Danny Casolaro's Investigation into the Octopus and the PROMIS Software Scandal. TrineDay, 2010. Sole source for the Centac, Panama, Northside Bank and Samper passages and for Riconosciuto's claim. ↩︎

3. United States v. Abbell, 271 F.3d 1286 (11th Cir. 2001). https://openjurist.org/271/f3d/1286 ↩︎