Excerpts

November 2, 2001

On the second of November in the year two thousand and one, a small cell of a group of Dominican drug traffickers took a hard hit when five people were arrested at Las Américas airport in Santo Domingo. They were attempting to travel to the United States, and Dominican airport authorities discovered during an X-ray inspection that their carry-on luggage contained contraband of twelve bottles of liquid cocaine, which had been transferred into bottles of a well-known Dominican rum. The arrested individuals, who were relatives from the city of San Francisco de Macorís, the town of Darío.

The group was identified by Dominican authorities as being part of a criminal association dedicated to national and international illicit drug trafficking, and the arrests occurred in two parts. The first two individuals were detained at 1:30 P.M., as they tried to board American Airlines flight number 588 to New York, and the other three people two hours later, as they attempted to board flight 882, also headed to New York, but via Miami.

The group was led by Yolanda Rosario, an attractive thirty-two-year-old woman who claimed to be a professional photographer, despite not knowing where the viewfinder or shutter of a camera was. Throughout the legal process, she always argued that none of the confiscated bottles were ever found in her luggage, something that, if true, suggested she had used her relatives as mules.

After the corresponding expert analysis, Dominican authorities determined that the weight of the twelve bottles amounted to thirteen and a half kilograms of cocaine. Furthermore, during the interrogation of the arrested individuals, it came to light that Darío Oleaga was the person who would receive the cocaine in New York City, as established in the interrogations that are on record in….