Colombian drug kingpin gets 40-year jail term

NEW YORK - A former Colombian drug kingpin has been sentenced to 40 years in prison for heading a cartel that smuggled massive amounts of cocaine into the United States and hid hundreds of millions of dollars in profits, prosecutors said.

Alberto Orlandez Gamboa, 49, who had once boasted of being among Colombia's top 10 drug lords, had previously pleaded guilty to charges of conspiracy, drug smuggling and money laundering. US prosecutors said he was sentenced on Wednesday in Manhattan federal court.

The indictment charged that he led an organisation based in the coastal city of Barranquilla that smuggled cocaine to Europe, Central America and the United States, where it went to New York, Miami and Philadelphia.

The crimes to which Orlandez Gamboa pleaded guilty began in 1996. However authorities said he began leading the cartel of large-scale traffickers in 1990 or earlier and kept running the group while in prison during 1998.

Authorities said Orlandez Gamboa's organisation sometimes shipped cocaine in crates of mustard and cough medicine to mask its odor. It was also hidden in shipments of engine parts, cement, and sometimes inside ceramic tiles.

The profits were hidden in various ways. In one case, more than $11 million was found hidden in hollowed-out truck transmissions in a shipping container destined for Venezuela from Port Elizabeth, New Jersey.

US authorities said Orlandez Gamboa also went by the alias of Caracol and that his name was sometimes spelled Orlande Gamboa.

Orlandez Gamboa was extradited to the United States in 2000 from Colombia. He was among the first Colombian nationals extradited from that country to the United States after the Colombian government eliminated the ban on extradition in 1997.

- REUTERS