How much cocaine would you carry in each of the flights for Pablo Escobar?"
"Up to about 500 kilos."
"How much profit did you make on every load?"
"I think it was running around a million-and-a-half to two million dollars."
Jimmy Ellard, a trim, mustachioed Texan, replies clearly and concisely to each of the questions posed by Pollak. It is October 19, 1994. Dressed in cowboy boots and creased designer jeans with a polyester shine, Ellard is a former Air Force pilot and Florida law officer who in five years earned $25 million flying cocaine into the United States. Now on a short leave of absence from his residence in a federal prison, he is the first of several key witnesses from among 35 who will ultimately be called to testify against Mosquera on charges of drug trafficking, murder, and terrorism, including the Avianca bombing nearly five years before. The trial-the second on these charges-began a few weeks before, in the Federal Courthouse at Cadman Plaza, in Brooklyn, within sight of the towers of the Brooklyn Bridge. Mosquera's first trial, held earlier in the year, had ended in a mistrial.
The chief prosecutor in both trials, Pollak folds her arms on the podium. She asks her questions in a flat voice, devoid of drama or emotion. She has copied each question into a thick loose-leaf notebook that lies open on the podium. In the margin beside each query is the expected response. She has a reputation for meticulous preparation, and for being tough. At a sentencing once, the judge seemed about to give in to the tearful pleading of a woman who, convicted of dealing heroin, begged for leniency for the sake of her small children. Pollak, who normally doesn't speak at a sentencing because presumably the judge has already decided the punishment, rose to her feet, seething. She reminded the judge that no one was there to cry for all the children affected by heroin. The woman got 24 years-"what she deserved," says Pollak.
Wearing a grayish silver suit, with a white choke-collar blouse, Pollak radiates the well-scrubbed aura of Ivory Soap. Pinned by a barrette, a buoyant wave of brown hair sweeps back along one side of her head. She wears her "three-witness shoes"-a pair of flat-heeled shoes. Two witnesses is the statutory limit for her standing in high heels. In stocking feet she is a petite 5-foot-1.
Seated at the government's table is assistant prosecutor Beth Wilkinson '84. When Pollak had requested her to help with the case, she didn't know that Wilkinson was also a Princeton graduate. Wilkinson, who has thick, dark hair, a husky voice, and an easy smile, combined modern dance and Army ROTC at Princeton before entering law school at the University of Virginia. Her eyes take in the courtroom, alert for any problem that might interfere with the orderly prosecution of the case. Often, Wilkinson doesn't wait for the defense counsel, or for that matter the judge, to finish speaking before she springs from her chair, stabbing the air with a finger to counter a point.
"What is Los Napoles?" Pollak asks Ellard, steering the witness toward the time when he first met the defendant.
"A large ranch outside of Medellín, Colombia, owned by Mr. Escobar," says Ellard, with the formality of someone speaking about a business client. He describes the 8,000-acre ranch that served as Escobar's headquarters: the white-columned gate topped by the first airplane Escobar used to smuggle cocaine, the orchards of lime and lemon trees, the pastures full of cattle, the guard towers, the zoo that included elephants and exotic birds, and the inner compound, surrounded by a cyclone fence 16 feet high, where Escobar and his extended family lived with their company of bodyguards. Life revolved around the swimming pool. That's where Escobar's personal bodyguards ate, and where they played cards, video games, and pool. One of the bodyguards who seemed closest to Escobar had looked like a kid in 1987, when Ellard first met him. His name was Dandeny Muñoz Mosquera.
While Ellard testifies, the defendant, seated at a table across the courtroom, stares ahead impassively. He wears headphones that connect him to a woman who stands near the judge's bench, translating the testimony into Spanish. Mosquera doesn't acknowledge that he knows English, or Ellard, or any of the other witnesses. When he walks to and from his assigned chair flanked by an entourage of marshals, he moves with a grace suggesting that he could bound from the courtroom in a few effortless strides. Of average height and build, he fairly swims in his double-breasted gray jacket, and his trousers bunch at the tops of his shoes. In his oversized clothes he looks boyish, like a kid who'd been caught picking pockets or selling marijuana. When arrested in Queens, he shook and sobbed uncontrollably. His first phone calls were to his mother, in Colombia.
One of the defense attorneys leans over and whispers to Mosquera. His dark eyes listen. He smiles shyly. The smile is attractive and engaging, but his eyes-as black and empty as the double bore of a shotgun-betray him. One witness has called them "the eyes of a fucking killer."
Ellard continues, describing a photograph Escobar and Mosquera had once shown him. It was a Polaroid snapshot of three informers. "There were three dead men. They'd all been skinned alive. Their testicles had been cut off, and their throats had been cut. I asked Escobar, 'What kind of person would do this to another human being?' Escobar looked at Mr. Mosquera. Mr. Mosquera looked back at him and smiled, and that was the end of it."
Mosquera's body is slack, but his fingers move constantly, drumming the table, or fiddling with a pen or his headphones. Two tautly suited marshals sit behind him, their attention riveted to him. When he stands up, they stand up. Eight other marshals are posted throughout the courtroom, twice the number of visitors on most days. A SWAT team waits in a ready room in the basement of the courthouse, and beyond the concrete barriers set up at the entrance, police cars and vans stand waiting. Twice Mosquera escaped from Colombian jails, once in a helicopter that swooped into the prison yard.
In building their case against Mosquera, Pollak and DEA agent Sam Trotman had started with coded phone numbers and names found on him at the time of his arrest. They dug for witnesses in U.S. prisons, researching names linked to the Medellín cartel. Their first break came when a former drug smuggler picked Mosquera out of a group photograph. He recalled him as a kid of 16 or 17 who, gun in hand, had often supervised the loading and unloading of drug shipments in Colombia. One by one, witnesses recounted sightings of the defendant in various roles as he had helped the cartel grow into a worldwide operation. Says Wilkinson: "We spoke to so many witnesses who told us the same things about Mosquera, people who couldn't have known or spoken to each other."
One federal prisoner told them about Jimmy Ellard, the pilot who would provide key testimony in their case. When Pollak interviewed the Texan, he told her he could link the defendant with the Avianca bombing. Up to that point, Pollak and the others in her department had known nothing about the Avianca bombing. She contacted FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., and obtained the dossier on the unsolved crime.
After hearing what Ellard had to say, Pollak included the bombing in the list of indictments against Mosquera. On August 13, 1992, she had Mosquera arrested a second time, on 13 counts of drug trafficking, racketeering, murder, and terrorism. Witnesses were prepared to testify that Mosquera had masterminded the bombing of the jetliner, and that he had also organized a rocket attack on the American Embassy in Bogotá and a bus bombing of the Colombian FBI headquarters which had killed more than 80 people. For strategic reasons, Pollak decided the prosecution should concentrate on the Avianca bombing.
Faced with these new developments, Mosquera at first tried to strike a deal. By then, Escobar had been arrested by Colombian officials but had escaped from custody. Mosquera offered to help find him, but quickly changed his mind. He didn't see how the U.S. could charge him for crimes committed in Colombia. In fact, if Pollak successfully prosecuted the case, it would be this country's first conviction under a 1986 statute that extended federal jurisdiction to the murders of U.S. citizens abroad. It would also be a major boost for law-enforcement officials frustrated for years by drug traffickers operating with impunity from Colombia.

"Now did there come a time when you had a conversation about blowing up an airplane?" asks Pollak.
Ellard describes how, in August 1989 at a meeting at Las Napoles, Escobar presented him with a drawing of a DC-6. By slicing open one of the fuel cells in a wing and filling it with cocaine, Escobar could transport a thousand kilos at a time. He needed increased capacity to capture the thriving New York City market. But, lying about the real purpose of his questions, he told Ellard that he also needed a fail-safe way to prevent his pilots from talking if intercepted by authorities. Escobar knew that U.S. surveillance planes usually trailed suspected aircraft to their landing places. He proposed to booby-trap his airplanes with bombs and wanted to know where to place them.
"We discussed the size of the airplane and whether it was pressurized or not-a very important question," says Ellard. "In a pressurized aircraft it only takes a small amount of explosive. It will make a small hole, but as the air inside the plane rushes out, it blows out the whole side of the airplane. A small amount of plastique would completely destroy an airplane if it was in altitude."
"Where did you tell him to put the bomb?" asks Pollak.
"Between the leading edge and straining edge next to the wing of the aircraft. The fuel systems are next to the fuselage along with the hydraulic system, the gear, the electrical and avionics systems. If a small explosion occurred in that particular area, it would either rupture the fuel tanks or it would fold the wings of the aircraft, one of the two."
Pollak and Wilkinson were elated with Ellard's performance in front of the jury. His information about placing the bomb matched what the FBI's experts had already described in earlier testimony. Ellard withstood the defense's rigorous attempt to portray him as a habitual liar who would do or say anything for his own gain-a man who had used more than a dozen aliases, who had committed bigamy, who had stopped at nothing en route to amassing and enjoying the riches of his trade: a $5 million ranch in Montana, a string of thoroughbred race horses worth millions, and bank accounts throughout the world.
Yet the evidence remained, at best, circumstantial. Ellard hadn't said that Mosquera, an expert on explosives, had been directly involved in the Avianca bombing. And Ellard had given the same testimony in the first trial, which clearly hadn't convinced everyone on the jury. The prosecution needed someone-another cartel member-who could corroborate Ellard and directly implicate Mosquera.

Before the start of the first trial, an informant had reported Mosquera's boasting that Pollak wouldn't live past Christmas, that a cousin of his would slit her throat. The Colombian put out word that he would pay for personal information about Pollak: her address, her car license-plate numbers, her daily habits.
"I was a little nervous," recalls Pollak. She speaks with the calm demeanor she has evidenced most of her life, according to her parents, who now live in Philadelphia. "I was also angry-I don't like to be threatened; but I wasn't really scared. I didn't think he could do anything to me. I was more concerned about my three sons."
The DEA wanted to move the Pollaks to Governor's Island, in New York Harbor, where it could protect them more easily, but they decided to remain in their Manhattan apartment. Marshals were assigned to live with them around the clock, in teams of three-two in a back bedroom of the apartment which Pollak's eldest son, William, 13, surrendered to them, and one in a van parked on the street.
"The kids thought it was exciting," says Pollak, with a smile. "Marshals driving them to and from school, carrying real guns. William bragged to his friends that he and Chelsea Clinton both had guards to take them to school. Our youngest, who was three at the time, kept saying 'marshal, marshal.' One time I overheard our kids saying to friends, 'If they were after Mom, they'd probably kill the family first as a warning.' "
Her husband, David, a Princeton classmate whom she began dating when both were at Cold Spring Harbor High School, on Long Island, is a corporate lawyer. In his practice, clients get angry, yell, curse, "but never threaten to kill me," he says. "Cheryl didn't take it that seriously. It was an aspect of her job. I was pretty upset-after all, nobody was worried about my safety. At first, I found myself looking over my shoulder all the time, thinking someone's following me, someone's out there and who is it? We had to plan constantly-if we wanted to go to the store, we had to call the van. Four of us went to a Broadway play on New Year's Eve: Cheryl, me, and two marshals. Same thing when we went to parties, to Cheryl's parents for Christmas, to our weekend home upstate. They lived with us for three months. We also discovered that having a van outside our apartment at night was no guarantee. I had worked very late one night. When I got to the entrance of our apartment, I saw the van, but no one seemed to notice me. The next morning it became clear that no one had seen me-someone had slipped up. If the Medellín cartel really wanted to get you, they could."
Once the first trial got underway, there were no further intimations of trouble. Pollak, who wears a beeper and is still accompanied home from work by an agent, says, "I think he [Mosquera] realized it didn't matter if he eliminated me, someone else would step right in. It wasn't like Colombia."

The majority of the jurors in the first trial had wanted to convict Mosquera by the end of their first day of deliberation. But not everyone agreed. While they argued, the days passed, and Pollak and Wilkinson fretted. The prosecutors couldn't believe any juror could doubt the defendant's guilt. Frustration among the jurors intensified into charges of bribery. A marshal was summoned to stop a fist fight between two jurors. After two weeks of infighting among the jurors, the judged declared a mistrial.
The mistrial shocked Pollak and Wilkinson. They were angry. Interviewing many of the jurors afterward, they discovered that all but two had wanted to convict. The two holdouts had, unknown to anyone, decided early in the trial that Mosquera was a scapegoat. The trial had been doomed almost from the beginning. "All we had to do was convict Mosquera on one count and he was gone for life," lamented Wilkinson, as she sat in Pollak's corner office on the fifth floor of the courthouse, near the end of a fall day during the second trial.
Framed in one window, the Brooklyn Bridge glowed against the late-afternoon sky. A U.S. eagle pulsed on Pollak's computer screen. The office was awash in soda cans, coffee mugs, and piles of papers. Stacked in cardboard boxes were poster-sized photos, exhibits for the prosecution. They showed a home-made rocket launcher and gym bags stuffed with cash. There were graphic shots of the Avianca bombing, and a rare, blurry photo of a dark-haired, heavy-set man: Pablo Escobar. It had been taken covertly and hastily through the window of an airplane by one of his pilots turned government informer. For this misdeed, Escobar's enforcers later murdered the pilot.
Pollak's wall-hangings include a law-school diploma from the University of Chicago and crayon drawings by her sons attesting to her other career as a mother. Preparing for the two trials, she and Wilkinson had worked long days and endless weekends when Pollak had often toiled in the city writing briefs and affidavits at her dining-room table while David and the children went off to their country home. She uses breaks between trials and witness interrogations to rush to her sons' schools for special events, and to worry about their homework. She told how their eldest son, William, had recently run afoul of a homework assignment. She and David had administered a speedy trial, she said, forming her hands in a stranglehold to indicate a swift sentencing. She then laughed at her story. Wilkinson said she didn't know how Pollak managed. Married four years, Wilkinson and her husband, Tim, a management consultant, plan to have a family, but she also expects to continue her career.
Continuing her assessment of the mistrial, Wilkinson said, "We were unlucky getting two bad jurors. What a waste of time and money." Added Pollak, "If people really want to subvert the jury process, they can. The two women deliberately did that. They sat in the corner doodling and talking with each other about the O.J. Simpson and Rodney King trials. They said they had reasonable doubt and didn't have to explain why. That's wrong-you can have your views, but if you don't share them, then the system doesn't work. There's no sanction; nothing we can do. Juries are getting to be more of a problem."
"The jury in the first trial seemed to like the defense attorneys better than us," Wilkinson mused. "It could have been the fact that we're government. Stylistically, we're not as exciting as the defense; we can't be exciting because we have to prove the case." She paused. "Older, retired people as jurors are more sympathetic to us."
"Older male jurors will sometimes wink at us," said Pollak, "and I heard after the first trial that one of the male jurors liked my legs-there are benefits." She covered her face and laughed.
Wilkinson, who wears her skirts more mini than does Pollak, laughed, too. "You're never sure what matters to individual jurors," she said. "As a woman, you don't want to look too tough. You have to be strong to present your case to win. But women also have to make the record with the judge in a nice, feminine way compared to men, who aren't judged as harshly for being tough or severe."

While serving time in a federal prison in florida for drug trafficking, Carlos Botero read about the mistrial and immediately contacted his attorney. Botero, who would turn out to be a walking encyclopedia on the Medellín cartel, had a degree in architecture from a university in Bogotá, where he'd also taught while carrying on a successful practice. After he designed a house for an attorney who worked for Escobar, other members of the cartel began calling him. It was an architect's dream-handsome commissions for large, ornate homes. Perhaps for the sheer thrill of it, Botero also began trafficking in drugs, supervising shipments and the movement of funds, and later setting up new routes within Latin America and the U.S. He eventually controlled the movement of all the cartel's drugs through Venezuela. One of his routes led to the Great Lakes area. He transported between nine and ten thousand kilos there in less than a year. In total, he earned about $10 million in drug money with the cartel.
A plump, bald man with a trim beard, Botero routinely carried a gun. He traveled widely to meet contacts like Raoul Castro, Fidel's brother, and General Raoul Cedras of Haiti, who were enlisted in the cartel's smuggling of drugs and weapons. The cartel needed weapons for its war with a rival drug operation and its campaign of terror against the Colombian government, which with U.S. prodding had stepped up efforts to stem the drug trade.
Speaking slowly and with an edge, Botero testifies that he first met Mosquera in 1988 at one of the schools for terror Escobar had started. Botero watched Israeli mercenaries teach Escobar's men how to assemble bombs-car bombs, package bombs, bombs big enough to blow up buildings. Botero met one "student" who, observers said, had "the mettle"-the aptitude-for explosives. He was so apt that he became an instructor. The man was Mosquera.
Botero describes how the cartel, as part of its campaign of terror, began systematically to attack the police in Medellín, the city that served as the cartel's headquarters. Escobar promised bounties: 2 million pesos for killing a uniformed officer, 5 million for a plain-clothes officer, and 500 million for a general of a federal police agency. He then assigned his lieutenants to recruit and oversee sicarios, or hitmen, in each neighborhood of Medellín. Mosquera became responsible for a part of town called Castilla.
Mosquera was already something of a cult figure in Medellín. His father had been a policeman; his mother was an evangelist minister thought to be implicated in the drug activities of her dozen offspring. Several of his brothers had also worked in the drug trade. They had been killed, but he had prospered. He had begun his career by stealing motorcycles. Then, about the time Beth Wilkinson was entering high school in Connecticut, Mosquero became a sicario, reputedly shooting his first victim at age 12. Rising in Escobar's esteem for his fearlessness and absolute dependability, he had acquired wealth in the form of ranches and homes. Witnesses always seemed to remember him among Escobar's personal bodyguards-the shy kid with the chilling eyes.
Overwhelmed by Medellín teenagers wanting to kill policemen, Mosquera set up a system: each would-be sicario had to inform him in advance of the identity of his intended target and then bring Mosquera a newspaper article to verify the killing. Botero drove in a car to watch Mosquera lead a bombing attack on a traffic kiosk. Two policemen were killed along with several civilians, including a woman whom Botero saw running "without legs."
Botero testifies about the cartel's aborted effort to kill President Bush in February 1990, when he visited Colombia to discuss a common strategy for dealing with narcotics traffickers. The cartel's plan called for a terrorist squad led by Mosquera to fire a rocket at Air Force One on its approach to the airport. They had gone to their point of ambush, but at the last minute the plane was rerouted to a different airport.
Botero also testifies that, in the presence of Mosquera, he once asked Escobar about the 1989 bombing of the Avianca jetliner: "Escobar said to me, 'This guy did it,' and placed his hand on Mosquera's shoulder. Mosquera then told me that one of Pablo's pilots"-Ellard, although Botero didn't know this at the time-"had explained something regarding the weak spots in an aircraft. Their intention was to kill two informants who were on board that flight."
As further confirmation of Mosquera's role in the Avianca bombing, Botero recalls a conversation he had with the defendant when soliciting his help in collecting some drug money. Mosquera told him, "If I was capable of blowing up an airplane to kill two sons-of-bitches informants, would I not be capable of collecting $400,000?"

The government's final witness is victoria uribe. the only woman to be called, she is serving time for laundering drug money that she carried on weekly flights between the U.S. and Colombia. Uribe testifies that her lover, a man named Carlos Mario, was a confidant of both Botero and Mosquera, and that he told her he had helped Mosquera assemble the bomb for the Avianca, which was placed in a briefcase carried on board by a suizo, or dupe. Uribe corroborates the testimonies of Botero, Ellard, and other witnesses for the prosecution.
On December 20, 1994, after just 15 hours of deliberation in the second trial, the jury moves unanimously to convict Mosquera on all 13 counts. When the foreman announces the verdict, the defendant stares straight ahead without expression. While his entourage of marshals escorts him from the courtroom, he begins to cry.
"Everyone was pleased with the result," Pollak said later. "It was significant for the DEA and the FBI. We felt great relief he wouldn't be hurting people anymore. And, of course, finally it was over, after more than three years." Members of the first jury were among those calling or writing notes to congratulate them.
Says Wilkinson, "I didn't feel like high-fiving Cheryl. We felt no joy. What Mosquera did represented a total breakdown in society; we're punishing him after the fact; nothing else worked, and so we had to apply the ultimate sanction. It was really a very sad occasion."

EPILOGUE
On May 6 of this year, Dandeny Muñoz Mosquera was sentenced to 10 consecutive life terms in prison. Dressed in prison blues and black sneakers, he listened into his headset as the proceedings were translated. Then, speaking through the translator, he addressed the court for the first time: "I would like to say that God and the government know that I'm innocent. Thank you very much and may God bless you." Mosquera will serve some number of years in isolation in a maximum-security prison. His attorneys plan to appeal.
In 1993, a year before Mosquera's second trial, Escobar was taken into custody by Colombian officials. He escaped and was later shot and killed by the military. After his death, the Medillín cartel split into factions, losing its primacy in the U.S. drug market to its archrival, the Cali cartel. With the recent arrest of top members of the Cali cartel, the Medillín factions are emerging as smaller but potent versions of the original.
Pollak was promoted to deputy chief of the Criminal Division for the Eastern District. Hearing the news, her oldest son remarked to David, "Dad, in your firm, you're just a partner; Mom's a chief." Shortly after, she was promoted again, to magistrate judge in the Eastern District.
Beth Wilkinson was transferred on special assignment to the Office of the Deputy Attorney General, in Washington, D.C., to work on the Oklahoma City bombing. She is now the principal deputy chief of the Terrorism and Violent Crime Section of the Department of Justice.
Last June 21, for their successful prosecution of Mosquera, Pollak, Wilkinson, and Sam Trotman received the Attorney General's Exceptional Service Award, the highest honor given by the Department of Justice.

Dan White '65 is the director of the Alumni Council and a frequent contributor to PAW.