San Juan, Puerto Rico: Federal authorities arrested a fugitive alleged drug kingpin on Saturday after a decade-long chase through the Caribbean marked by his narrow escapes and public taunting that he paid off police to remain free.
Known as the Pablo Escobar of the Caribbean, Jose Figueroa Agosto was caught wearing a wig while driving through a working-class Dominican neighbourhood of San Juan. When he realised he was being followed, he tried to run on foot as he had last September in the Dominican Republic after a pursuing vice squad shot out a tyre on his Jeep.
But this time US Marshals, FBI, drug enforcement agents and Puerto Rican police caught up.
"We asked him his name, and he simply answered that we knew who he was," said Antonio Torres, who heads the US Marshal Service's fugitive task force in Puerto Rico.
"It is a tremendous arrest, definitely," US attorney Rosa Emilia Rodriguez told a news conference on Saturday, where she was surrounded by other cheerful federal authorities. Escobar, the Colombian drug lord of the 1980s, was an escaped convict who died in a shootout with police in 1993.
Agosto, who was 45 in March, is suspected of shipping Colombian drugs to the US mainland through Puerto Rico, where he escaped from prison in 1999 after presenting a forged release order. He had served only four years of a 209-year sentence for killing a man suspected of stealing a cocaine shipment.
He moved to the Dominican Republic a month later and was briefly detained during a 2001 drug investigation, but was let go because he was using an alias.
Though no one can say exactly how much cocaine he moved, the scale of Agosto's empire emerged following the botched September raid, which netted several cars, including an armoured Mercedes Benz with $4.6 million (Dh16.8 million) in cash inside, and a laptop computer full of evidence.
With leads on several new aliases, police intensified the search. Six of his properties were confiscated — among them a million-dollar apartment in the Dominican resort area of Puerto Plata and a ranch outside Santo Domingo with a small zoo.
Got away
A man claiming to be Agosto called a popular Dominican radio show in December to say he got away after paying police $1 million. He called again in February and pledged $800,000 to anyone who would kill one of two top Dominican police officers.
US and Dominican officials said the man probably was Agosto, who is also wanted in the Dominican Republic on kidnapping, money-laundering, drug-trafficking and murder charges. Summoned by President Leonel Fernandez, Dominican officials met behind closed doors for more than two hours after Figeroa's capture. They said they would announce what actions they will take against him.
