WAR ON DRUGS HAUNTS LAWYER FIGHTING EXTRADITION TO COLOMBIA

BOGOTA, Colombia -- Valiant antidrug crusader or fugitive cartel moneyman?

That's the question in the strange case of Victor Tafur, a young Colombian jailed in Philadelphia last month on suspicion he helped finance the largest cocaine shipment ever seized in this country.

For the Colombian prosecutors who had Mr.  Tafur arrested and are demanding his extradition back home, the scion of a well-heeled family is a prize catch in a probe of a shadowy and violent mafia that fed Europe with cocaine.

But a growing chorus of critics insist Mr.  Tafur is the victim of a cruel miscarriage of justice.  They are demanding freedom for a man they consider a brave and honest professional -- and certainly no friend of Colombia's drug gangs.

A Colombian caught in a web of crime and drugs.  It happens frequently and without raising eyebrows here in the world's leading cocaine-producing nation.

But Victor Tafur -- former antidrug official in President Andres Pastrana's government, miraculous plane crash survivor, son of a senator believed murdered by drug lords -- is no ordinary suspect.

His capture has shocked some in Colombian high society and politics while posing a potential embarrassment for a government seeking billions of dollars in international aid to prosecute the drug war.

Mr.  Tafur's case also presents U.S.  judicial authorities with a delicate dilemma: whether to return the 36-year-old lawyer to a violent land with a fragile justice system on what many consider insufficient evidence.

A federal magistrate in Philadelphia has granted Mr.  Tafur bail and he was released from jail last Monday pending a May 4 extradition hearing.  Judge Charles B.  Smith voiced doubts about the strength of the evidence, saying Mr.  Tafur shouldn't be "whisked out of the country without due process."

Authorities haven't publicly detailed their evidence against Mr.  Tafur, but the chief prosecutor's office says that its case is "solid" and that it will supply Judge Smith with additional evidence.

Prosecutors, however, are peeved by Judge Smith's skepticism and suggest that could hurt U.S.  efforts to get Colombian drug suspects extradited to the U.S.  to stand trial.

Mr.  Tafur's legal fight is just the latest chapter in a surreal life story that echoes the "magical realism" of Colombian Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Charmed Childhood

Born Sept.  14, 1963, in the western city of Cali, Victor Tafur grew up far removed from the criminal underworld that would emerge in the late 1980s as the Cali cocaine cartel and engulf the city in drugs and violence.

The first child of parents from prominent families, Mr.  Tafur attended a prestigious British school and became a champion horseback rider.  Weekends were often spent at Club Colombia, the sunny city's most elegant country club.

After high school, Mr.  Tafur earned a law degree from Javeriana University in Bogota, an elite Jesuit-run institution that has given Colombia presidents, government ministers and many leading intellectuals.

He did a year of graduate work at the University of London while embarking on a successful, though low-profile career.

Mr.  Tafur's first major job was in the Bogota treasurer's office during Mr.  Pastrana's 1988-1990 term as mayor.  Over the years he built a solid legal resume, working for an international paper company, Cali's public utilities company and the Bogota and Cali chambers of commerce.

Terror Campaign Hits Home

But Mr.  Tafur's seemingly smooth ride through life took a first tragic detour on March 6, 1992, the day motorcycle gunmen assassinated his father, Donald Tafur, as the retired senator drove up to the family's Cali home.

Victor heard the automatic weapons fire and ran downstairs to find his father slumped in the car with 16 bullet wounds.  He cradled the bleeding man in the ambulance en route to the hospital.

"Donald died in Victor's arms," recalled Victor's mother, Solita Dominguez Tafur-Rosade, speaking by phone from New Hope, Pa., where she lives with her second husband.

Like most crimes in Colombia, Donald Tafur's assassination was never solved.  But people believe he was killed by cocaine lords who were waging a terror campaign to fight extradition to the U.S.

Donald Tafur had been a leading proponent of the 1979 extradition treaty under which several Colombians have been sent to the U.S.  for trial.  Victor Tafur could be the first Colombian extradited in the other direction under that same treaty.

The Man of the Family

Following the assassination, Victor "became the man of the family," his mother recalled.  Six years later, he took a job that put him in his father's drug-fighting footsteps.

In October 1998, two months after Mr.  Pastrana was inaugurated as president, Mr.  Tafur became deputy director of the presidential program working to provide poor peasants with alternatives to growing the illegal crops used to make cocaine and heroin.

Mr.  Pastrana was promising a kinder, gentler approach to the drug war -- helping farmers change their ways instead of just sending in police fumigation planes to kill their livelihood with herbicides.

"It was probably the happiest time of his life, going and teaching the Indians and teaching the peasants," Mr.  Tafur's mother said.  "He was absolutely fascinated and thrilled."

But on a rainy morning in March 1999, five months into the job, a small plane carrying Mr.  Tafur and six colleagues to inspect an opium-for-rasberries project crashed in mountains southwest of Bogota.

Fifty-six hours later, the shattered wreckage of the Piper was spotted in a densely forested ravine.

Rescuers found six tangled and decomposing bodies jammed into the plane's nose, said Adriana Ospina, a Red Cross paramedic flown in by helicopter to the crash site.

"We called on the radio to say we had found all the victims.  They told us there was still one missing," Ms.  Ospina recalled.

Searchers fanned into the woods and about a hundred yards away found a man barely alive -- dehydrated, in shock, with multiple fractures and a badly swollen stomach.  It was Mr.  Tafur.  He had crawled for help or to escape a possible explosion.

"We couldn't believe it," said Ms.  Ospina.

Mr.  Tafur regained consciousness on the helicopter and flashed an OK sign to his rescuers, but they doubted he'd pull through.  "I didn't think he had much of a chance," Ms.  Ospina said.

'A Credit to His Country'

Mr.  Tafur's amazing survival made him a huge news story, putting the family in the national spotlight for the first time since his father's slaying.

The Tafur name again rang a bell for Colombians when this March 4, almost a year to the day after the crash, police pulled over a car on Interstate 95 near Philadelphia and DEA agents took Victor off to jail.

"When they told me the news, I said: 'I don't believe it.  There's some error here, something that doesn't rhyme,'" said Mario Posada, a lawyer who is a former Cali Bullfight Association president and a friend of Mr.  Tafur's father.

Undisputed even by Colombian prosecutors, Victor was a portrait of perseverance in the months following the accident.

After several surgeries and a short convalescence in Bogota, a wheelchair-bound Mr.  Tafur flew to the U.S.  last June to live with his mother and take advantage of better U.S.  medical care.

Still weak and having to drain fluids from his abdomen, Mr.  Tafur took on consulting jobs for the Colombian anti-drug agency and enrolled in an environmental law master's program at Pace University in White Plains, N.Y.

There Mr.  Tafur showed academic drive and brilliance and became an instant leader on campus, said Robert J.  Goldstein, director of the school's law program.

"Victor, through his actions here at Pace, has demonstrated that he is the antithesis of someone guilty of the charges against him," Mr.  Goldstein wrote in a letter to Mr.  Tafur's attorney in Bogota.  "He is a great credit to his family, our law school and his country."

Largest Colombian Cocaine Seizure Ever

But while Mr.  Tafur was endearing himself to his professors at Pace, his name was popping up in Colombia in the financial records of a mafia front company that shipped cocaine to Spain via Jamaica and Cuba.

On Dec.  3, 1998 -- while Mr.  Tafur was still employed in the government antidrug agency -- police seized 7.2 tons of cocaine in shipping containers on the docks of the Caribbean port of Cartagena.

It was the largest seizure ever on Colombian soil, and led to a globe-trotting investigation involving U.S., Colombian, Spanish and Cuban authorities into the company, E.I.  Caribe Ltd.

At least five people connected to E.I.  Caribe are under arrest, including the daughter of a former congressman.  But prosecutors believe they've only skimmed the surface of a ruthless mafia that could include well-known businessmen and politicians.

The problem for investigators is that "everybody who in any way was involved with this company is getting killed," said Leo Arreguin, the U.S.  Drug Enforcement Administration attache in Colombia.

Prosecutors say four alleged E.I.  Caribe associates have been killed since December in an apparent mafia drive to silence potential witnesses.

An E.I.  Caribe partner, Ricardo Estrada, turned up dead on a riverbank near Cali.  The assassins left a bar of soap in one of his hands -- a mafia message to say they were cleaning up loose ends.

Then they killed Mr.  Estrada's wife and son.

Easy Money

Prosecutors believe E.I.  Caribe was a vast organization employing people expert in all aspects of the drug trade: purchasing cocaine, concealing the drug, arranging safe passage and financing the operations through tough-to-trace transactions.

When investigators poring over an E.I.  Caribe bank account in Bogota found 13 checks written by Victor Tafur worth nearly $350,000 in total, they decided the young lawyer from Cali had some explaining to do.

Colombians who invest in drug shipments don't always fit the Hollywood stereotype of gold chain flashing drug traffickers.  The lure for someone willing to take the risk is an easy tripling or quadrupling of their money.

An arrest warrant was issued Sept.  27, but Mr.  Tafur was in the United States and was not notified until several months later, his Colombian lawyers contend.  A second warrant calling Mr.  Tafur a "fugitive" came on Dec.  31, while Mr.  Tafur was visiting Colombia during his end-of-year school recess -- and making no apparent attempt to hide.

Mr.  Tafur attended bullfights in Cali, visited his sister and a girlfriend in Bogota and went to the U.S.  Embassy to renew his visa, friends and family said.

Mr.  Posada, the family friend from Cali, ushered in the millennium with Mr.  Tafur at a ball at the swank Club Colombia.

"We gave each other a New Year's hug," he recalled.

A Simple Explanation

Mr.  Tafur claims the case against him is a big misunderstanding.

He has a simple explanation for the checks, which he says he wrote in September 1998 to Rafael McCausland, manager of a Bogota import-export company, and to a McCausland associate named Oscar Valencia.

Congress had recently awarded Mr.  Tafur's family a huge pension claim for his father's legislative tenure and Victor says he went to Mr.  McCausland to convert the payout -- worth about $350,000 -- from Colombian pesos to U.S.  dollars.

Documents show the dollars were apparently deposited into a Tafur family account in Zurich, Switzerland, a few weeks after Victor wrote the checks -- proving, his lawyers say, that he didn't finance any drug shipment.

"It was a large sum and I did not want to go to a regular exchange house in Colombia where you exchange cash for cash," Mr.  Tafur told the Associated Press.

"It was a good-faith issue that he would not endorse the checks," Mr.  Tafur said of Mr.  McCausland, who he said he met during his law-school years but did not know well.

What Mr.  Tafur didn't bank on, he says, was Mr.  McCausland signing the checks over to third parties, allowing them to eventually end up in the coffers of E.I.  Caribe.  In Colombia, checks endorsed to third parties are like currency and are commonly passed from person to person just like cash.

Colombian drug traffickers commonly launder their profits through the black market, whereby exchange houses sell dollars at a discount in return for Colombian pesos or checks.  Checks used to buy dollars can easily wind up in the hands of traffickers.

Mr.  Tafur says, though, that his case is different because he did not use an exchange house.

The case could thus come down to Mr.  Tafur's word against that of Mr.  McCausland, who the federal prosecutor's office says has denied in sworn testimony that he received checks or had any dealings with Mr.  Tafur.

Phone calls to Mr.  McCausland's office in Bogota were not returned.  His secretary said he was traveling outside the country.  Mr.  Valencia, whose whereabouts were unclear, is named in prior federal investigations into kidnapping and drug trafficking.

Mr.  Tafur wouldn't be the first honest Colombian to wade into the legal but slippery black market for foreign currency.

Both "bandits and legal people" use the black market, which includes shady, backdoor operations and respectable money-exchange houses in shopping malls, said economist Robert Steiner, an expert on Colombia's drug economy.

They do so because "drug dollars" are cheaper -- and also to avoid reporting requirements, taxes and commissions charged at banks, Mr.  Steiner said.

Image-Conscious Prosecutors

If Victor Tafur is a drug trafficker, he has convinced some credible people otherwise.

In addition to Mr.  Goldstein and other Pace professors championing his case, 10 prominent Cali residents signed a letter last month vouching for Mr.  Tafur's character.

"In the circles I move in ...  people are very upset and incredulous," said Mr.  Posada, the family friend and one of those who signed the letter.  "This is seen here as a mistake and an injustice."

Franciso Lloreda, director of Cali's leading newspaper, El Pais -- where Mr.  Tafur worked as a legal adviser in 1997 -- said the young man's "profile simply doesn't match that of a drug trafficker on the run."

Mr.  Lloreda worries that image-conscious prosecutors might be willing to send Mr.  Tafur to jail rather than concede they were wrong.

"In Colombia, the authorities don't like to admit these kinds of mistakes and prefer to let time take care of it," he said.  "Three years later a story appears on page 10 of a newspaper saying Victor Tafur has been freed, that it was an error."

'Prisoner in the War on Drugs'

Prosecutors don't seem fazed by the criticism.

The day after Mr.  Tafur's release on bail, chief prosecutor Alfonso Gomez told the AP the evidence in the case was "solid" -- though he did not elaborate.

Mr.  Gomez's office simultaneously issued a statement saying "the fact that the basic validity of the evidence provided by Colombian authorities is being questioned in the U.S.  could affect the principle of reciprocity that defines and characterizes extradition."

Washington is currently seeking the extradition of 30 Colombians arrested in October on U.S.  cocaine-trafficking warrants.  They were detained in Colombia's biggest drug sweep since the Cali cartel was dismantled in 1995.

Mr.  Tafur, meanwhile, says he feels like a "POW-D -- prisoner in the war on drugs."

He told the AP by phone from his mother's house that he's confident he will ultimately be found innocent and that he wants to return to Colombia and resume his alternative development work.

Mr.  Tafur is also worried about his studies.  "It will be a miracle if I finish my degree," he said.

His mother is concerned, meanwhile, about new bleeding from her son's abdominal wounds, which Mr.  Tafur thinks became infected while he was in jail.

She also wants it known her son could never betray his father's legacy.

"I just pray to God that the people who are in charge of this case realize that Victor is an innocent person and that what he was doing was working for Colombia and never against Colombia.  Never, ever," she said.