From the Publisher

By Robert L. Miller

"Any reporter who covers crime knows that when the flash-bang goes off at the front door, the SWAT team is storming the back door," says correspondent Elaine Shannon. And so, when Pablo Escobar Gaviria, the ferocious leader of the Medellin drug cartel, surrendered to authorities in Colombia last week, Shannon knew that the real story lay elsewhere. "Escobar is a terrific sound- and-light show," she says. "But people of such towering stupidity always flame out." In her eyes, the group to watch is the Cali cartel. And, as deftly laid out by her in one of this week's cover stories, its members have the brains.

"I look at organized-crime groups the way I might analyze companies in which I am considering investing," says Shannon, who has kept tabs on the Cali group since 1984. "Medellin had more wholesale and retail outlets, but the organizations were sloppy and high-handed. Cali, on the other hand, is always finding new ways to handle high volume with efficiency and security. They're like Detroit and the Japanese automakers used to be."

Shannon is the author of Desperados: Latin Drug Lords, U.S. Lawmen, and the | War America Can't Win. The book was turned into last year's Emmy-winning mini- series Drug Wars: The Camarena Story. She began working on our cover piece last fall by interviewing U.S. drug-trafficking experts. In March she went to Colombia to describe the world of the cartel chiefs.

Meanwhile, TIME's Latin America bureau chief, John Moody, and Bogota reporter Tom Quinn had been angling for an interview with cartel patriarch Gilberto Rodriguez Orejuela. Finally, word came in April that the "Chess Player" was ready to talk. Moody and Quinn flew from Bogota to Cali and waited tensely for a phone call. "We began to worry: Had Rodriguez changed his mind or, worse, was this some elaborate trap?" John recalls. About 50 journalists have been killed in Colombia since 1980. But the call eventually came, and they were driven to meet Rodriguez. The Cali chief talked calmly. "There was no blood dripping from fangs, no guns in hidden holsters, no ugly threats," says Moody. "My abiding impression of Rodriguez is that he could be anyone's dad or uncle." And that's the true terror.