DEAD RIGHT

In the crowded corner of Queens known as Little Colombia, where Manuel de Dios Unanue lived and died, the American dream is intertwined with an American nightmare. Beneath the elevated tracks of the Number 7 subway line, the sidewalks along Roosevelt Avenue pulsate with the booming commerce of yet another wave of striving immigrants newly arrived from an impoverished homeland. But much of the capital behind the scores of flourishing restaurants, nightclubs, groceries, fashion boutiques, beauty salons, travel agencies, money-transmitters, and banks comes not from the Small Business Administration but from what is possibly the biggest business in Queens: cocaine.

It was in the shadowy Queens netherworld of the Colombian cocaine cartels, and among the myriad entrepreneurs who launder their billions, that Manuel de Dios made his name as a crusading reporter and then editor-in-chief of El Diario/La Prensa, New York's oldest and largest Spanish-language daily. When de Dios was shot to death by a hooded gunman as he sat at the bar of a Queens restaurant on March 11, 1992, there seemed little doubt that the Cuban-born journalist's fearless anti-drug reporting -- "even if it costs me my life," he used to say -- finally did him in. He appeared to have been silenced by the sicarios, hired killers whose prolific attacks on journalist were all too familiar in Colombia itself but unprecedented in New York City. BRAVERY KILLED HIM, a Daily News headline declared.

Yet in the year since his death, and with the crime still unsolved, press interest has waned and the meaning of the journalist's murder has become blurred. After an initial flurry of flattering portraits, the forty-nine-year-old editor began to emerge as an erratic and reckless maverick who had made many enemies, perhaps deservedly so. He had left El Diario in 1989 amid acrimony with his colleagues, some of whom denounced him as a "lunatic" and an "asshole." His journalism was maligned as conspiratorial, poorly sourced, ethically suspect -- the product of a fanatical obsession. At the time of his death, it emerged, de Dios was personally bankrupt, reduced to publishing a marginal low-budget crime magazine out of his home in Queens.

Lost amid the depressing details of a diminished career was a fact of no small importance to journalism: though he may often have been reckless and wrong, much of what he wrote was true -- as mainstream as journalists have been able to verify through court documents and law enforcement sources. De Dios was just about the only journalist in New York who covered the city's multibillion dollar drug trade with any degree of detail or intimacy. The fact that he sometimes erred scarcely accounts for why he was killed. It is doubtful that a law-abiding individual whom he unjustly accused of criminal wrongdoing would have hired an assassin to redress the error. More likely, whoever ordered his murder did so because they felt he had good reason. The murder thus stands as an attack not just on a quirky loner of a journalist, but on all journalism.

A year after de Dios was killed, there is concern that the killer himself has probably left the country, and that in his absence the person or persons who ordered the murder may never be brought to justice. But the police team of three detectives investigating the case full time reportedly has narrowed its focus to a limited field of promising suspects. New York Newsday reported in February that investigators believe that as many as a dozen Queens-based drug profiteers and money launderers linked to the Cali cocaine cartel conspired to have de Dios killed, raising $ 30,000 to hire the gunman and an accomplice. As of this writing, no arrests had been made.

The course of the police inquiry goes through territory that is fruitful for journalists as well. It has to do with the extent to which legitimate businesses in New York are fused with narcotics trafficking. All along, police have believed the sponsor of de Dios's murder may have been the owner of one of the many hundreds of flourishing businesses in Manhattan or Queens that are money-laundering fronts for the cocaine cartels.

This is a story as old as New York: the brackish tide of half-clean, half dirty money that has buoyed not just Hispanic immigrant neighborhoods but many others through the decades, from the cash-intensive restaurants of Little Italy and Chinatown (credit cards not accepted) to Pakistani and Afghan fast-food joints. Money laundering is one of the most difficult stories for prosecutors to prove, and thus for journalists to tell. De Dios was one of the few reporters who regularly -- and perhaps recklessly -- tried.

Manuel de Dios was born in Camaguey, Cuba, in 1943. After moving with his family to Spain and then earning a master's degree in criminology in Puerto Rico, he came to New York in 1973. He worked with the Hispanic Criminal Justice Task Force before joining the staff of El Diario in 1977. He would spend twelve years at the paper as a reporter, columnist, and finally editor-in-chief from 1984 to 1989.

De Dios quickly developed a reputation as a crusader. He pursued the extremist anti-Castro cuban organization Omega 7, which is believed to have been responsible for the bombing of El Diario's lobby in 1978. He assailed radical leftists like the FALN, a Puerto Rican independence group that launched terrorist attacks in New York and San Juan in the 1970s, and he likewise sought to expose the Puerto Rican police conspiracy behind the murder of two independence advocates in 1978. Among New York's 1.8 million Hispanic residents he won both respect and more than a few enemies by breaking with the tradition among many Spanish-language media outlets of soft-peddling corruption among Hispanic elected officials.

Above all, he hammered away at the drug lords and their legions of collaborators. While the English-language press rarely ventured beyond "drug-related" body counts in the escalating drug wars of the 1980s, El Diario sought to describe what was actually going on, naming names, publishing photographs of alleged kingpins and assassins and laundering fronts, diagramming the structures of the cartel cells that operate in Queens much as guerrilla insurgencies operate around the world. He pushed his team of young reporters -- sometimes at considerable risk, some have since noted with an edge of bitterness -- to tease out the details of turf battles between Cali and Medellin subsidiaries. Meanwhile, threats against de Dios's life mounted to the point where colleagues steered clear of his battered car for fear of a car bomb attack. "No one can tell me what I can't write," de Dios told apprehensive colleagues. "If they want to kill me they know where to find me."

De Dios was not a mainstream journalist by American Standards. He was an advocate, and much of his work stepped over the boundary of acceptable -- one might even say responsible -- reporting. De Dios sometimes reported rumors as fact. His "investigations" could be longer on suspicions than on hard evidence of criminal wronggoing. He had a reputation for relying on sources whose motives were suspect. He allowed himself to be financially indebted to individuals whom he had reason to write about, including suspected money launderings. He was also known to have cooperated to a problematical degree with law enforcement authorities. He clearly saw himself as a player, not jut an observer.

"Manuel was a journalist in the Latin American tradition, where there is more of an emphasis on believing in a cause," says Rossana Rosado, a former colleague at El Diario. "He felt that North American journalists were obsessed with objectivity, and that as a result they ignore a lot of things."

Others among his former colleagues are less charitable. "He invented things," says Fernando Moreno, de Dios's successor as editor of El Diario and a longtime friend who later fell out with de Deios. "It got to a point where you couldn't tell what was true and what was invention." Indeed, his often shrill reports usually gave little indications of where the information came from, whether from criminal indictments or from internal law enforcement affidavits or from his many sources, reliable and otherwise, in the precint houses and soccer bars where he hung out. As often as not, his reporting was based on all of these sources. His most valuable contribution was not so much in unearthing secrets as in spotlighting publicly available information that other press outlets had overlooked.

Vicky Sanchez, the editor's Colombian-born companion and the mother of his three-year-old daughter, says she believes that whoever ordered his assassination did so because de Dios was "getting real close" to revealing the assassin's illegal activities. In a long conversation over coffee in a Cuban restaurant in Jackson Heights, Sanchez seemed isolate and embittered -- as much toward the press as toward the police for their failure to solve the crime. "What is sad is the position of the media," she said. "They haven't acted like a journalist was killed. He was killed because he was a journalist, telling the truth. He was writing about things that people don't want to hear. Today it was Manuel. Tomorrow it could be anybody."

In fact, New York newspapers have offered more than $ 40,000 toward a reward fund for information leading to the conviction of those responsible for de Dios's death. And in the weeks after the murder, efforts were made by a number of mainstream and Spanish-language outlets in New York to combine resources and investigate the case -- and to pick up some of the strands of de Dios's reporting. These efforts were modeled after the case of Don Bolles, an investigative reporter for The Arizona Republic who was killed by a car bomb in 1976 after writing a series of articles about political corruption and organized crime in Arizona. Bolles's murder appeared to challenge the old Mafia axiom that killing reporters "brings too much heat," and as a team of thirty-six journalists from around the country -- sponsored by Investigative Reporters and Editors -- assembled in Arizona to complete Bolles's investigations. The result was the Arizona Project, a series of twenty-three articles that appeared in newspapers aroundhe country and gave Arizona's legal establishment the impetus to start cleaning up the state.

But the effort to duplicate this achievement in New York quickly foundered amid competitive pressures -- and because of the animosities between de Dios and his former colleagues at El Diario, with whom Vicky Sanchez refuse to share details of his ongoing investigations. Also, some of those who were involved frankly acknowledge that fear was a factor. "After a while, as it became clear that there was not going to be a quick solution, people lost interest," says Juan Gonzalez, a columnist for the Daily News who spearheaded the effort at four news organizations -- the News, El Diario, the local CBS affiliate, and a local affiliate of the Spanish-language network Univision. "Also, some of our own people got scared," Gonzalez adds. "We realized that we were out on a limb. Look at what these cartels have done in Colombia. You can't underestimate what they might do if you got close enough to create a problem. Fear is not unjustified."

Moreno, de Dios's successor at El Diario, agrees. "Whoever gets involved in that world is risking his life," he says. "Queens doesn't belong in New York City. It's like an isolated republic, a world by itself. It's run by money launderers. Everything is impregnated by the smell of coke, and by the money from coke. It's a very violent world."

De Dios's intimacy with the Queens underworld and his sometimes-questionable financial relationships with those about whom he had reason to write have led some of his former colleagues to doubt whether he was actually killed because of his journalism. "Some of his friends were dangerous people," Moreno says. "He had a big mouth. He threatened people as a way of getting information from them. I think it was his attitude in pursuit of a story that got him killed, not something he wrote. In that world, a lot of people get killed because somebody doesn't like the way you look."

Nevertheless, the police team investigating his death is still focusing on his drug reporting. The two main avenues of the murder investigation can be delineated by two major avenues in New York where money laundering thrives: Roosevelt Avenue in Queens, where de Dios was killed, and Broadway in upper Manhattan. It is the Queens end of the investigation that appears to be bearing fruit.

In the Jackson Heights section of Queens known as Little Colombia, the investigation has focused on a group of prominent Queens businessmen known as the Nine Kings, a term de Dios coined. In the 1980s Jackson Heights and neighboring Elmhurst emerged as the wholesale headquarters for the Cali and Medellin cartels' multibillion-dollar business in New York and much of the rest of the country. There are safehouses for smugglers and contract killers, warehouses for the product itself -- and scores if not hundreds of businesses that launder its proceeds.

Cocaine may be the largest industry in Queens, rivaled only by the airline industry at Kennedy and LaGuardia airports, whose proximity to Jackson Heights helped draw the cartels into the neighborhood. Although the majority of the neighborhood's mostly immigrant residents are not involved in criminal activity, the businesses along teeming Roosevelt Avenue are thriving to a degree that is difficult to explain without the huge and continuous flood of capital derived from cocaine. Prosecutors estimate that every dollar earned selling cocaine may be spent six times in Queens before it finds it way out of the country. On some blocks, prosecutors say, virtually every business is laundering dirty cash, willingly or otherwise -- perhaps by doing business with the multitude of loan sharks who, in an old New York tradition, may be the only source of capital for not-yet-credit-worthy immigrant entrepreneurs. But if it was ever thus, it is not always easy to prove. "There is a quantum leap between what you think andhat you can prove," says Mark Feldman, chief of narcotics investigations for the Queens District Attorney's office.

A number of the Nine Kings have in fact been prosecuted on various racketeering charges. Other have been identified in court documents and internal law-enforcement affidavits as suspected money launderers. An early suspect in the case was (and remains) Juan Manuel Ortiz Alvear, a Cali-born Queens newspaper publisher who is also a suspect in the 1990 killing of Queens printer Pedro Mendez, a friend of de Dios whose murder the journalist was investigating. Police have linked Ortiz to a team of sicarios responsible for scores of drug-related murders in Queens in recent years. Another target of the investigation is Jorge Alarcon, a well-known nightclub owner of Roosevelt Avenue who owns broadcast rights to South American soccer games. According to public court records, a confidential informant has told the FBI that Alarcon "heads a major Colombian cocaine distribution organization that services the East Coast of the U.S." It is one of the stranger complicating factors in this story that Alarcon was de Dios'landlord, and he has said that the journalist owed him $ 16,000 in back rent before filing for bankruptcy. In 1988, Alarcon was shot in the face, in a still unsolved incident. Afterward, according to confidential government documents cited by New York Newsday, de Dios told DEA investigators that he had heard Alarcon was shot because he owed money to the Medellin cartel. for some reasons, de Dios did not report this in El Diario at the time.

The Manhattan end of the investigation has focused on Washington Heights, where Dominicans have emerged as New York's preeminent retail distributors of crack and powder cocaine, the "foot soldiers for the Colombians." The long neck of upper Manhattan is well suited for the business in part because of its easy-in, easy-out accessibility, particularly near the George Washington Bridge. Washington Heights was the scene of rioting last summer after police shot and killed a suspected dealer. At the time of his own death, de Dios had been reporting on a group of Dominican businessmen known as the Federation of Dominican Merchants. De Dios had taken up the cause of Joseph Occhipinti, a federal immigration agent who was convicted in June 1991 of civil rights violations in connection with Project Bodega, an investigation of Dominican bodega owners whom Occhipinti suspected of being fronts for drug dealers. Occhipinti, who had served eight months of a three-year prison term before President Bush commuted his sentencin January, claims he was framed by the Federation, which he and others accuse of being little more than an association of drug financiers.

In addition to de Dios, one other journalist emerged as an outspoken crusador for Occhipinti: the columnist Mike McAlary, formerly of the New York Post, now with the Daily News. McAlary wrote a memorable three-part series for the Post in October 1991 in which he branded the Federation as a front for the "San Francisco Cartel," a loosely affiliated network of gangs recruited mostly from the Dominican city of San Francisco de Macoris. McAlary's series was unevenly reported and fatally marred by his failure to examine the court record of Occhipinti's trial. The officer was convicted by a jury of his peers, and the verdict was upheld on appeal. A Justice department review of the case found no reason to question the outcome. Meanwhile, de Dios's former paper, El Diario, crusaded against Occhipinti for his heavy-handed investigation of Dominicans and denounced McAlary in an editorial headed MIKE MCALARY'S GESTAPO JOURNALISM.

Nevertheless, much of what McAlary reported on the Federation, if not on Occhipiniti, was valid. The Federation, since disbanded, did include a number of convicted money launderers among its officers, including its vice-president, Erasmo Taveras, who pleaded guilty in 1990 to money-laundering and loan-sharking charges that involved illegally transmitting about $70 million dollars in suspected drug profits to the Dominican Republic. So while Occhipiniti was guilty as charged, many of his accusers also may have been guilty of the crimes he accused them of. Yet McAlary's findings were not pursued aggressively by the rest of the press. Not surprisingly, McAlary later emerged as one of de Dios's most flattering eulogists.

This saga is a good illustration of the problems encountered by law enforcement officials and journalists alike in the murky world of the drug financiers -- problems that run the gamut from due process guarantees to racial stereotyping. De Dios, Occhipinti, and McAlary were birds of a feather: gung-ho crusaders who were often right, but whose standards of fairness were open to question.

Yet the fact that they were sometimes right should be viewed as a challenge for mainstream journalists: Can the same information be published within the boundaries of responsible reporting? Since de Dios's death, some reporters have made an effort in this direction. New York Newsday, in particular, has published a number of impressive articles about money laundering on Roosevelt Avenue, thoroughly anchored in court records and internal law enforcement affidavits. A month after de Dios was killed, a team of four Newsday reporters produced a lengthy piece, including a map, identifying a half-dozen major money-laundering fronts in Jackson Heights. It was the sort of piece de Dios used to produce, except that it was based almost entirely on a public record of criminal indictments -- State Liquor Authority licenses, Small Business Administration loan documents, U.S. Customs Service records, and the like -- as well as on internal FBI and Drug Enforcement Administration affidavits. It was Newsday that publishethe first detailed account of Jorge Alarcon's alleged Medellin connection, based in part on trial transcripts and sentencing memorandums publicly filed in federal court.

Perhaps the most substantial investigative reporting on money laundering nationally was published in The Miami Herald in March 1990, a year before de Dios died, in a six-part series that highlighted the huge impact of drug money in south Florida on everything from banks to political campaigns. The series, like the reporting in New York Newsday, was based in large part on an exhaustive search of public records.

These examples show that the stories can be told, and they should be. For all the press's infatuation with traditional Italian mobsters, it is the newer syndicates from Asia and Latin America that represent the growth end of organized crime in New York -- what Murray Kempton has called the criminal equivalent of multiculturalism. For every big-name Mafia "hit" that draws front-page attention, there are many high-stakes murders in more recent immigrant communities that are never reported in the English-language press, although the stories behind these crimes are highly revealing. Likewise, there are dozens of racketeering trials that never make the papers, with case files bulging with richly informative details about the evolving nature of New York's criminal underworld.

With rare exceptions, drug coverage still tends to focus on the teenagers in basketball shoes and not the men in suits and ties, and to overlook invisible neighborhoods until they explode, as Washington Heights did last summer. In so doing the press paints a distorted picture of the drug trade, exaggerating the importance of its least powerful employees and underestimating the extent to which drug money saturates the legitimate economy. Law enforcement agencies, having largely failed to stem the flow of the product itself, are devoting greater and greater resources to money-laundering investigations. More sophisticated press coverage of such cases could serve to highlight the strengths -- and weaknesses -- of that effort. The field should not be left to loners like Manuel de Dios.

New York's Spanish-language press devotes much more attention to neighborhoods like Jackson Heights and Washington Heights than does the English-language press, for obvious reasons, with everything from execution-style killings to criminal proceedings against alleged money launderers getting far greater play as breaking news stories. Perhaps the most extensive coverage along these lines appears in the Noticias del Mundo, owned by the Reverend Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church, which regularly publishes voluminous articles about the unending violence among Hispanic drug gangs. But these stories, like those de Dios used to run, tend to be highly speculative and unreliable.

The Spanish press in New York lacks the resources for serious investigative reporting. El Diario, with a circulation of 48,000, has only six reporters on its city staff; the paper can't afford to assign four reporters to spend a month pouring through documents, as New York Newsday did with its Roosevelt Avenue story. The Spanish press also lacks the protection -- or the perception of it -- that mainstream English-language publications enjoy. It seems likely that a decision to assassinate a marginal Hispanic editor like Manuel de Dios involves a different calculation of risk than one might make when deciding whether to kill a reporter for The New York Times. Since 1980, at least twelve journalists have been killed in the United States. All but one of them, including de Dios, were minority or third world journalists -- Cambodian, Vietnamese, Haitian -- apparently silenced by partisans (or government agents) in their own discreet universes.

For all his quirks and flaws, de Dios was the only reporter in New York who was writing about the inner workings of the cartels and about the individual people involved. Clearly, somebody wanted to silence him. If other reporters had given these stories the attention they deserved, de Dios might not have been killed. Whoever wanted him silenced would have known there were plenty of others to replace him.

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