Cali cartel moneyman bagged in Spain for crypto-laundering

BREAKING NEWS — A notorious long-time trafficker for Colombia’s once-powerful Cali cartel was arrested in Spain this week, ending a mystery of where the major moneyman had gone. And what he was up to. Like many a modern mob story, this one comes with a cryptocurrency twist.

The Mob Reporter here with the back story to Operation Ranger, that sent a squad of heavily armed cops to a luxurious villa in the south of Spain — and who and what they found there. First the who: Mario Halley. Halley hit the underworld radar when he relocated from Colombia to Europe at the nimble age of 25. There he worked as a European sales agent for the Cali cartel in its hay days of the early 1990s. If you’ve watched season 3 of the Netflix series Narcos, you know what the Cali Cartel was. Just knowing it was a bitter rival to Pablo Escobar’s cartel in Colombia — and came out on top — should mean something. Last summer, at the age of 50, Halley relocated from the Netherlands to Spain and was living in a mansion with his family in one of the most luxurious areas on the beautiful Costa del Sol, where a Spanish SWAT team came for him in the night.