SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — Federal authorities arrested a fugitive alleged drug kingpin 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 neighborhood of San Juan. When he realized 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 tire on his Jeep.
But this time, U.S. marshals, the 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 U.S. Marshal Service’s fugitive task force in Puerto Rico.
Escobar, the Colombian drug lord of the 1980s, was an escaped convict who died in a shootout with police in 1993.
Figueroa, who was 45 in March, is suspected of shipping Colombian drugs to the U.S. 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.
