Trial begins Monday in Miami for Fabio Ochoa Vasquez, reputedly the biggest Colombian Druglord Extradited since 1977.

Our pals Roy Black and Howard Srebnick are defending Ochoa. Security is so tight that "that the anonymous jurors will be driven back and forth to court in vans with tinted windows to protect their identities."

Ochoa served five years in a Colombian prison in the 1990s for helping pioneer drug smuggling by air. Under the extradition treaty, the United States cannot try him for any of his cartel activities, including his alleged role in the 1986 hit on drug pilot and informant Barry Seal.

The case against him is built instead on allegations he got back into the cocaine business by joining up with a longtime friend and former cartel lieutenant, Alejandro Bernal Madrigal, in an operation that smuggled as much as 30 tons of the drug into this country per month.

Ochoa has denied returning to the cocaine business, proclaiming at the time of his 1999 arrest that he would be "stupid" to get into drugs again. Before his extradition, he erected billboards in Bogota and Medellin declaring: "Yesterday I made a mistake. Today I am innocent."

The case is largely dependent upon testimony of drug dealers who made a deal with the government to testify against Ochoa in exchange for leniency in their own cases.