Arturo Durazo

If police corruption merited an entry in the Guinness Book of Records, Arturo "El Negro" Durazo, who has died aged 80, would be a strong contender for the title. In Mexico, where the words police and corruption are inseparably linked in the public mind, Durazo's six-year reign as the capital's police chief (1976-82) turned him into the definition of the phenomenon.

Yet he is also remembered fondly by many as the man whose mano dura (strong-arm) methods made the streets of Mexico City safe for ordinary citizens.

Born in the northern border state of Sonora, Durazo moved to the capital very young. He studied business administration and worked in the central bank from 1944; in 1948, he discovered his vocation as a policeman, switching careers to traffic inspector and then to being an agent of the much-feared Federal Security Directorate (DFS). He was credited with uncovering the activities in Mexico of Cuban exiles under Fidel Castro; in the mid-1950s they plotted the overthrow of the Batista dictatorship.

The DFS arrested Castro, along with Che Guevara and other members of the group, but they were eventually released due to political pressure. Durazo was DFS commander from 1958-62. He went on to found the Crime Prevention Investigations Division (DIPD), whose brutality terrified both criminals and the urban guerrillas who were active in the early 1970s.

The stroke of luck that sent Durazo's career into the stratosphere was the nomination of his childhood friend, José López Portillo, as presidential candidate for the long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) in 1976. Durazo became López Portillo's personal security chief, and when the man assumed the presidency he was rewarded with command of the Mexico City police.

Eleven months earlier, as López Portillo well knew, Durazo had been indicted by a US grand jury on narcotics charges. But the president's prime consideration, as he once declared, was that he knew Durazo would protect him with his own life. El Negro had a well-deserved reputation for placing loyalty to his friends above everything else. Once he was in the job, he reported directly to the president, bypassing his ostensible boss, Mexico City's mayor.

"Durazo converted the police into a racketeering empire that made his predecessors' performances seem positively innocuous," wrote Alan Riding in Distant Neighbours, his book about 1980s Mexico. The sources of his rapidly growing illicit wealth were many, from the bribes paid by every cop in the city to the cocaine trade and kickbacks on the purchase of police equipment.

The president granted him, by decree, the rank of general and El Negro began to behave like a mini-dictator. When his convoy of vehicles was on the move, roads were sealed to ensure his security and speed his progress.

But despite the excesses, Durazo was much admired - both at home and abroad - for his crime prevention. A Soviet delegation went so far as to declare him "the best police chief in the world".

Mexico's inhabitants mostly neither knew nor - presumably - cared about the methods his dipos (as the DIPD detectives were known) used to keep crime under control. But when the bodies of 12 Colombians, alleged to be bank-robbers, were found in the Tula River with clear signs that they had been tortured and executed, questions began to be asked.

Durazo's downfall came in 1982 with the accession to the presidency of Miguel de la Madrid, who had made moral renewal a theme of his campaign. El Negro then prudently left the country, but the details of his wealth, and its origins, were revealed in a book by his former personal aide, José Gónzalez, which became a runaway bestseller. Durazo later won a libel case against Gónzalez - from inside his prison cell.

During his ascendancy, Durazo had built himself a $2.5m mansion on the outskirts of Mexico City, with a horse-racing track and a replica of the Studio 54 discotheque in New York. In the Pacific coast resort of Zihuatanejo, his cliff-top retreat, complete with classical columns, was nicknamed the Parthenon.

In January, 1984, he was finally charged (in absentia) with tax evasion. Two months later the charges were expanded to include extortion, smuggling and possession of illegal weapons, and the government formally sought his extradition from the US.

He was arrested in Puerto Rico later that year, extradited to Mexico and sentenced to 25 years in prison, although in fact he served less than eight. His Mexico City palace was opened as a museum of corruption and proved a popular attraction.

Paroled in 1992, he retired to Acapulco and, by some accounts, spent his declining years helping alcoholics to kick the habit. At his memorial service, former president López Portillo (himself one of the most reviled political figures in the country) defended El Negro. Praising his courage and honesty, he said he had lost "a friend and a great collaborator. He was a magnificent policeman, by vocation and by devotion."

Durazo is survived by his wife, Silvia Garza, and their four sons.

Arturo Durazo Moreno (El Negro Durazo); police chief turned criminal, born 1920; died August 5 2000

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