'MARIA FULL OF GRACE' Role based on real-life trouble-shooter

Orlando Tobon helps Colombians who are living in New York.
By DESMOND BUTLER
ASSOCIATED PRESS
NEW YORK -- In Jackson Heights, they call Orlando Tobon the "mayor of Little Colombia."
Tobon makes his living as an accountant and travel agent, but he makes his name as a social service fixer and all-purpose guide to many of the tens of thousands of Colombian immigrants who come to live in his ethnically diverse Queens neighborhood.
Tobon is also known as "the undertaker of the mules" for his work helping families repatriate the remains of the dozens of Colombians who die every year smuggling drugs into New York. Some mules run afoul of drug gangs; others die when drug-filled pellets wrapped in condoms burst in their stomachs en route.
Tobon's work with the families of mules caught the attention of Joshua Marston, writer-director of "Maria Full of Grace," a film about the lives of families devastated by the drug trade between Colombia and New York.
Set in Colombia and Jackson Heights, the movie tells the story of Maria, a vivacious teenager who quits a job stripping thorns from roses in a small Colombian city and decides to make the perilous crossing to New York with a pregnant belly full of heroin.
Added to screenplay
After meeting Tobon, Marston rewrote his screenplay with a new character inspired and portrayed by Tobon.
"I sat in his office off and on for three weeks," explained Marston. "I realized that Orlando was a very important part of Jackson Heights and the story I wanted to tell."
In Marston's film, Maria is brought to Don Fernando, the character played by Tobon, after a friend and fellow smuggler dies in a hotel when a heroin pellet bursts in her stomach.
"Maria Full of Grace," released by HBO Films and Fine Line Features, opened last week in New York and Los Angeles and will appear in more cities in upcoming weeks. It has received awards at film festivals including Sundance and Berlin.
Tobon came to New York in 1968 at age 17, "with $60 in my pocket." While working a series of menial jobs, he earned a degree in accounting and later started Orlando Travel, a tax accounting business and travel agency.
Consulting on tax returns soon became consulting on everything.
In his office
On a recent afternoon, Tobon sat in his cluttered one-room office decorated with photographs of Tobon with Bill and Hillary Clinton, former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, Colombian President Alvaro Uribe and other politicians.
He tended to a steady stream of clients, political courtiers and people with problems, all the while sorting their documents, petitioning the Internal Revenue Service on their behalf and offering advice.
But Tobon was preoccupied with Julio Olarte, a somber 22-year-old who sought assistance after his sister, Tatiana, was found dead of a burst drug pellet in a local hotel.
Olarte could not afford to pay the necessary $2,500 to the morgue to claim his sister's body, which would otherwise be buried by the city, according to Tobon. So as he had done hundreds of times before, Tobon began raising the money within the community to help someone bury a relative with dignity.
Tobon calmly explained to Olarte that his sister's body would have to be cremated because so much time had passed. They hoped to hold a church service for Tatiana before her ashes were returned to Medellin, Colombia.
Olarte says that when he learned of his sister's death, he knew to ask for help from Tobon, a friend of Olarte's late parents.
"I am here because of Orlando," said Olarte. He explained that his mother was once not allowed to board a plane from Bogota to New York because she was in the late stage of pregnancy. His father called Tobon, who fixed the problem with a call to a contact at the Colombian airline Avianca. So Julio Olarte was born in New York.