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Smugglers refine their tricks

By: Donna Leinwand/USA Today

Smugglers are finding new ways to get cocaine, heroin and Ecstasy into the United States, even as increased security at U.S. borders and airports is leading to record drug busts, authorities say.

In recent months, U.S. officials have been surprised by the ingenuity of South American, Mexican and European drug-smuggling rings, whose operations virtually shut down in the days after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks because of dramatically increased security at U.S. borders.

When the rings tried to re-establish smuggling routes later in the fall, border agents began seizing unprecedented amounts of drugs. At key crossings in California and South Texas, seizures of cocaine and marijuana doubled from the same period the previous year.

Now, authorities acknowledge that drug rings are figuring out how to avoid FBI, Customs, Coast Guard and other law enforcement agents who have shifted from anti-drug duties to what officials call a "goal-line defense" against terrorism. The smugglers' success is reflected in the availability and stable price of cocaine, heroin and other illegal drugs. In Miami, Chicago and Los Angeles, dealers' prices for the drugs -- the surest measures of supply -- have not changed since Sept. 11, authorities say.

"I thought after 9-11 things would slow down because there would be no way to get the drugs into the country," says Tom Donahue, executive director of the Chicago High Intensity Drug Trafficking Agency, one of 28 federally funded anti-drug task forces across the nation. "But (the flow of drugs into the United States is) bigger and better than ever. The price is the same. We're not experiencing shortages in heroin, cocaine and marijuana. And Ecstasy is on the increase."

Arrests in the past few months indicate that smugglers are using creative new tricks and are refining some old ones:

* Traffickers in the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean are chaining drug-filled metal containers to the undersides of luxury cruise ships and sending divers to retrieve the booty after the ships dock in U.S. ports.

* Heroin smugglers from Mexico and Colombia have begun dissolving cocaine in a liquid solution, soaking shirts and sweaters in it, drying them and then packing the heavy, stiff clothing in suitcases to try to avoid pat-down searches and drug-sniffing dogs at airports and border crossings. Once the smugglers arrive at their U.S. destinations, they soak the clothing in water to draw out the drug, and then let the solution evaporate back into powder form.

* Ecstasy traffickers from northern Europe are experimenting with new land and sea routes to get the club drug into the United States.

* In numbers that haven't been seen for years, drug-carrying speedboats are tearing across deep- ocean routes in the Caribbean, where Coast Guard cutters have abandoned some anti-drug patrols since Sept. 11.

"Our adversary is greed and the human imagination," says Joseph Webber, special agent in charge of the U.S. Customs investigations office for the New York City area.

The smugglers' changes in strategy come as law enforcement agencies that had been chasing drug kingpins and their couriers for two decades have become more concerned with patrolling harbors, providing air marshals, guarding airports and securing the borders.

The U.S. Coast Guard, usually a lead player in catching drug smugglers, has pulled its patrols closer to the 95,000 miles of coastline and inland waterways it is charged with protecting, says Cmdr. Jim McPherson, a Guard spokesman. More than 75 percent of the Coast Guard cutters, helicopters and other assets previously used to search the sea for illegal immigrants and drug traffickers now are assigned to terrorism-related tasks, he says.

Coast Guard cutters escort cruise ships and oil tankers into port, guard nuclear power plants and secure the area around Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba, where 300 al-Qaida and Taliban fighters are being held. About half of the Coast Guard's special agents who usually investigate drug and immigration cases now are flying on commercial jets as air marshals.

"It's a problem," McPherson says of the war on terrorism's impact on other duties. "Our fisheries patrols are down. Our pollution patrols are down. Are we doing as many drug patrols? Probably not doing as many as we did before, but we are making some substantial busts. That may be because the smugglers are trying to test us."

In the days immediately after the attacks on New York and Washington, drug smuggling into the United States essentially stopped. Airports were closed, and agents along the nation's borders were put on the highest level of alert. Foreign drug rings held back their shipments, authorities say, apparently waiting for soft spots to emerge in the new security efforts.

"I think everyone, including drug dealers, was traumatized by 9-11," says Bill Ruzzamenti, director of the Central Valley California High Intensity Drug Trafficking Agency, another of the federally funded anti-drug task forces. The agency includes local, state and federal officers from nine counties from Bakersfield to Sacramento.

Sept. 11 "was probably the only day in history where we had no narcotics operations in the (San Francisco) Bay area," says Bob Prevot, interim director of Northern California's anti-drug task force and a lieutenant in the San Mateo County Sheriff's Office.

But drug smugglers can sit on their inventories only so long before their losses begin to outweigh any risks of having couriers get caught. So after nearly a month-long lull in smuggling, the dam burst in early October. Drug rings started to aggressively move their products again, and Customs, Coast Guard and Drug Enforcement Administration agents began making record busts.

Marijuana seizures at 10 border crossings from Mexico into South Texas doubled from the year before. From Oct. 1 through Dec. 31, Customs agents seized 42,276 pounds of marijuana, worth about $17 million to the distributors who sell to the street dealers. During that same period, Customs seized 2,650 pounds of cocaine on the Mexican border with California, more than twice the amount seized the year before. The seized cocaine was worth about $20 million at the distributor level, authorities say.

Despite such record seizures and unprecedented border security, authorities say it's clear that smugglers remain quite successful at getting drugs to U.S. buyers.

"There's a demand for drugs in this county. They will find ways to get drugs in. Our job is to figure out what method they've switched to," says Gary Grimm, coordinator of the intelligence center for South Florida's regional anti-drug task force. "The traffickers have lots of money, and they are thinking about it all the time. The smuggler just gets more creative."

Smugglers still try their luck with older methods, such as hiding contraband beneath legal products in cargo ships and trucks, and using elderly people or children to carry drugs on international flights on the theory they are unlikely to be searched.

Some traffickers wrap drugs in fabric softener sheets or other smelly things to try to confuse drug- sniffing dogs, a variation on earlier efforts to pack drugs in aromatic coffee shipments.

Grimm says he expects to see more cocaine, heroin and marijuana traffickers return to the sea routes they favored during the 1980s now that the Coast Guard's attention is focused closer to shore. Just before Thanksgiving, Customs and the Coast Guard on routine patrol just south of the Puerto Rico coast intercepted a 33-foot speedboat carrying more than a ton of cocaine, worth an estimated $23 million at the distributor level.

The notion that drug rings could be emboldened by reduced enforcement in some areas alarms many lawmakers, who are beginning to question whether the new attention to terrorism will set back gains made in the war on drugs.

With resources stretched thin by competing demands, intelligence-gathering on drug rings and terrorism threats is crucial, DEA Administrator Asa Hutchinson says. "In law enforcement, we have to adjust and react as quickly as the traffickers do," he says.

At the anti-drug task force's intelligence center in South Florida, analysts are trying to compensate for the lack of patrols by outsmarting smugglers. The analysts plot previous seizures, calculate moon phases and wave heights and track weather patterns to try to predict which paths the smugglers might pick in a vast ocean.

"It's somewhat of a cat and mouse game," Webber says. "The endgame is to be looking forward: What is their next move? Because they'll never stop trying."

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