Drug Dealers Escape Miami Heat in Vegas

Squeezed out of South Florida by increased federal pressure, drug dealers have discovered this gaming mecca as a popular place to transact business and have a little fun at the same time.

Authorities say dealers--looking for new spots to make major transactions--are lured to the Las Vegas area by a combination of factors, topped by the glittering life style and relative anonymity a town crowded with tourists provides them.

“They like to party, they like to play the tables and they like to cavort with the ladies of the night,” said Fred Ackermann, a supervisor with the Nevada Division of Investigations. “These are pretty flashy people, if you know what I mean.”

Behind Hotel Room Doors

Several recent major cocaine and methamphetamine busts barely scratched the surface of the large-scale drug dealing that authorities believe goes on behind locked hotel room doors.

“It’s a great place to meet and operate in an area where they’re not known,” said Joe Catale, agent in charge of the federal Drug Enforcement Agency’s Las Vegas office. “If a guy has a bunch of heroin in New York and wants to move it to California, they meet here. We don’t know either of them, and they can operate under a cloak of anonymity.”

In a town that is greased by cash, drug dealers also find it easy to carry--and sometimes launder--large amounts of the green stuff without attracting much attention.

New regulations requiring the reporting of exchanges of more than $10,000 in cash at casinos may tighten laundering, but authorities say it is almost impossible to distinguish between a cash-carrying gambler and a drug dealer.

“If you land in Portland, Ore., with $400,000 in cash in a briefcase, you’d have a hard time explaining why you have that much cash,” Ackermann said. “But here it’s not uncommon to come through the airport with thousands in cash that you’re taking to the tables to gamble with.”

2 Casino Executives Cleared

Although federal prosecutors indicted two Royal Casino executives on charges they laundered $390,000 through the casino’s cage, the men were found innocent last September and authorities say they believe little, if any, organized money laundering is done inside casinos.

Instead, they say, drug dealers may exchange some of their proceeds for casino chips and, after a period of gambling, exchange the chips for other “clean” money from the casino.

“I don’t think you have casino involvement,” Ackermann said. “The casinos have too much to lose--primarily their gaming licenses--to be caught in an activity like that.”

“You get indications there is some laundering,” Catale added. “But you don’t know if it’s on a regular basis or on a hit-and-miss basis.”

Drug agents say the recent crackdown on drug smugglers by a federal task force in the Miami area prompted them to look elsewhere to make their deals. The dealers apparently find the bright lights and 24-hour activity of Las Vegas alluring.

“They come in here and live very high while they do their transactions in hotel rooms,” said Metro Police Lt. Mike Manning, who heads the narcotics unit. “They especially like the big events, like title fights, where there’s a lot of people in town and they can do their business unnoticed and maybe see the fight too.”

Desert Landing Spots

In addition to dealing behind hotel room doors, the vast desert areas surrounding the city offer unlimited landing spots for aircraft bringing in drugs. Authorities say a plane loaded with cocaine can fly beneath radar detection to any of hundreds of possible landing sites in Southern Nevada, unload the drugs and be on its way within 20 minutes.

“We’re seeing the increase in cocaine coming from South America,” said Manning, whose department helped the Drug Enforcement Agency bust a shipment of 85 kilos of cocaine from Bolivia flown to an airport in neighboring Henderson. “That kind of shipment before would have been sent to the Southeast, but now it’s starting to come to this area.”

Manning’s agents, in a joint operation with Los Angeles police, also aided in knocking off a methamphetamine operation recently, confiscating enough chemicals to make $63 million worth of the drug and two large trucks of manufacturing equipment and portable buildings. Manning said they were being taken to a remote desert site in northern Arizona where the drugs would actually be made.

Though more drug traffickers are apparently plying their trade in the Las Vegas area, they have not been met with a corresponding increase in federal, state or local drug agents--a fact that authorities say is recognized by the dealers.

“They figure it is a little safer out here than in Miami,” said Catale, who has a staff of eight federal agents in his office.

“We’re trying to work hard to stay on top of it, but we don’t have the resources the dealers do,” Manning added. “We’re trying to not let this become another Miami with gang wars and shootings and that type of stuff.”