Drug Arrives by Land, Sea, Air; Huge Amounts Seized : Southern California Has Ravenous Cocaine Appetite

Once, hard-working mules were highly visible in Southern California--strong and stubborn beasts of burden that were highly regarded for their ability to carry goods and work fields.

Today’s “mules” try hard to be invisible--and are held in such contempt by their masters as to be considered expendable.

In the jargon of the underworld, the mule is a key but comparatively low-level criminal whose burden is illicit drugs. These days, more and more, his secret burden is cocaine, and his destination is Southern California--Los Angeles in particular.

In the view of Alan Walls, special agent in charge of the U.S. Customs Service here, the reason is quite clear. “Los Angeles,” he said, “has got to be the consumption capital of the United States, and probably of the world, in terms of cocaine.”

‘Our Best Estimates’

But in the same breath, he also admitted: “I don’t think anybody has a complete picture of the absolute amount of drugs that are coming in and of the absolute amounts that are in transit (to other markets). We’re all (just) making our best estimates.”

Ted Hunter, special agent in charge of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency’s Los Angeles field division, said the question of how much cocaine is used here, as compared to the amount brought to Los Angeles for distribution elsewhere, is unanswerable.

Hunter’s division encompasses seven California counties (San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, Ventura, Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino), making it the largest in the country. It covers 32,000 square miles and has a population of about 14 million.

“With the sociological makeup, the life style and the affluence of that population, you can say that (this) constitutes one of the biggest, if not the biggest, cocaine areas in the United States,” he said.

A Ravenous Appetite

If seizures are any measure, then Southern Californians have developed a ravenous appetite for cocaine.

In the 1985 fiscal year, which ended Sept. 30, federal and local law enforcement agencies seized 873 kilograms (1,920.6 pounds) of cocaine locally--562 kilograms in Los Angeles County, 212 in Riverside, 90 in Orange and 9 in Santa Barbara, according to the DEA office here.

“That,” said Hunter, “is a huge amount of cocaine.”

In the San Diego division--covering San Diego and Imperial counties--73 kilograms were seized during the same period.

During the preceding 12 months, the Los Angeles Division’s total was only 239 kilograms--190 in Los Angeles, 35 in Orange, 7 in Santa Barbara and 7 in Riverside.

Cocaine for California

The common wisdom is that the much-publicized crackdown on cocaine traffickers in Florida and the Caribbean--where 14,240 kilograms (31,328 pounds) were seized by federal agencies in fiscal 1984--has caused many dealers to shift their operations westward and put more cocaine in the Southern California market.

But Hunter believes it isn’t quite that simple: “I would maintain that the demand and the appetite have always been in Los Angeles.”

What has changed, according to Hunter, is “the logistical line . . . the route pattern.” The traditional route has been from Colombia to Florida, which he said is the simplest and most direct way to get the drug into the United States. From Florida, it would be transshipped to other markets, Los Angeles probably being the biggest.

Coming Through Mexico

“And so,” said Hunter, “the same drugs that were always intended for Los Angeles . . . are now coming on a different line, through Mexico.” Not that cocaine traffickers have abandoned the old routes through Florida. “They (law enforcement agencies) are still making astronomical seizures in Miami,” Hunter said.

Cocaine comes into Los Angeles by land, sea and air--and in all sorts of containers.

In his office, Capt. Bob Blanchard, commander of the Los Angeles Police Department’s narcotics division, keeps a copy of an X-ray photo that dramatically illustrates the desperate measures that mules will use to smuggle cocaine.

The X-ray shows a collection of what appears to be a collection of Ping-Pong balls distributed through the intestines of a young male.

A Secret Burden

On Aug. 1, 1981, this mule--a Colombian who had apparently arrived by air from Bogota some hours earlier--staggered into a Los Angeles police station and turned himself in. He believed that he was dying because he had been unable to excrete the secret burden he was carrying in his bowels: 76 condoms, tied off with dental floss and packed with three to four grams each of almost pure cocaine.

The containers were surgically removed at a hospital, and the man survived. Officials said that because records have been lost or misplaced, his legal fate is not known but it is likely that he was deported to Colombia.

But Rebecca Focacci de Brandon’s fate is known. On Feb. 24, 1982, one of the 50 balloons of cocaine she had swallowed burst inside her body. The 50-year-old Peruvian woman died a short time after her Varig Airlines flight from Lima landed at Los Angeles International Airport.

Free Ticket to L.A.

For such dangerous missions, the typical mule will be paid $900 to $1,000 at the takeoff point, given a free ticket to Los Angeles and paid another $500 or so upon delivery of the cocaine to the dealer here, according to the DEA’s Hunter.

Such crude methods are seldom used now, according to experts here, although smugglers still employ such old-fashioned devices as secret compartments in suitcases. A 46-year-old Peruvian man was caught by a Customs inspector at the Los Angeles airport on Nov. 14 with two kilos of cocaine concealed in a false-sided suitcase.

Some mules are given clothing soaked in a liquid solution of cocaine, which then can be chemically extracted and converted to salable cocaine once it arrives.

Cocaine is also transported inside surfboards, in electronically locked secret compartments in cars and trucks, in overhead niches in the toilets of airliners and in merchandise (chile peppers in one recent instance) packed in containerized ships.

Flown In From Florida

But perhaps the greatest bulk of the drug is brought in by flying mules--outlaw pilots who fly their shipments from Florida or directly from secret fields in South America and Mexico.

They make their deliveries to confederates on the ground at airstrips or remote roads in the high desert country of Southern California and Arizona.

The Customs Service has its own air support wing, headquartered at March Air Force Base in Riverside, which covers smugglers’ sky routes between San Antonio and the Pacific Ocean.

Joe Maxwell, Customs Service director of aviation operations in the West, said his aircraft--everything from big, radar-equipped turboprop P-3 Orions and swift twin-engine jets to helicopters--fly routine patrols and also “scramble” to meet suspected mule planes. But he would not say where his planes are deployed or how many interceptions and arrests his office has made.

“We like to keep them (the smuggler pilots) a little bit paranoid,” he said.

Task Force at LAX

The DEA also is somewhat secretive about the little-known joint narcotics task force at Los Angeles airport.

It is made up of undercover operatives from the Los Angeles Police Department and the DEA and, when manpower permits, a few from the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Office narcotics bureau. They work closely with Customs inspectors and agents. Hunter described the airport task force as “a vital dimension in our enforcement program here.”

It is “a fair estimate,” he said, that the task force numbers about 30 to 35 officers plus several “sniffer” dogs that can smell out the most minute quantities of cocaine and other drugs.

“The operation is an extremely well-run, well-coordinated interagency activity,” Hunter said, “where we are successful in seizing drugs, seizing (drug-connected) assets. . . . Of all the cocaine that comes into California, LAX affords us the single most important choke point to tighten up and make it as inconvenient as possible (for criminals) to move their drugs and their assets (mostly cash) into and out of Los Angeles.”

$12 Million Seized

During the last year, the airport task force seized $12 million in cash, most of it cocaine-connected. In separate action, Customs inspectors and agents seized another $20 million in cash in the Los Angeles area during 1984-85, most of it thought to be cocaine-related.

The DEA’s Los Angeles Division seized a total of just over $36 million in assets during 1984-85, a good deal of it in property--airplanes, automobiles, real property. This is up from the $18.3 million in the previous 12 months. And the projection for 1985-86 is about $50 million.

Seizure of assets is “a tremendous tool” for law enforcement in its battle against cocaine and other drug traffickers, Hunter said.

Such seizures, made possible by a 1979 federal law, are civil proceedings in which the DEA has only to show by the preponderence of the evidence--rather than beyond a reasonable doubt, the standard used in criminal cases--that cash or other assets are directly connected to illegal drug dealing.

A Boon to Police

Another law, the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984, gave federal law-enforcement agencies the authority to return seized drug assets to local police agencies if they participated in the case. As an example, Hunter said, “We have many cases pending (in which) millions of dollars will be returned to the Los Angeles Police Department.”

Blanchard said the LAPD expects to receive more than $4 million from the DEA for seizures and arrests made since the first of the year. The law requires that the funds be used to improve narcotics enforcement and prevention programs in the city. Blanchard said it will help stem the flood of cocaine, which he called “our biggest (current) drug problem.”

But, according to Hunter, despite the fact that law enforcement agencies are becoming more effective, a drug-free society is nowhere in sight.

“Drug trafficking is an economic crime,” he said. “Supply and demand at its ‘finest.’ And as long as you have the demand, someone will continue to supply it--no matter what the risk.”