Drug Probe Targets 40 at Eastern Airlines

More than 40 Eastern Airlines’ baggage handlers are under federal investigation for allegedly smuggling significant amounts of cocaine, primarily from Colombia through Miami, law enforcement sources said Wednesday.

The investigation by the Drug Enforcement Administration is expected to lead to indictments this spring, the officials said.

Word of the investigation first surfaced Tuesday when DEA Administrator John C. Lawn, in San Jose, Calif., to deliver a speech to the Commonwealth Club of California, said that about 50 employees of an unidentified airline would be indicted soon on charges of smuggling cocaine.

Tip From Colombians

Other sources familiar with the investigation, which began last summer after a tip from Colombian authorities, confirmed that the airline involved in the probe is Eastern.

“We will . . . cooperate every way with the authorities to make certain that none of our airplanes or our employees are involved in that trade,” Eastern Chairman Frank Borman said Wednesday night in an interview with NBC News.

The law enforcement sources said that the smugglers showed great ingenuity in hiding the cocaine in passengers’ baggage and in telling handlers in Miami to keep those bags away from Customs Service agents and drug-sniffing dogs.

One law enforcement official, declining to describe the means of hiding the narcotics and informing baggage handlers on the other end of the flight, would say only that “they’re bounded only by their imaginations.”

The sources dismissed as “outrageous” estimates that two or three tons of cocaine had been smuggled into the country by the baggage handlers. But they acknowledged that baggage handlers, who are paid about $20,000 a year, could “triple or quadruple “ their wages with such smuggling.

19% Smuggled on Airlines

DEA officials have estimated that roughly 19% of the cocaine now being smuggled into the United States is carried on commercial airlines. Other law enforcement sources said that less than half of that amount is attributable to the suspected Eastern scheme.

“There’s an amazing network,” one source said of smuggling operations on airlines. “But as far as we can tell, it’s at the baggage-handler level, with no airline executives caught up in it.”

Eastern, which has been threatened with a union-led proxy fight for control of the troubled carrier, is facing a Feb. 28 deadline to obtain money-saving measures from its three unions, representing pilots, machinists and flight attendants. If the efforts fail, lenders may move against the airline, which owes $2.5 billion.