War on Cocaine Fought on 3 Frustrating Fronts

Law enforcement’s strategy in the war on cocaine has been to fight on three major fronts--but all have met with incredible problems, frustrated law officers say.

As a result, law officers who once thought manpower and money were the only obstacles to eliminating drugs like cocaine now say they are being overwhelmed by an ever-increasing appetite for the drugs.

The battle is being waged on foreign soil, on the coast and along the Mexican border and on the streets. In each, there are problems:

--Fighting cocaine trafficking at its source--through crop eradication programs in Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Brazil--has had only modest success, Drug Enforcement Agency officials say, and bumper coca crops abound.

Persuading foreign governments to eradicate the crops or to carry out agreements for joint operations with the United States has been difficult at best, officials say. Even when such operations are mounted, results are often hampered because of logistic and political problems.

--Border interdiction operations are expensive--best accomplished with high-tech radar, search and chase planes, massive manpower at ports of entry and no small amount of luck. Even when the operations are successful, those caught with drugs at the border are most often expendable couriers, not drug bosses, customs officials say.

--On the streets of cities like Los Angeles, where customers abound, the promise of quick riches has allowed establishment of a variety of drug networks--professional and amateur. The economics of marketing cocaine in rock form and the ease with which it can be distributed have made police work a nightmare.

Lt. J. R. Schiller of the Los Angeles Police Narcotics Division likens the street battle to firefighting: “We send a lot of men into an area on a short-term basis and try to extinguish the drug sales. Then we move into another area, then back again, trying to keep the embers from turning into a full-scale fire.”

Here is a look at how the war is being fought:

The New Route

In recent months, the cocaine pipeline from Colombia to Southern California has become the focus of U.S. frustration. “The 200-mile border between Mexico and California has become a deadly sieve through which daily pours illicit drugs . . . leaving in its wake ruined lives and dirty fortunes,” U.S. Sen. Pete Wilson (R-Calif.) said during a recent hearing.

Well-run businesses that they are, the dozen or so major South American drug cartels that have traditionally used Florida to unload have begun taking more interest in the most direct route to their largest retail market--through Mexico and across the border into Southern California.

Los Angeles, like Miami, is an attractive target for drug smugglers--it is a multicultural urban financial center close to an extremely busy border-crossing area. Even more important, said Glenn Levant, a Los Angeles police commander, “What we have are customers--very, very good customers.”

Long Involvement

Mexicans have long been involved in drug smuggling, according to Kenneth Ingleby, special agent in charge of U.S. Customs in San Diego.

For 30 years or more, Mexican drug families have been trafficking heroin and marijuana, most of it grown in that country. However, the drugs were not of high quality and were often cut with everything from “brick mortar to chicken feathers,” Ingleby said. During the mid-1970s, when Mexican officials at the prodding of the United States conducted large-scale eradication of poppy and marijuana fields, Colombian dealers stepped in to supply upward of 70% of the marijuana imported into this country, striking deals with the Mexicans for use of their distribution networks, Drug Enforcement Agency officials say.

Later, when marijuana crackdowns at U.S. ports made the bulky dope loads unprofitable, Colombians began concentrating on cocaine, again paying off Mexicans who helped route the drugs across their country, warehoused it and shuttled it across the border in small quantities.

Crisis on Border

In May, Customs Commissioner William Von Raab said that drug trade along the border from Texas to California had reached a “crisis proportion” and efforts to stem it were doomed to failure without Mexico’s cooperation.

In mid-August, Mexican President Miguel de la Madrid pledged to crack down on drug corruption in his country. That same day, Administration officials learned that a DEA agent had been beaten and shocked with a cattle prod during interrogation by Mexican state police. Last year, another DEA agent was murdered in a scheme reportedly involving Mexican officials.

Both countries have been working to patch the resultant strained relations. “We are really getting full cooperation from Mexico at this point. They are really trying,” said Associate U.S. Atty. Gen. Stephen Trott.

At the Border

It is because crop eradication has been less than successful that border interdiction has become so important, federal drug fighters say. The problem is one of strategy against a mobile, well-equipped smuggling force.

A new General Accounting Office report critical of West Coast interdiction efforts says that more resources and better coordination are needed.

Law enforcement tactics in the Southwest differ from those in Florida, where more than 70% of cocaine enters the country, explained Ted Hunter, Los Angeles regional DEA director. Because most smuggling in the Southeast is by sea, radar planes and boat patrols have been used successfully to set up “choke points” in the Caribbean.

But along the Mexican border, U.S. Customs officials say, it has so far been impossible to stem the flow of drugs. They have identified 760 areas where drug trafficking occurs, as well as 472 clandestine airstrips and 132 drug warehouses. U.S. Rep. Glenn English (D-Okla.) says he is optimistic that the new task force will diminish smuggling along that 2,000-mile stretch.

Still, Terry Bowen, DEA agent in the California border town of Calexico, describes the smuggling as “coming in every which way--over, under, around, by sea, air, land.”

And in San Bernardino County, Capt. Leonard Johnson, narcotics commander for the Sheriff’s Department, said it is “still going to be an almost impossible task with 20,157 square miles to patrol. We have 93 dry lakes and countless dirt roads they can land on.”

The nearest things to Florida’s choke points are the border ports of entry, including the five along California’s 200-mile border.

San Ysidro is the busiest. And along with the 58 million people a year crossing from Mexico into the San Diego area comes most of the cocaine, some knowledgeable sources believe. Between January and June of this year, 300 pounds of cocaine was seized there.

It is a treasure hunt fraught with stress and only occasional triumph. Because they can inspect in detail only about 5% of the vehicles crossing the border and have only 40 seconds to get a feeling about a single car moving through, inspectors must rely on license plate checks, psychological profiles and “a lot of gut hunches,” explained customs supervising inspector Robert Shorey.

Imaginative Ploys

The length to which smugglers will go to hide the cocaine is “only limited by their imagination,” Shorey said. “And our apprehension of them is limited only by ours.”

Truck frames have been split and filled with cocaine, fake linings have been made for camper tops, gas tanks have been divided, surfboards have been hollowed out.

It’s a continuous cat-and-mouse game, Shorey explained, with smuggler and inspectors constantly trying to catch one another at a disadvantage. Smugglers have used undercover men posing as curio salesmen to walk the traffic lines near the crossing gates to spy on inspectors in hopes of finding those who might be tired and executing only cursory examinations.

In turn, customs has used teams to walk by waiting traffic to target suspicious cars.

One recent smuggling ploy, officials reported, has been to send cocaine across with pregnant women or families. Smugglers also are sending decoys across the border--trucks on which some cocaine is hidden, apparently figuring that if inspectors are diverted they will be less likely to go after the big loads following just behind. Or they will send a vehicle without cocaine on a test crossing to see if it raises eyebrows.

Stashed Under Truck

One inspector, who asked that his name not be used because “I have a wife and kids and these guys play rough,” recalled finding 85 pounds of coke under a truck. He remembered the way the Colombian woman’s necklace “seemed almost to pop off her neck,” when he asked to see what she was bringing across. The woman showed him a plaster bull and a vase. He pulled her truck in for a more thorough search.

Bo, one of 17 dogs used at the border, “kept scratching and going crazy” at a place behind the seat, he said. The inspector squirmed under the truck, found a metal plate welded to the cab. “We opened it up, and I thought we’d find maybe a little, but there it was, pack after pack after pack. I’d never seen anything like it.”

Beyond problems at the border, there is concern that the California coastline is vulnerable to smugglers. The General Accounting Office report on the effectiveness of interdiction efforts suggests that the chance of stopping seaborne smuggling on the West Coast is practically nil.

On the Streets

Narcotics officers have their problems once the cocaine gets into town. As Glenn Levant, LAPD’s commander of special investigations, said: “It’s easier to take 1,000 pounds of cocaine before it gets here than to hunt it down gram by gram on the street.”

That task has grown tougher in the last two years because of “rock” or “crack,” a form of crystallized cocaine that is believed to have had its start in Los Angeles.

Just a few blocks from the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, while most of the world was viewing the 1984 Olympics, what is now described as a national epidemic had its beginnings. Crack has changed the economics of cocaine peddling, has fostered new difficulties in detecting distribution efforts and has made cocaine a far wider problem than had been believed.

Crack’s main effect has been in reducing the price to perhaps $10 for enough of the drug for a “high,” perhaps a tenth of the price of powdered cocaine. “This (cocaine) used to have a market clientele of the upper middle class and rich, but now anybody almost any age can use rock,” said Los Angeles Police Lt. Michael Melton, head of the South Bureau Anti-Drug Task Force.

In Los Angeles, the lower price triggered a new street market and a seemingly disconnected network of 1,000 well-fortified “rock” houses mainly in South-Central Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley. It was when rock houses proved virtually impregnable that Los Angeles police unveiled a six-ton tank armed with a 14-foot battering ram.

Crack made cocaine a street crime again at a time when many local police agencies had abandoned their efforts against small-level dealers in favor of pursuing the higher-ups in drug trafficking.

The problem is so widespread in Los Angeles that one police officer, only half in jest, said, “There are more rock stops in South-Central than bus stops.”

One 9-year-old told a Times reporter that he started out as a lookout for dealers, but has been dealing himself lately. An electronic beeper on his belt sounded and he hurried off to respond to the calling customer.

Police say they have been successful using marked money to make drug buys and subsequent arrests. But despite hundreds of arrests, the street trade in crack is flourishing, they say. “On the streets, we are busy but we are only making a dent in the drug traffic, particularly of rock,” Melton said.

In the rock or crack business, there is no “Mr. Big” because it is so easy to buy a small amount of cocaine and cook it with baking powder and water.

Local police, who had complained that they lacked the money, manpower and time to follow small-time cases up the organizational ladder to the international trafficking bosses, now find themselves working with the federal Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force programs, which have been given the money and responsibility for pursuing major dealers.

Cases involving the major dealers are played out worlds apart from that of the street dealer, often in the world of wealthy estates and fashionable night spots.

Still, Los Angeles police have seized more than 7,000 pounds of cocaine this year.

The flood of prosecutions of street-level crack dealers is clogging the courts, some officials say, and resulting in calls for stiffer sentencing.

“As it is, some of these young dealers are frequently getting one, two or three days in jail,” said Diane Vezzani, a special drug division assistant to Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner. “It’s a revolving door that has the citizens who see them almost immediately (back) on the street feel there is no punishment or justice.”

Vezzani said that four out of five criminal complaints filed in narcotics cases involve cocaine in rock or crack form.

Authorities say the other area in the county overwhelmed by street sellers and users is northwest Pasadena, bringing with it a wave of burglaries, robberies and assaults.

“Somehow, we are going to have to take the streets back from these people. But the whole community is going to have to take part and help the police,” said the Rev. John Perkins of that area of Pasadena, whose home has been firebombed twice after confrontations with dealers.

James Cleaver, an aide to county Supervisor Kenneth Hahn and former editor of the Los Angeles Sentinel newspaper, echoed those remarks about South-Central Los Angeles: “The police can’t do it. They are outnumbered. But the decent people down there are not, and we are going to claim back our community.”

Contributing to this story was Times researcher Susanna Shuster.