$79 Million in Cocaine Seized, Four Arrested

Drug investigators from the Los Angeles Police Department and the federal Drug Enforcement Administration seized 457 pounds of cocaine in Orange County and $526,500 in cash in downtown Los Angeles, it was announced Wednesday.

Agents confiscated the cash after arresting Julio Perez, 25, and Gloria Arias, 36, in Los Angeles. The arrests led to the issuance of search warrants for four Orange County locations, the investigators said.

The cache of cocaine, with an estimated street value of $79 million, was found Tuesday during a search of a residence on Delaware Street in Huntington Beach. Luz Mary Guzman, 26, was arrested at the house on suspicion of possession of cocaine.

The cocaine was discovered in a one-story, wood-frame house at the rear of the Huntington Beach address. The ramshackle house appeared to be unoccupied, although an expensive new automobile was parked in front. Observed through an open back window were three opened suitcases on a bed, a television set and a few food items on a shelf.

Manuel Vasquez Garcia, 65, was arrested on drug charges during a search at another site, a two-story home that he shares with his wife on Canary Drive in Costa Mesa.

The two residents of the front house at the Huntington Beach address identified their landlord as a man named Manuel Garcia and said he was the only person they had ever seen at the rear house, where articles of female underclothing were strung on a laundry line across the front yard.

According to resident Geoff Green, 21, a Newport Beach bartender, Garcia had been making repairs on the rear house last week when he last saw him there.

Green displayed a business card he said Garcia gave him that identified Garcia as an interpreter-investigator with offices in Santa Ana. An answering service said several attorneys work at the same address as Garcia but none could be reached for comment.

Mike Vreeland, 22, who also lives in the front residence and works at the same restaurant with Green, described Garcia as a “nice, friendly guy who always wore a baseball hat. . . . I called him ‘Magnum’ because he told us he was a private eye.”

Search warrants were also served at a house on Indiana Avenue in Buena Park and another home on Rancho Santiago in Orange. No arrests were made at those locations, said DEA spokesman Dwight McKinney.

The investigation is continuing and more arrests are possible, said Lt. J. R. Schiller of the Police Department’s Narcotics Division.