Deputies, LAPD Seize Over a Ton of Cocaine, Nearly $5 Million

In what law officers say is the second-biggest drug bust in Los Angeles County history, sheriff’s deputies Monday seized 1,760 pounds of cocaine, $3.2 million in cash and arrested a suspected drug dealer in a raid on a Maywood house.

The raid came a day after Los Angeles police arrested six suspected drug dealers and confiscated $1.7 million and 702 pounds of cocaine, much of it on a goat farm in San Bernardino County.

The Maywood case brings this year’s total cocaine seizures for Los Angeles and Orange counties to more than 24,000 pounds--five times the amount of cocaine confiscated the previous year by federal and local agents, officials said.

“It’s just shocking,” Sheriff Sherman Block said, waving his hands at the hundreds of packets of money and cocaine with an estimated street value of $150 million that was stacked on a large table at his headquarters. “It is frightening that we have reached the point of this volume, which is easily disposed of on our streets.”

Sheriff’s deputies said they found the $3.2 million stashed in plastic bags in a garage when they arrested Jose G. Martinez at his home in Maywood on Monday night.

The cocaine was seized a few hours later at a home in an unincorporated area of Hacienda Heights. The packaged drugs were stored in garbage sacks piled in two bedrooms. No one was arrested there, but deputies believe that possibly two other suspects lived at the home. Three handguns, apparently collector’s items, and two Chinese-made semiautomatic rifles were also found, plus cartons for 28 more such firearms.

Martinez, a Mexican national, was being held on $1-million bail at the sheriff’s jail in Norwalk on suspicion of possession of cocaine for sale. Deputies are seeking at least three other people in the case.

Tip From Customs Agents

Information about the drug ring was developed after a tip from U.S. Customs officials who were working on another case, officials said. A task force of seven deputies spent a month investigating the case. The deputies were among 22 whose work is financed by money from the federal forfeiture program, in which local agencies share the seized assets and cash from drug busts, officials said.

Americans consumed an estimated 125 tons of cocaine last year, Block added. The wholesale cost of a kilogram of cocaine has dropped from $60,000 to $12,000 in the last couple of years, indicating that the market is glutted in spite of law enforcement attempts to keep the drugs out of the country.

In the goat farm case, Los Angeles police, after a two-month investigation also involving the San Bernardino Sheriff’s Department, arrested Pasqual Rutulante, 33, who was driving a truck on Interstate 15 near Helendale. Approximately 300 kilograms of cocaine was concealed in three large compressed air tanks in the truck’s cargo space, police said.

Colombians Arrested

Later at a ranch in Helendale, near Victorville, about 19 kilos of cocaine was found under a trap door in a large barn where goats were penned. In addition, officers found an assembly-line operation, where other tanks were being taken apart, filled with cocaine, and readied for shipment to other parts of the country, said the LAPD’s Lt. J. R. Schiller.

Arrested at the 80-acre ranch were Pedro Aponte, 23, and Nell Zunega, 22, both Colombians. Two other Colombians, Sergio Ochoa, 33, and Rosa Ochoa, 34, were arrested with $1.6 million in cash at a Riverside home, and Jaime Granda, a 29-year-old Colombian, was arrested in Tujunga with $100,000. All six were being held at San Bernardino County Jail on $5-million bail each on suspicion of possessing cocaine for sale.

Other items confiscated in the case were 10 vehicles, 13 firearms and $28,000 worth of chemicals allegedly used to convert cocaine paste into powder.

The largest cocaine seizure in the county was an Aug. 15 raid in which LAPD officers seized about 2,100 pounds of the drug in Chatsworth.