U.S. Labels L.A. a Center of Drug Trade, Violence

An attorney general’s report released Thursday portrays the Los Angeles area as an epicenter of drug trade and violence that is seeping into every corner of the nation.

The report, the result of 93 U.S. attorneys working for almost a year to map out the nation’s drug problem region by region, paints a stark portrait of California--and specifically Los Angeles--as a “uniquely vulnerable” staging area for illegal drug activities.

Supplying the nation with perhaps half of its cocaine, 80% of its PCP or “angel dust” and much of its methamphetamine, and with marijuana possibly the state’s largest cash crop, California has also begun exporting Los Angeles’ violent street gangs to rural America, the report says.

Los Angeles gang members have been discovered selling “crack” cocaine in 47 other cities, have recently been convicted of drug dealing in rural Iowa and have operated rock houses in small towns in South Dakota, the report notes. It calls the proliferation of Los Angeles’ Bloods and Crips gangs “one of the most dangerous and menacing developments in drug trafficking.”

Not Expected in Iowa

“At the outset we knew that the country was awash in narcotics and dangerous drugs, but we did not expect to find significant cocaine organizations in Wyoming, or heroin trafficking in Iowa,” Atty. Gen. Dick Thornburgh said at a press conference. “It’s everywhere.”

Billed as a “Dun and Bradstreet” primer on the pervasiveness of drugs in America, the report details in three phone-book thick volumes how the drug trade is changing the face of the nation, including banking, business and organized crime.

A summary was presented by Thornburgh to drug czar William Bennett, who met later Thursday with President Bush to discuss work on a comprehensive anti-drug policy. Bennett is director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy.

“There weren’t any great shocking surprises,” Bennett told reporters. “Most of the USA is a high-intensity drug trafficking area.”

Although he and Thornburgh did not detail likely policy changes, the report is certain to prompt a new call by Los Angeles-area officials for greater federal assistance in combatting drug traffickers.

Complaining of an East Coast bias in the allocation of federal money, the heads of the Los Angeles offices of the FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration, U.S. Customs Service and Immigration and Naturalization Service in April joined county supervisors in appealing to Congress and the Bush Administration for more money and manpower.

Bennett visited Los Angeles in June and agreed that the area “has to be the focal point of any serious effort,” but made no commitments of assistance.

“This will obviously be used in our efforts to get more attention paid to Los Angeles,” Ed Edelman, chairman of the county Board of Supervisors, said after the release of the Thornburgh report. “I think the stats speak for themselves.”

“The point we have tried to make is that we’re not talking about just a local problem here,” said Los Angeles County Assistant Sheriff Jerry Harper. “We’re talking about a national problem . . . if this is the major beachhead, for cocaine in particular, why not fight the war at the beachhead.”

The section of the report covering Los Angeles was prepared by the U.S. attorney’s office for the central district of California, which also includes Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, Ventura, Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties.

Many of the conclusions echo the announcement by federal and local narcotics agents in January that they had seized more than $100 million in cash in Los Angeles in 1988 while arresting more than 90,000 people on drug charges. It was the first time that more cash was seized in Los Angeles than Miami. But Miami authorities still confiscated about twice as much as the 15 tons of cocaine seized in Los Angeles last year.

DEA officials in Washington concluded at the time that while Miami remained the nation’s major import point for cocaine, about 40% of the drug entering the United States was being shipped to the Los Angeles area. “Based on huge seizures of cocaine, . . . that figure may be above 50%,” according to the report.

The report noted that drug trafficking patterns have changed drastically from 10 years ago, when “Los Angeles was primarily a drug-consuming market” and “the great majority of cocaine (consumed in Los Angeles) was smuggled into the United States in Florida and then shipped overland to California.”

After a South Florida task force was established in 1982 to fight drug importing there, Colombian cocaine kingpins began forming alliances with Mexican drug organizations, the report said.

Since 1984, the report said, “vast amounts” of cocaine have been smuggled into Los Angeles from Mexico on the ground and in small airplanes that regularly land on “over 100 clandestine airstrips” in desert areas.

In addition, other drugs are smuggled by boat to “hundreds of miles of unprotected coastline.”

“Los Angeles presents a unique and vulnerable target to prospective drug traffickers,” the report concludes. “Factors of geography and population and, to a lesser extent, climate all conspire to make this area attractive. . . .”

The report also said that “the generally relaxed and leisure-oriented life style of the Southern California area, coupled with the glamorous entertainment industry . . . has given rise to an accepting attitude toward drug use.”

The section on Los Angeles notes that “crack” cocaine first appeared in the city in 1981, then spread to other parts of the country in recent years, providing a new widespread business for the city’s street gangs.

“Los Angeles street gangs now dominate the rock cocaine trade in Los Angeles and elsewhere, due in part to their steady recourse to murderous violence to enforce territorial dealing supremacy, to deter cheating and to punish rival gang members,” the report says, estimating that more than 10,000 gang members are actively involved in the drug dealing.

While their activities are mainly concentrated in black communities around Los Angeles, “the LAPD has identified 47 cities from Seattle to Kansas City to Baltimore, where Los Angeles street gang traffickers have appeared,” the report said.

More than half the 452 gang-related killings in Los Angeles County last year were drug related, the report says.

Several factors make enforcement difficult in Los Angeles, according to the document, including the world’s busiest freeway system “which at once facilitates travel and complicates law enforcement surveillance and coordination,” particularly in a county with 43 police departments.

Jamaican ‘Posses’

The report says law enforcement agencies have special problems with gangs other than the traditional ones. For example, it says Jamaican “posses,” which operate cocaine rock houses nationwide, have about 400 members in Los Angeles and are “principally distinguished by ready recourse to brutal violence against whole families, especially with automatic weapons, which makes the violence of the street gangs pale in comparison.”

Not much is known about the posses in Los Angeles, the report says, largely because of “the difficulty of infiltrating their operations with undercover officers.”

Similarly, a shortage of officers fluent in Chinese, Thai, Korean and other languages has made it difficult to infiltrate Asian criminal organizations that import heroin.

The report also cites other statistics that may make California the nation’s “drug capital”:

- Los Angeles is “an ocean of drug-tainted cash,” with the Federal Reserve’s cash surplus in the city surpassing that of Miami’s for the first time last year.

- The marijuana-producing area of the state is the greatest source of on-the-job-injuries for federal agents, with 4% of raids resulting in investigators being hospitalized.

- San Diego has become the methamphetamine capital of the United States, with 136 “meth” labs found there in 1988.

- Los Angeles and San Diego rival Miami as cocaine distribution-money laundering centers.

- California motorcycle gangs, led by the Hells Angels, have become a major drug smuggling network.

- The state leads the country in assets forfeited by drug traffickers, with almost $120 million seized in four years.

The report admits, however, that “anecdotal information” is the basis for the statement that “marijuana may be the largest single case crop produced in a state which is one of the major agricultural economies in the country.”

Michael J. Ybarra reported from Washington and Paul Lieberman from Los Angeles.