U.S. Seizes Ship, Cocaine Cargo in Gulf of Mexico : Coast Guard Haul Points to Frantic Bid by Colombia Drug Lords, Officials Say

The Coast Guard, announcing “the largest maritime cocaine seizure in history,” said Wednesday it has intercepted a ship carrying at least 5.75 tons of the drug, with an estimated street value of nearly $2 billion, through the Gulf of Mexico.

U.S. officials said that the seizure reinforces mounting evidence that Colombian traffickers, reacting to a government crackdown, have launched an effort to move bulk quantities of cocaine to the United States before their vulnerable caches are uncovered by police authorities.

Indications of the exodus have been found in an extraordinary series of cocaine busts by U.S. authorities, beginning with a record 20-ton find in a Sylmar warehouse last week, the officials said.

The latest interception, about 400 miles south of New Orleans, brings the week’s count of cocaine seizures to nearly 28 tons--about 7% of estimated annual world production.

“Their stash sites in Colombia are in jeopardy, and they’ve had to move it out,” said Charles P. Gutensohn, chief of the Drug Enforcement Administration’s cocaine investigations division.

Officials said that the unusual size of the cocaine stockpiles found in the Los Angeles area and aboard a number of vessels offshore suggests that cocaine traffickers in Colombia have adopted new tactics in an effort to dispatch shipments in haste.

As a result, Gutensohn said, “they’re making big, dumb mistakes.” But he and other officials cautioned that the new modus operandi by Colombian traffickers is certain to include changes “that we don’t yet know about.”

‘Something Unusual Happening

“We have never seen these large stashes before,” said John Zienter, special agent in charge of Los Angeles DEA office. “It tells me something unusual is happening. The something unusual is the pressure we’re applying in South America, particularly in Colombia. It’s too early to say if they (the Colombians) are panicking, but I certainly would hope so.”

The apparent burst of activity by the drug cartels marks an end to a monthlong lull in cocaine smuggling. Federal officials had hailed the slowdown as an indication that the Colombian government’s offensive against trafficking operations was succeeding.

While conceding that the respite had ended, officials contended that the pattern of disruption is continuing. Shipments of raw coca from Peru and Bolivia to factories in Colombia remain minimal, they said. And they characterized the huge U.S.-bound shipments as indications of desperation among Colombian traffickers.

“First they battened down the hatches,” one official said. “Now their cache locations are in jeopardy, and they’re looking for an opening to get it out.”

Officials said that the massive seizure in the Gulf of Mexico resulted from a “cold hit” on a ship bound for Tampa, Fla., by a lone Coast Guard cutter patrolling in international waters near the Yucatan peninsula. A “cold hit” is an apprehension based on no prior information about suspected criminal activity.

The Coast Guard crew members who boarded and searched the vessel found 11,500 pounds of cocaine secreted in containers aboard the ship, Coast Guard Lt. Cmdr. Jim Simpson said. Three more containers inaccessible at sea might contain yet more cocaine, he said.

The Coast Guard cutter was escorting the seized vessel to New Orleans, where it is expected to dock early today. Officials said that the interception took place several days ago, but they declined to provide further details until the ship is in port.

The largest previous maritime seizure of cocaine occurred in November, 1987, in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., where officials found more than 8,700 pounds of cocaine in hollowed-out lumber that had been cut for patio furniture.

The announcement of the gulf seizure followed two U.S. operations earlier this week that together netted nearly two tons of cocaine near Puerto Rico.

Other Big Seizures

On Monday, a Coast Guard-Customs Service operation seized a 148-foot Panamanian freighter and found 2,840 pounds of cocaine hidden in a shipping container in the cargo hold. On Tuesday, another joint operation recovered 1,120 pounds of cocaine in bales that had been dropped at sea from an aircraft.

The 15,460 pounds seized in the three operations represents more cocaine than the Coast Guard seized during all of 1988, officials noted.

“We’ve sat through roughly a month now of a pretty dry spell as far as smuggling activity was concerned,” said Leon Guinn, a senior Customs official who heads enforcement operations in Florida. “Now suddenly we’re back in the middle of it again.”

U.S. officials said that it was the sheer magnitude of the 20-ton stash found in the Los Angeles warehouse--rather than the fact that it contained drugs from both the Cali and Medellin cartels--that provided a powerful clue that something unusual was afoot.

Both the Cali and Medellin operations have long used the same Mexican smugglers to bring their cocaine into Los Angeles, and they are believed even to have shared the same warehouses before reclaiming the stashes for distribution, the officials said.

But they also said they believe the size of the stockpile was unprecedented. “It just doesn’t make sense for anyone to put that much cocaine in one place,” said the DEA’s Gutensohn.

The DEA’s Gutensohn declined to say if investigators had learned when the cocaine had been smuggled into the United States. But other sources said that evidence uncovered in the search indicated that the Los Angeles warehouse was being used as a storage site for bulky shipments dispatched from Colombia within the last few weeks.

SYLMAR BUST’S IMPACT: Police Chief Daryl F. Gates is confident that the record Sylmar cocaine bust will mean new anti-drug resources for the Southland. Metro, Page 3