Innocent Ties to Drug Dealers Can Hurt

Inga Lourey says she has never met a drug trafficker, but for seven months she and other business owners unwittingly paid rent to one.

Now they are paying the federal government, which seized the property.

Lourey and her husband, Carl, own a supermarket in the Park II Alto Mesa shopping center on El Paso’s upscale West Side. Unbeknown to them, the $4.3-million center was owned by Rafael Munoz Talavera, considered the “premier godfather” of cocaine smuggling from Mexico into the United States, government officials say.

Federal investigators say he headed a smuggling ring that moved at least 60 tons of cocaine into the United States during 1989, including the 21.4 tons discovered last September in a warehouse in Sylmar, Calif.

Munoz Talavera was arrested shortly after the warehouse was seized and now is jailed just a few miles from Lourey’s store, across the border in Cuidad Juarez, Mexico.

In November, the U.S. Marshals Service seized the shopping center and told the Loureys and other merchants who their landlord had been.

Lourey said she had no idea who owned the shopping center. “We just had an address we sent the rent to,” she said.

“There are a lot of people doing business with criminals who do not have any way of being aware of it at the time,” said Steven T. Boyle, spokesman for Marshals Service headquarters in Arlington, Va.

The shopping center is one of more than 26,300 properties seized by the Marshals Service in 1989--from real estate to cars and personal belongings--as the result of drug investigations, Boyle said.

There is little anyone can do to avoid doing business with a drug dealer, Boyle said, since usually the first information linking someone with the illegal trade comes out when they’re indicted or arrested.

And by then, it probably is too late for the innocent business person to avoid feeling the consequences, as the Loureys found out.

When the public learned of the shopping center seizure, some of Lourey’s customers believed merchants there might be fronts for drug dealers.

“We had some snide remarks from customers. Some were saying: ‘If you’re involved in laundering money, we’re not coming to the store anymore.’ Others said they would boycott the store,” she said.

Merchants became so worried that they got the Marshals Service to issue a statement saying their businesses are legitimate.

But Lourey worries that something similar will happen again, and she doubts that she could do anything to prevent it.

“Shopping centers change hands. If this happens again, are you going to ask (the landlord) are you OK? Is your money all right?” she asked.

Boyle said about the only tip-off to a drug connection is someone trying to buy something with a briefcase full of cash.

The man who sold the shopping center said he, too, was a victim. He said he sold the property to, and did business only with, Rafael Munoz Tellez, the father of Munoz Talavera, not knowing the link.

“It hurt my business tremendously. I lost clients. A lot of people in town talk,” said the property seller, who spoke only on the condition that his name not be used. He said more publicity would further erode his business, which is just beginning to recover.

The shopping center was one of about a dozen residential and commercials properties seized in El Paso and Ruidoso, N.M., as a result of the September cocaine seizure in California. The federal government will maintain them until a court rules whether the suspects must forfeit the properties.

The number of properties seized by the Marshals Service has been escalating with the drug war. Seven times as many properties were seized last year than were just three years ago--3,645 in 1986. Last year’s seizures were valued at $1.09 billion.