Ledgers Show Daily Profit of $3 Million for Cocaine Suspect : Drugs: Operation linked to seizure of 21 tons a year ago in Sylmar was larger than officials imagined. Six men are on trial in the case.

When authorities raided a Sylmar warehouse a year ago, seizing 21.4 tons of cocaine, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration said the drug cache was the largest ever recorded anywhere in the world.

But now, as the trial of six defendants charged with stockpiling the cocaine unfolds in a federal courtroom in Los Angeles, authorities say the amount of drugs distributed by the ring was far greater than they had imagined.

The operation was so profitable, they said, that one of the alleged ringleaders--Carlos Tapia-Ponce, 69, of Mexico--was making as much as $3 million a day off the operation, according to seized ledgers.

Asked to put the figure in perspective, a DEA source said it represented about 3% of the cocaine sales generated daily in the current U.S. market. “Your mind doesn’t want to believe $3 million a day, but that’s the lure of narcotics,” the source said.

The $3-million figure and other intelligence information was collected by the DEA and the Internal Revenue Service and is contained in a now-unsealed search warrant affidavit filed in federal court in El Paso, Tex.

The affidavit was authored by Palmira A. Lopez, a DEA agent in El Paso, who, along with Los Angeles-based DEA agent James L. Capra, is assisting federal prosecutors.

El Paso is a key city in unscrambling the Sylmar puzzle because the cocaine, which was shipped in multi-ton quantities to California, entered the border city from Mexico over a period of at least two years.

According to the affidavit, the drugs were stored in warehouses in El Paso and then moved to Los Angeles--the nation’s No. 1 cocaine distribution center-- aboard big-rig trucks fitted with secret compartments.

In his opening statement to a federal court jury last week, Assistant U.S. Atty. James P. Walsh Jr., revealed that the Sylmar drug cache, which carried a wholesale value of $6 billion, only told part of the story.

In fact, Walsh said, cocaine trafficking through the warehouse had been accelerated to the point where, in the three months preceding the seizure last Sept. 28 and 29, an additional 77 tons were recorded in confiscated ledgers.

Government intelligence sources contend that the Sylmar operation “was a family-run cocaine trafficking organization” operating with a structure akin to a legitimate business. Its primary source of cocaine was Colombia’s Medellin cartel.

The seizure at the Sylmar warehouse has caused the DEA to make adjustments in the way they intercept drug traffickers and has forced the narcotics smugglers to make countermoves, according to the DEA.

Now, the DEA source said, spot deliveries of cocaine from major drug labs in Colombia, Bolivia and Peru are being transshipped through Mexico to wholesaler-distributors in the United States in quantities generally not exceeding 200 kilos (one kilo equals 2.2 pounds).

“They want to avoid another Sylmar-type discovery,” he said.

Before the Sylmar event, the Colombians were flooding the U.S. market with cocaine, partly due to cocaine overproduction in that country, the DEA said.

But now, stemming from the Sylmar bust and major efforts in South America and Mexico to control cocaine production and distribution, the Colombians are having more trouble moving the drug through their traditional pipelines to the United States.

“They have to rely on good communication” and the movement of many more shipments of smaller quantities to so-called “safe houses” in the Los Angeles area, the DEA source said.

“Now, we’re seeing a closer match to supply and demand,” he added.

Additionally, “there may be more of a waiting period for cocaine,” he said. “The producers are more cautious now on who they’re selling to. And intelligence tells us there is a stockpiling of cocaine going on outside the United States in an effort to artificially drive up prices. Much of this is in Mexico along its northern border with the United States in what we call ‘stash ranches.’ ”

Although authorities had no idea about the Sylmar warehouse until tipped by a resident, DEA agent Lopez had already begun accumulating information on one of the defendants, James Romero McTague, 42, of El Paso, as far back as 1986. His name surfaced during an investigation of a 600-pound marijuana seizure, according to the affidavit.

Prosecutor Walsh and Special Assistant U.S. Atty. Susan Bryant-Deason, who is co-prosecuting the case, contend that McTague, who is Tapia-Ponce’s son-in-law, was the manager of the Sylmar warehouse operation who supervised the cocaine distribution.

Those charged in the case include McTague; Tapia-Ponce; his son, Hector, 39; another son-in-law, Jose Ignacio Monroy, 37; and a fifth defendant, Hugo Fernando Castillon, 32. They are accused of conspiracy to possess with intent to distribute narcotics. A sixth defendant, Miguel Chavez, 34, is charged with possession with intent to distribute narcotics.

With the exception of McTague, an American from El Paso, the other defendants are from Mexico, and some have residences in both countries.

Defense lawyers say their clients have nothing to do with cocaine trafficking.

It was during 1988, according to agent Lopez’s affidavit, that she struck pay dirt.

At that time, she began to exchange information with an IRS agent in El Paso, Alice Huereque, who had an anonymous source of information--code-named “SOI-1”--who said that McTague was overseeing the transportation of “million-dollar cocaine shipments” from El Paso to Los Angeles about “three times a week.”

McTague, through his lawyer, Michael Pancer of San Diego, has pleaded innocent to the charges.

According to her source, Tapia-Ponce’s son, Hector, “owned the tractor-trailers which were transporting the cocaine” from the Mexican border city of Juarez into El Paso, and that the organization used several warehouses to store the cocaine.

The ring was “a family-run cocaine trafficking organization and all family members participated with duties ranging from importing money to counter-surveillance on the cocaine transportation routes,” the informant said.

After the September, 1989, cocaine seizure in Sylmar, Los Angeles DEA agents searched a penthouse apartment on Sepulveda Street in Sherman Oaks leased by Tapia-Ponce, McTague and Monroy, according to the affidavit.

“In the penthouse, ledgers indicating that Tapia-Ponce was making $2 million to $3 million a day from selling hundreds of kilograms of cocaine were found,” Lopez said in her sworn affidavit.

On Oct. 1, 1989, a DEA intelligence analyst in Los Angeles, Mike Stranahan, told Lopez he had a confidential informant, identified as “SOI-2,” who had told him that the cocaine source for the father and son “was the Medellin, Colombia, cartel,” one of Colombia’s two major drug cartels.

“Hector Tapia-Anchondo usually went through a Mexican connection to receive the cocaine supply, but also contacted some unknown person in the Medellin cartel himself by telephone,” the source said.

Ironically, a DEA source said the success of the Sylmar raid may have made it more difficult for agents to find large caches because the cartels have altered their routes and drug storage places.

“It made it harder for both sides,” the source said.