DEA Urges Tri-County Drug Crackdown : Law enforcement: Police say major L.A. traffickers have moved north. They call east Ventura County a cocaine warehouse.

Federal officials have proposed putting more heat on narcotics traffickers in Ventura, Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties amid evidence that drug kingpins have moved north to escape a crackdown in Los Angeles, law-enforcement sources said.

According to local and federal law-enforcement intelligence, about a dozen major traffickers have moved to the Simi and Conejo valleys and made an effort to blend into quiet, upper-middle-class neighborhoods.

Along with them, the drug dealers have brought increased shipments of narcotics, transforming eastern Ventura County into a warehouse for cocaine distributed nationwide, sources said.

“The eastern part of Ventura County is a suburb of Los Angeles,” said Drug Enforcement Administration supervisor Harry Hensel. “The dope flows over the hill.”

The situation has prompted DEA officials to urge local police agencies to consider joint task forces to thwart the heightened trafficking.

Just last week, for example, DEA officials met with Simi Valley police to discuss forming a new task force for the east county. And later this month, a representative from the federal drug agency plans to sit down with Oxnard and Ventura police to propose a strike force for the two cities.

Other federal/local task forces are on the DEA’s drawing board for Santa Barbara County--initially focusing in the Santa Maria area--and San Luis Obispo County, DEA sources said.

The DEA’s chief agent for Ventura, Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties warned that “there are indicators” that the drug trafficking is reaching a level that requires massive law-enforcement intervention.

“If we don’t do something now, and try to wait three to five years, we’ll get slapped in the face,” said William Modesitt, who runs the agency’s Goleta office.

Modesitt said he admires local police efforts to quell drug trafficking. But he said he believes that they don’t have the manpower or scope to win the battle without federal help.

“I’ve seen too much isolationism up here where agencies work by themselves,” he said. “There are a lot of egos involved. Everybody’s trying to do it alone.”

The DEA considers Oxnard a prime target in its push north.

“We see Oxnard as a major drug distribution area for the central coast,” Modesitt said.

Last year, a DEA task force working with Burbank and Santa Monica police smashed a drug ring that stored 125 kilos of cocaine in an Oxnard house, he said.

“I don’t feel that’s an isolated event,” he said. “It’s going on throughout Ventura County.”

Oxnard also has major problems controlling black-tar heroin produced in Mexico and sold primarily to Latinos, narcotics agents said.

Called “gum” or “tootsie roll” in street jargon, one-tenth of a gram sells for about $20. It can be injected or heated on tin foil so fumes can be inhaled, producing a high called “chasing the dragon.”

“There has been a consistent, steady increase of black-tar heroin and other forms of heroin coming into California over the last five years,” said DEA spokesman Ralph Lochridge in Los Angeles.

“There has been so much heat in L.A.,” he said, that the traffickers have been moving north. “You push down in one area and it pops up somewhere else.”

The evolving drug problem in Oxnard, said the DEA’s Modesitt, “bleeds over into Ventura.”

Sgt. Bill Bogner, who heads the Ventura Police Department’s drug unit, agreed that the problem “crosses all borders.” Besides cocaine and heroin, detectives also have seen significant sales of methamphetamine in the city, he said.

In eastern Ventura County, law-enforcement sources said, the drug problem has been compounded by traffickers doing business from their homes.

“A couple of hundred” dealers from Los Angeles are now believed to be living in the east county, sources said.

The drug dealers’ migration is similar to that of traffickers who left south Florida in the 1980s for Los Angeles. Now, Los Angeles is the nation’s No. 1 center for cocaine distribution, says the DEA. Heroin from Mexico and the Far East also is shipped through Los Angeles to the rest of the country, the agency says.

Of the dealers who have moved their bases from Los Angeles, about a dozen drug kingpins--people who deal in mega-quantities of narcotics--have moved into pricey subdivisions in the Thousand Oaks and Simi Valley areas, DEA sources said.

Most of them, the sources said, are linked to the Calle cartel of Colombia, now considered the world’s dominant cocaine distribution organization.

“It’s easy for them to blend in away from the sphere of the Los Angeles Police Department and the Los Angeles sheriff,” Modesitt said. “They can have a normal life and do their drug dealing somewhere else.”

The narcotics that have come along with them are stored in warehouses, offices and homes in this county and eventually shipped throughout the county and nation, narcotics agents said. Money laundering also has increased as dealers have exchanged their tainted money for clean cash through legitimate businesses.

Federal efforts to answer the explosion of east county drug activity resulted in last week’s meeting with Simi Valley police.

“There’s enough work up there to keep people busy,” said Hensel, who heads a new DEA task force in the San Fernando Valley. Hensel’s unit would coordinate the Simi Valley task force.

The Simi Valley Police Department has a history of working with DEA task forces, loaning a detective to the agency’s Los Angeles office as early as 1987.

“We were the first agency in the county to do it,” said Lt. Robert Klamser. “We are a firm believer in the concept.”

Klamser said his department has tracked the influx of drug dealers. “We’ve seized large quantities of cash in local homes,” he said.

In a DEA task force, police agencies assign officers to work with federal agents for at least a year. In exchange, the DEA is authorized by Congress to pay the local officers’ overtime and expenses and to provide all support for their work.

In addition, under the federal asset-forfeiture program, local police agencies receive cash back from Washington based on their participation in drug busts.

There is precedent for an anti-drug trafficking task force approach in Ventura, Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties. Between 1981 and 1985, the DEA and the FBI participated in such an operation, but it was disbanded when the DEA moved to Goleta.