Hard Spadework Finally Hit Pay Dirt in Drug Bust : Law enforcement: 13-month investigation that started with routine license-plate check nets 39 arrests, tons of cocaine seized.

The demise of a major Southland drug-trafficking ring began with a simple check of a license plate by a narcotics investigator.

Agent Russ Sutter of the Anaheim Police Department and two other undercover narcotics agents had just wrapped up another investigation and had gone to the Anaheim Hills neighborhood of a suspected drug dealer. During a brief stakeout of the suspect’s home, they decided to check the license plates of cars parked there.

One turned out to be registered to Deborah Lynn Mendes, 34, who had previously been in trouble in Texas over illicit drugs.

The drug agents initially trailed her to a San Bernardino beauty parlor where she worked. Unaware she was regularly followed in the weeks to come, Mendes would lead investigators to the major players in a trafficking operation.

“By following her, she basically led us to everyone and everything,” Sutter recalled Tuesday when local and federal authorities revealed that a 13-month undercover investigation had resulted in the arrests of 39 people and the seizure of more than six tons of cocaine in Los Angeles, Orange, San Bernardino and Riverside counties, and as far away as Muskogee, Okla.

“A couple of guys went out to check some old leads,” remarked Tom Davis, a lieutenant with the Regional Narcotics Suppression Program, and “from there it just snowballed.”

Indeed. Drug investigators from about two dozen cities and federal agencies said they seized an estimated $1.7 billion worth of cocaine and marijuana during a series of raids on homes and warehouses between July, 1991, and February of this year. In the course of the raids, 28 individuals were arrested.

The purported leader of the illicit drug organization--which shipped cocaine and marijuana from Mexico aboard trucks and buses operating under the guise of a Fontana-based commercial trucking company--is suspected of ordering four murders over the past year, including one in which someone other than the intended victim was killed, according to narcotics investigators and federal prosecutors. One of the murders occurred in Oklahoma, and others in San Bernardino and San Diego.

The 36-year-old reputed kingpin of the organization, Joseph Edwardo Arvizu of Los Angeles, reportedly ordered the killings to silence suspected informants after narcotics agents began arresting members of the organization and seizing large loads of cocaine, according to the RNSP agents who dismantled the ring.

“These people (in the Arvizu organization) have the propensity to kill people like you have a propensity to pull weeds,” said Daniel Jarvis, an RNSP sergeant who helped supervise the 10 agents involved in the investigation.

Federal prosecutors in Los Angeles have indicted Arvizu and several other members of his organization on drug charges. An FBI agent in Oklahoma has filed a criminal complaint against Arvizu and five other men on conspiracy to distribute cocaine and conspiracy to commit murder.

During a Tuesday press conference in Anaheim Stadium, authorities displayed plastic-wrapped bricks of cocaine and marijuana stacked neatly near a table covered with high-powered weapons seized from homes and warehouses over the past year.

Authorities said they could not estimate the total quantity of drugs the group shipped since the organization began operations in Southern California. But based on the amount of drugs seized, the Arvizu trafficking organization was one of the largest in the Southland and was trying to expand by arranging shipments to the East Coast, RNSP investigators said.

Although most of his lieutenants were arrested, Arvizu himself remains at large and is believed to have fled to Mexico in February, when police began rounding up 11 men and women identified as helping Arvizu run the far-flung operation, an RNSP investigator said.

The 11 suspects, including Mendes, are being held in the Metropolitan Detention Center in Los Angeles, said Capt. Tim Simon of the RNSP.

The 4-year-old organization allegedly spent more than $2.2 million to buy numerous homes and warehouses in Southern California and Oklahoma, as well as several business near Fontana that served as fronts, Simon said. Most were used to stash drugs.

The majority of the warehouses were in Fontana, where constant truck traffic, proximity to the Mexican border, and countless warehouses provide an ideal setting for drug trafficking, agents said.

Homes that organization members owned were scattered from Pico Rivera to Riverside to Chula Vista. In Orange County, suspected organization members operated out of homes in Tustin, Newport Beach and Santa Ana.

The organization in mid-1990 bought Morris Transportation, a legitimate trucking business in Fontana, and its branch office in Oakland to use as a front, investigators said.

Sutter said RNSP investigators spent “thousands of hours” watching and following suspects. During months of surveillance, Sutter said, “we had to stay as concealed as we could, hide as well as we could.” And some months seemed endless, he recalled.

“Imagine sitting out in beautiful Fontana during June, July, August, September, October. You’d be cooped up in the cab of a Peterbilt when it’s 110 degrees, watching 24 hours a day.” But the snooping paid off, beginning in late July, when narcotics agents stormed homes in Tustin, Chino and Commerce and came away with a cache of semiautomatic weapons, 831 kilograms of cocaine and two arrests.

The biggest single bust of the investigation was in Fontana on Oct. 9, 1991, when LAPD officers seized 2,298 kilograms of cocaine and arrested seven people.

RNSP agents deliberately concealed their involvement in the regional investigation by using local police or federal agents, such as those from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, to make arrests and serve search warrants.

The arrests and busts served to chip away at Arvizu’s organization, agents said.

“Who we hurt was Arvizu and that’s why people started dying,” said an RNSP agent who declined to be identified.