Routine Check Brought Down Drug Ring : Crime: The inquiry into a license plate number started a 13-month undercover operation that led to 39 arrests and the seizure of nearly six tons of cocaine.

The demise of a major Southland drug trafficking ring began with a simple check of a license plate by a narcotics investigator, authorities said Tuesday.

That check ultimately enabled investigators from about two dozen cities and federal agencies to seize an estimated $1.7 billion worth of cocaine and marijuana during a series of raids on homes and warehouses between July, 1991, and last February, authorities said. In the course of the raids, 28 people were arrested.

The purported leader of the illicit 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 last year, investigators said. One of the murders occurred in Oklahoma, and others occurred in San Bernardino and San Diego.

The 36-year-old alleged kingpin of the organization, Joseph Eduardo 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, agents said.

The investigation began when Agent Russ Sutter of the Anaheim Police Department and two other undercover narcotics agents went to the Anaheim Hills neighborhood of a suspected drug dealer. During a brief stakeout of the drug dealer’s home, they decided to check the license plates of cars parked there.

One of them 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 that she was regularly followed for weeks, Mendes led investigators to the major players in the ring.

“By following her, she basically led us to everyone and everything,” Sutter said 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 nearly 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,” said Tom Davis, a lieutenant with the Regional Narcotics Suppression Program, and “from there it just snowballed.”

“These people (in the Arvizu organization) have the propensity to kill people like you have a propensity to pull weeds,” said Daniel Jarvis, a Suppression Program 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.