5 1/2 Tons of Cocaine Seized in DEA Sting : Drugs: The undercover bust eliminates a network suspected of transporting drugs from Mexico to Riverside County and into the Los Angeles area, officials say. Fourteen are arrested.

When the two undercover Drug Enforcement Administration agents in Arizona received the shipment of 11,000 pounds of high-grade Colombian cocaine from across the Mexican border last week, their job--carrying out the largest undercover cocaine bust in U.S. history--was just beginning.

They loaded the $500 million worth of drugs onto their tractor trailer and drove it from Tucson to Riverside County, where it was eventually deposited at a posh ranch authorities say is owned by one of the Mexican cells of the notorious Cali drug cartel.

On Monday, authorities say, the 5 1/2 tons of cocaine were being split up into five batches, each to be shipped in a van or pickup truck to a nearby stash house, where other narcotics traffickers would distribute them.

That’s when the feds, and dozens of state and local law enforcement officers, pounced.

About 10 a.m. more than 100 law enforcement officers made 14 arrests after raiding sites in Riverside County and West Covina. They confiscated the cocaine along with nearly a dozen firearms, including several semiautomatic weapons, authorities announced Wednesday. When law enforcement officers burst through the door at the ranch, the main stash site, they were greeted with nine rounds of fire from an AK-47. No officers were injured, but a suspect was wounded in the leg.

“These people were a very well-connected organization,” said Robert Bender, special agent in charge of the Los Angeles DEA office. “Their bad luck was that they got connected with federal law enforcement.”

That connection began almost six months ago, Bender said, when a DEA undercover agent and a West Covina police officer on loan to the federal agency began to build a relationship with Mexican cocaine traffickers looking for a way to get their drugs across the Arizona border, and to the Los Angeles area.

The agents posed as truckers willing to run drugs to California, Bender said, but it took a long time to earn the traffickers’ trust. “Things like this don’t happen overnight,” Bender said.

They had won that trust by last week, when the drug smugglers paid them a $2-million advance to drive their haul to the Southland. The drugs were smuggled across the border in vans driven into Nogales, Ariz., and were then taken to Tucson, where the agents loaded them on their truck, bound for Riverside County.

This is standard operating procedure for traffickers, Bender said. “We did this in the same fashion as the bad guys do it all the time.”

The plan was to arrest the Southland distributors of the drugs, Bender said.

“Los Angeles becomes the western warehouse for narcotics smuggled across the border as far east as El Paso,” said Bill Meglen, U.S. Customs special agent in charge of the U.S. Customs office in Los Angeles.

The largest cocaine bust in Los Ageles history, and one of the nation’s largest as well, occurred in September, 1989, when 21.4 tons of cocaine were seized from a Sylmar warehouse. But this week’s bust was the largest undercover seizure in U.S. history.

Officials say Mexican authorities have been notified, and that the investigation is continuing in that country with the aid of Mexico City’s Federal Judicial Police.

Twelve of the 14 suspects, one of whom remains at large, face life in prison if they are convicted, U.S. Atty. Nora Manella said.

“We basically eliminated a cell,” Bender said, acknowledging that there are many other such operations smuggling cocaine into Los Angeles.

But officials were savoring how they had duped the alleged traffickers. Noting that the undercover agents had been promised $1.5 million more after the drugs were moved from Riverside County, Bender said: “They still owe us.”