COLUMN ONE : California’s Illicit Farm Belt Export : The nation’s booming methamphetamine trade is fed by mobile labs throughout the state’s rural areas. Mexican drug families have replaced biker gangs as masterminds of the elusive network.

The shabby farmhouse tucked behind vineyards hardly looked like a clandestine factory for California’s most elusive drug makers. It blended perfectly into this rural San Joaquin Valley town, right down to the children on the lawn, the chickens in coops and the vans to transport farm workers.

Only a red stain eating away at the metal roof hinted at its real purpose. In January, drug agents stormed inside and found an all-too-familiar scene:

A makeshift lab containing enough tubes, huge flasks and burners to cook hundreds of pounds of methamphetamine--a white crystalline stimulant known as crank or speed, fancied as a bargain substitute for cocaine.

This time, like most times, the cook was gone and the farm workers there weren’t talking. Fifty pounds of meth, one night’s toil worth $2.5 million on the streets of Chicago, already was 100 miles down the interstate--California’s newest exported crop.

Once the domain of outlaw biker gangs, the nation’s meth trade has been taken over by Mexican drug families in the rural belt from San Diego County to Redding. Operating from Sinaloa and other states deep inside Mexico, these families oversee teams of cookers dispatched to orchards, cotton fields, chicken ranches and abandoned dairies north of the border.

Their ability to produce the drug in mass quantities overnight and distribute it across the country in days is one of the most perplexing problems to confront local, state and federal authorities.

“In my 24 years in law enforcement, I’ve never seen a drug problem as frustrating as this one,” said John Coonce, who heads the Drug Enforcement Administration’s national clandestine meth lab task force in Washington. “It is absolutely epidemic.”

California Atty. Gen. Dan Lungren calls meth “the most difficult problem” facing the state.

Toxic byproducts of the labs are being dumped in canals, fields and streams, posing a growing environmental hazard. The bullet-riddled bodies of farm labor contractors and workers who moonlight in meth labs are showing up in fields. Agents say that the motive for these murders is not always clear but that the message is unmistakable to anyone thinking of crossing the rings.

The labs, like the one in Sanger, may be makeshift but they are highly efficient, mobile and hard to spot. Unlike the small-time biker operations, the Mexican-run labs betray little chemical smell. Often, agents are alerted to a lab only after a shed or house explodes.

The cookers blend in with the seasonal ebb and flow of farm laborers, moving with virtual impunity.

“The Mexicans do it so simply, so quickly and their network is so mobile and tight that they can make meth today and have it sold in the Midwest tomorrow,” said Wilfredo Cid, head of the state Bureau of Narcotic Enforcement’s office in the San Joaquin Valley, where the bigger labs seem to be moving.

The lure for meth producers is obvious. Mexico’s drug syndicates long have had to split their cocaine, heroin and marijuana profits with growers, middlemen and mules ferrying the product north. But meth, made and sold in the U.S.A., is the closest thing to pure profit they have found.

Mexican nationals are smuggling meth to virtually every state and commanding premium prices, according to state and federal drug agents. In Florida, for example, California meth sells for five times what it does here.

Because the rings delegate tasks, agents are seldom able to snare more than one head of the Mexican meth Hydra. Consider three busts on the same day last month in Southern California.

First, a sheriff’s narcotics agent was summoned to the Riverside County community of Menifee to inspect a suspicious Ford van pulled over after running a stop sign. Inside, he found enough chemicals sloshing in plastic containers to make more than 120 pounds of crystal meth with a wholesale value of $600,000.

The ring had split the manufacturing process between two labs to thwart authorities; the driver refused to disclose either site.

Later that morning, in the northern San Diego County town of Fallbrook, state agents smelled telltale odors wafting from a large shed. Inside, they found sophisticated lab ware and enough chemicals to cook about 30 pounds of meth, but no leads to higher-ups.

About the same time, agents acting on a tip raided a handsome home in Montclair in San Bernardino County and found enough hydriodic acid to make 300 pounds of meth. Only a middleman was arrested, authorities said.

Methamphetamine, a central nervous system stimulant, once was used by long-haul truckers and college students pulling all-nighters. Today, because it creates effects similar to cocaine but longer lasting, it is injected, snorted or smoked by partying teen-agers, housewives who want to lose weight, laborers seeking to increase productivity and professionals hoping to cram more into their day and to enhance sexual performance at night.

Emergency rooms and drug counseling centers are seeing more meth users. Even the blue-blood Betty Ford Center in Rancho Mirage reports that 10% of patients are being treated for methamphetamine addiction--nearly as many as for cocaine use.

And law enforcement is encountering an increasingly irrational and violent breed of psychotic criminal stoked on meth. Many child-abuse cases and drug-related murders now are linked to methamphetamine users, police say, because the drug breeds irritability and paranoia.

“I relate meth to violence,” said Jim Conklin of the DEA’s San Diego office. “People who use it don’t sleep for days. They’re tweakin’. They get real paranoid. They think their neighbors are watching them, the cops are following them, and they turn violent in an instant.”

Biker gangs in San Diego County began cooking the drug in the early 1960s and passed along the technique to the Hells Angels and others, agents say. Using over-the-counter chemicals such as ether, they produced a drug that was about 50% pure and called “crank” because it made users cranky.

The ether posed two hazards to the makers: The smell sometimes alerted law enforcement, and it was explosive. To dodge these hazards, the gangs frequently enlisted Mexican laborers as cooks.

Over the past decade, the roles reversed. Mexican nationals, with improved cooking recipes, began producing meth that was at least 90% pure, eventually taking over the bikers’ business. Now it is the bikers who buy meth from the Mexicans and--if they are lucky--handle street sales, law enforcement officials says.

For Mexico’s drug lords, meth is a way to expand their operations while keeping them in the family. “One brother’s doing coke, one brother’s doing heroin, one brother’s doing marijuana and now one brother’s handling meth,” said Cid of the state narcotics bureau. “They are businessmen. They spread their eggs around.”

Unwilling to let outsiders horn in, these “Sinaloa Cowboys” with their beaver hats, boots and ostrich-skin belts are armed and dangerous. “Stay out if you value your ass!” read the spray-painted message in Spanish and English on the side of a large shed in rural Firebaugh, west of Fresno.

It is no idle threat. In December, Merced County deputies discovered the body of a laborer along Dead Man’s Creek near an abandoned lab site. He had been shot five times and dumped in a pile of empty gas canisters and bedsheets used to strain meth.

Investigators surmised that the man had been recruited from nearby Stockton to cook a batch of the drug, when things turned violent. His killers apparently fled, leaving behind half a pound of pure meth and $2,000 in cash.

“Farm labor is a dangerous occupation,” said Merced County Sheriff’s Detective Mario Anaya. “Unfortunately, they are trading that job for an even more dangerous one.”

This winter, state agents in Fresno have busted four large labs in farm communities. At each one, they note, was at least one semiautomatic assault weapon.

“These guys are packing big heat,” said Robert Pennal, a state drug agent in Fresno. “It’s not so much to engage law enforcement as it is to protect their labs from being ripped off by rivals.”

The labs do not require much investment: $1,000 for hardware and glassware and about $4,000 for chemicals. Ten hours of mixing, cooking and extracting yield an average of eight pounds of virtually pure meth that fetches $50,000 on the wholesale market--a 10-fold return on investment.

The Mexican nationals have been able to make a more potent meth by using ephedrine, a chemical harvested from the Chinese ephedra shrub and sold to German drug companies for legitimate uses, mainly as a decongestant.

Ephedrine was sold over the counter in wholesale batches in California until 1987, when law enforcement agencies realized that a huge increase in its demand was tied to the meth trade. That year, the bulk sale of ephedrine was restricted to bona fide pharmaceutical companies.

Cracking down on ephedrine, however, put the Mexican groups more firmly in the driver’s seat. Swiss pharmaceutical brokers ship tons of ephedrine to Mexico, where it is smuggled into California along the routes used for cocaine, marijuana and heroin. The U.S. Customs Service’s drug-sniffing border dogs are not trained to detect the chemical.

Unfortunately, the ephedrine problem is much bigger than a leaky border. A cousin of ephedrine--pseudoephedrine, also a decongestant--is easily converted into meth and is available in bulk tablets through the U.S. mail. East Coast outlets ship thousands of bottles overnight to California with no questions asked. They are even willing to send free samples to entice customers.

Another meth ingredient, hydriodic acid, which is used primarily as a dairy disinfectant, is also restricted by the state. But it, too, is smuggled here from Mexico or can be purchased on the black market or made from scratch.

Finding a place to brew these chemicals is no problem either. Any rural setting is a potential site, the more desolate the better. Some labs are in such forlorn places that drug agents wanting to spy on the operations have nowhere to hide. They must use high-tech devices that monitor the slightest ground movement.

In recent years, as law enforcement has focused on Southern California, meth cookers have shifted to the Central Valley. The region’s cotton fields, orchards and grazing land--where crop-dusters in the 1970s smuggled tons of marijuana from Mexico--provide ample cover for the factories. Access to a site is often won by greasing the palm of a ranch foreman or farm labor contractor, agents say.

The labs can fit in the back of a small truck, packed and moved in a moment’s notice. In northern San Diego County, one meth operation hid its equipment in underground cubbyholes and delivered it to different lab locations on any given weekend. Agents in Riverside rummaging through a commercial storage yard discovered enough boxed equipment to run 14 labs--ready to be hauled at the first call.

Some audacious rings rent houses from unwitting owners.

“They cleaned up the place real nice, weeded it and even asked if they could build a storage shed out back for hay for their horses,” said Gail Bonagofsky, who rented a house in San Bernardino to a family that paid $3,000 cash for first and last months’ rent.

Several weeks later, drug agents acting on a tip used a battering ram to break in. They discovered a lab in the garage capable of producing 40 pounds of meth per cook. On a bedroom floor, agents found 35 pounds of finished crystal, ready to be packaged in small bags. Eight Mexican nationals were arrested.

The house-turned-chemical-depot was across from an elementary school and just blocks from the regional Little League headquarters. Neighbors had no idea what was occurring.

The cookers themselves--recruited from the fields--sometimes are not aware of the dangers. Hydriodic acid, much more caustic than the muriatic acid used in swimming pools, eats through not only skin but concrete. If inhaled, its fumes cause chemical pneumonia, which can bring a quick, painful death.

“One cook had 18 bottles cooking at one time with four sub-cooks,” said state agent Dan Callahan. “He paid each one $2,000 to $3,000. But there were no condensers (to contain the fumes). They were breathing acid gases and spitting blood.”

When agents raided a large meth factory near Hemet recently, they found a dozen breathing respirators. But the paper filters could only trap solid particulates, such as paint. They were ineffective in stopping toxic fumes.

“We have no idea how many dead Mexicans we find in the desert died from breathing in meth fumes,” one DEA agent said. “Or whether they were told not to breathe the stuff.”

When caught by law enforcement, most of these laborers play dumb about their bosses. Agents surmise that their silence is mostly out of fear. Often, they were recruited only after ringleaders confirmed their blood ties in Mexico, where revenge against a snitch can be meted out against family members.

The war on meth--unlike the war on cocaine--features no publicity shots inside warehouses full of drugs. Because meth is on the streets within hours, agents must catch cooks in the process.

For a time, agents were able to uncover labs after studying patterns of late-night electrical surges at suspected cooking sites. But the cooks got wise and started using generators. “They stay one step ahead of us,” said one DEA agent.

In the small farm towns of the San Joaquin Valley, some of the poorest cities in the state, the meth cowboys are sometimes welcomed as a source of commerce. Workers who earn as little as $5,000 a year picking California’s crops can make that much in half a dozen illicit cooking sessions.

Some of the profits, drug agents said, trickle through the local economy. Two grocery stores in rural Fresno County, suspected of laundering meth money, recently were discovered doing a land-office business--more than $11 million in cash flow in one year.

And some of the profits are literally buried in the ground, agents said. In Porterville, one ring had stashed $4.5 million in cash in trash cans three feet underground.

There is no such attempt to hide the toxic castoffs of their trade. “These guys don’t file EPA permits,” Atty. Gen. Lungren said.

Exposure to the chemicals is so worrisome that agents annually are sent to UC Davis for monitoring for poisoning. The cost of cleaning up labs is skyrocketing, and state and local agencies are bickering over who should pay. The state Department of Justice last year spent more than $1 million to clean up some of the 415 labs it uncovered--and is maintaining a pace that will double that cost this year.

In the wake of recent state legislation, cleanup costs will shift to the state Department of Toxic Substances Control, which seeks $3 million a year to do the job but fears that will not be enough.

The enormity of the problem continues to boggle authorities’ minds. Agents invested five years into bringing down part of one Mexican organization that ran labs in Escondido, Fallbrook and Rainbow in San Diego County and in Snelling, Pixley, Fresno and Dunlap in Central California.

Agents concede that they are no closer to stemming the problem than they were six years ago when the Mexican syndicates began pushing aside the bikers. There is such a glut of meth that the price has dropped 50% since then. This despite the fact that the number of state agents devoted to combatting the labs has risen from 12 to 41 since 1987.

“For every lab we find,” said Ed Synicky, an overworked state agent in Riverside, “we assume there are 10 others out there we don’t know about.”

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In the Middle of the Meth Trade

Rural areas of California have become the nation’s supply center for methamphetamine. Meth, a stimulant also known as crank or speed, is made from chemicals that are “cooked” in makeshift labs run by families based in Mexico, drug authorities say. Among the reasons that the trade has become centered here:

LOCATION: Farmhouses, chicken ranches, abandoned dairies and rambling orchards provide meth cookers with isolated locations to set up their “kitchens.”

LABOR: Workers recruited from fields by the promise of quick money blend in easily with the movements of farm laborers and don’t draw suspicion to the labs.

HIGHWAYS: Meth manufactured in rural labs can be trucked to California cities for sale in just hours or reach the Midwest in days. No smuggling across borders is necessary.

INGREDIENTS: Ephedrine and hydriodic acid, key chemicals in the cooking of meth, are controlled but available from smugglers or on the black market.

FAMILY TIES: Tight control by Mexican families who ruthlessly enforce loyalty thwarts efforts by law enforcement to break up the meth trade.