Raid Destroyed Large-Scale Drug Ring, Police Say

Officer James Jensen Jr. died Wednesday trying to crush a drug ring that police blamed for the spread of methamphetamine and cocaine through Ventura County.

Jensen, cut down by a fellow Oxnard officer’s shotgun fire in the smoky confusion of a police raid, was also fighting a new phenomenon in the county--large-scale drug dealing linked with local street gangs.

Many of the 14 suspects arrested Wednesday are current and former members of a Santa Paula gang, which had recruited younger street-level gangsters to sell speed and coke, Lt. Carl Handy said.

“I think it’s terrible,” said Handy, a veteran gang cop and spokesman for the Ventura Police Department. “It just shows that we’ve got a critical street gang problem in Ventura County that seems to follow trends in bigger cities. . . . These guys were role models for the other gang members in the community.”

Police say the 16 raids and the arrests made early Wednesday destroyed a drug ring that was operating in western Ventura County and had become a major supplier to mid-level dealers.

Wednesday’s arrests also “sent a message to the others who might want to follow in their footsteps that there’s more room in federal prison for them.”

The arrests capped a two-year joint investigation by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and the Ventura/Oxnard Narcotic Enforcement Team.

Long-term, large-scale operations like this have grown more common over the past three to four years, as law enforcement steps up its efforts to combat drug sales in Ventura County.

Cocaine from Central America has been filtering through Ventura for decades, as it has across Southern California and the nation.

But only recently, drug officers say, has Ventura County become one of the most active spots in the U.S. for the manufacture, sale and use of methamphetamine:

Vast tracts of wilderness here harbor hidden labs where the noxious odors of a speed kitchen can go unnoticed.

Those making and selling speed these days are often Mexican nationals. They mingle in Ventura County’s tight-knit Latino communities, recruit street dealers and hook users through cultural ties.

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And finally, drug agents say, the availability of cheap speed has boosted its popularity on the street. What once was the preferred intoxicant and moneymaker for outlaw motorcycle gangs has become Ventura County’s illicit drug of choice.

“It’s a very popular drug right now,” said Special Agent Ralph Lochridge of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. “It’s being used by people from all walks of life, not just trailer trash or long-distance truckers or kids pulling all-nighters.”

From 1990 to 1995, Ventura County saw a 500% increase in arrests for methamphetamine trafficking and possession. That reflects the trend across California, which the DEA has labeled as a “source country” for methamphetamine--a status that Colombia shares for cocaine.

Abuse is surging in Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, Phoenix and other western cities.

Across California, emergency-room visits by methamphetamine users jumped 366% between 1984 and 1993, according to the DEA.

In Los Angeles alone, methamphetamine-related deaths more than tripled between 1992 and 1994, and nationwide, methamphetamine-related deaths increased 145% in that time.

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On Tuesday, U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and other lawmakers introduced the Methamphetamine Control Act of 1996. Meant to curb speed production, the bill would impose a maximum civil penalty of $250,000 for chemical suppliers that sell certain methamphetamine ingredients after receiving a written warning from the DEA.

The meth makers are either buying the chemicals illegally in the U.S. or buying them in Mexico and moving them over the border to Ventura County labs, Lochridge said.

And they are pushing hundreds of pounds of it out onto the street at cut-rate prices, he said.

Doctors are grappling with paranoid, strung-out, sometimes violent speed users, said Dr. Nat Baumer, emergency room director at Ventura County Medical Center.

There are three types: First-timers frightened by the racing heart rate and paranoia speed causes; strung-out chronic users who have not slept for 72 hours; and the acutely intoxicated: “They can be belligerent, they can be extremely paranoid, they can have high blood pressure, they can be sweating and have a temperature,” he said. “And they can be very violent.”

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Speed users who drive and crash also land in the emergency room, Baumer said.

“Usually they do some bizarre act, something that lacks common sense--like drinking and using amphetamines and getting on a motorcycle,” he said.

And then there are the innocents, he said--pedestrians or other drivers cut down by speed-using motorists.

In recent years, Ventura County methamphetamine users have been getting younger, too. Narcotics detectives report busting 16- and 17-year-olds for possessing $5 bags.

And county prosecutors--two of them now assigned specifically to the methamphetamine problem--are juggling up to 40 open cases apiece on dealers.

“There’s been an increase in use, not just in arrests,” Deputy Dist. Atty. Kim Gibbons said. “Due in part to the crackdown on cocaine, and due to the fact that it’s easy to make.”

DEA agents joined police from every department in Ventura County in Wednesday’s raids.

Police say the drug ring’s operations were based around an Oxnard shop called J & J Hydraulics. On Wednesday afternoon, the doors to the small warehouse, set just off Oxnard Boulevard, were closed tight.

Eight men were booked into the U.S. Metropolitan Detention Center in Los Angeles on charges of conspiracy and distribution of controlled substances: Joe Frank Abel, 26, Joseph Raymond Bustamante, 26, Jose Javier Zendejas, 30, and Saul Alan Moore, 26, all of Oxnard; Johnnie Fred Bustamante, 27, and Andrew Arthur Rodriguez, 27, of Ventura; David Gradney, 25, of Camarillo and Richard Garcia, 23, of Port Hueneme.

If convicted, they face minimum terms of 10 to 20 years in prison, police said.

Ozwaldo Gonzalez, 18, of Port Hueneme was booked into Ventura County Jail on suspicion of sales of controlled substances. Lawrence William Crist, 26, and Anthony Larry Ramirez, 37, both of Ventura were jailed on suspicion of possessing controlled substances for sale. Walter Covarrubias was arrested on suspicion of a probation violation, and Philip Bolanos of Santa Paula was jailed on suspicion of parole violations.

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