Drug Dealers Adopt Much Lower Profile

The flashy cocaine cowboys of South Florida’s infamous 1980s are gone. But the drugs keep coming, thanks to a quietly effective 1990s breed of trafficker.

South Florida is home to even more traffickers now than it was a decade ago, says James Milford, acting deputy administrator for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.

“Miami is the North American headquarters for the South American cartels,” says Pam Brown, spokeswoman for the DEA’s Miami’s field office. “They haven’t gone away. They’ve just changed their profile.”

The U.S. Customs Service in Miami seized 70,000 pounds of cocaine in 1996, an increase of more than 50% over last year.

In the first nine months of fiscal year 1996--before several big seizures in August--the DEA’s Miami office confiscated 19,465 pounds of cocaine. That was more than five times the amount of cocaine seized in Houston and four times that intercepted in Los Angeles in the same period.

In recent months, the smugglers have sent big loads of cocaine through the Caribbean and South Florida, mostly using cargo ships, investigators say.

“We have a big-time cocaine smuggling threat in South Florida,” says John McGhee, assistant special agent in charge of drug-smuggling investigations for U.S. Customs in Miami. “Levels of cocaine coming into South Florida are as high as they have ever been.”

Investigators say the tide of drugs is the work of cartel operatives who, unlike their 1980s counterparts, like to keep low-key.

They live in modest homes in middle-class neighborhoods, not million-dollar mansions in upscale areas. They drive rental cars, not luxury automobiles. They wear business suits and work 9 to 5, eschewing diamond-studded Rolex watches and lavish parties.

“It was stupid to be high profile,” McGhee says. “It brought a lot of media attention to you and a lot of law enforcement attention.”

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, most of the cocaine entering the United States came through South Florida, usually via private boats or airplanes. But the feds stepped in to try to dam the tide, bringing an army of agents, airplanes and boats to Florida and the Caribbean to intercept shipments.

Faced with that obstacle, traffickers from the late 1980s through 1995 began rerouting their cocaine to the West, shipping it on commercial trucks and cars across the U.S.-Mexico border. Once again, the U.S. government beefed up its interceptions.

So last year the smugglers started coming back to South Florida, McGhee says.

The month of August was a prime example.

On Aug. 1, federal agents seized 6,043 pounds of cocaine from a shipment of coffee beans at the Port of Miami. Four days later, a ship on the Miami River yielded 2,896 pounds. On Aug. 28, agents found 2,080 pounds in a mobile home on a roadside in a suburb north of Miami.

Agents also confiscated millions in cash from drug sales. On Aug. 12, they found $6.2 million in cash hidden in electronics equipment, household appliances and toys in a Miami freight company warehouse. The shipment was destined for Cali, Colombia.

Five days later, they seized an additional $9.2 million in a container belonging to the same company. The container had been shipped to Cartagena, Colombia, but returned to Miami at the request of U.S. authorities.

Before he was caught, Harold Ackerman was typical of today’s businessman-smuggler. He jogged every morning, worshiped at temple on Saturdays, ate brown-bag lunches with his wife--and closed drug deals via a cellular phone. His upper-middle-class Miami neighbors described the family as “nice,” “quiet” and “normal.”

Authorities say the 55-year-old Colombian was one of the Cali cartel’s principal cocaine distributors until he was arrested in 1992. He was sentenced in 1993 to life in prison for smuggling 22 tons of cocaine concealed in fence posts and frozen broccoli for the Cali cartel.

Information from Ackerman’s computer led to a far-reaching 1995 indictment that targeted 59 people at all levels of the cartel, including six lawyers whom the government said crossed the line to work in a cocaine-smuggling conspiracy. The case is to go to trial in U.S. District Court in Miami in March.

Today’s traffickers learned from the mistakes of the 1980s, when Colombia’s Medellin cartel was the primary supplier of cocaine. With Medellin’s leaders killed or jailed during the first half of this decade, the equally violent but more businesslike Cali cartel has taken over the cocaine trade, investigators say.

The Cali cartel has carefully set up its United States operations in “cells” that import and distribute drugs, then audit and export cash. The cells--in Miami, New York, Los Angeles and Houston--consist of a regional manager who hires sub-managers to handle the various tasks: transportation, distribution, warehousing and collection of drug sale proceeds.

Each of the sub-managers hires employees who know only what task they must perform. This protects the managers and other employees if one trafficker is caught. Popular employees are inside operators--Port of Miami stevedores and airport baggage handlers--paid to offload drugs from cargo ships and cargo holds.

To communicate, the managers use cellular phones they rent from small shops with a $1,000 deposit. To avoid being traced, they pay their monthly bills in cash and use a telephone only a short time before getting another.

Law enforcement authorities have changed their tactics too, to keep up with the traffickers.

In the 1980s, agents burst through suspects’ doors in nighttime raids.

Now, they use court-approved wiretaps to intercept communications via cellular phones, faxes and beepers, Milford says. The DEA office in Miami is topped by large antennae that allow agents to talk via nontappable car phones.

Nationwide, the number of wiretaps approved by federal courts has grown by 26% in five years, from 812 in 1990, to 1,024 in 1995, according to the Administrative Office of United States Courts. The number of convictions stemming from wiretap cases grew by 18% in the same period, from 420 to 494, office statistics show.

Most wiretaps are used in drug cases, says Janet Webb, deputy chief of the Justice Department’s electronics surveillance branch.

“The Southern District of Florida is a region that uses electronic surveillance on a continuous basis and uses it very effectively,” Webb says.

Instead of arresting lower-level smugglers, investigators now focus on catching the top man to wipe out the entire cell, the DEA’s Milford says. Otherwise, the manager simply hires new employees and continues to operate.