METH IN OUR MIDST

Angelina Magallon Ceja stands in her tree-shaded home on Pope Avenue in Lynwood, talking on the telephone. Several area codes away, in Camarillo, Clyde Raborn and Jeff Cameron listen, as they have listened every day from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. for the past three months.

Ceja is a slight, dark-haired, 32-year-old mother of two. She is also, allegedly, an entrepreneur who runs a home-based business with her lover, Javier Arreola Torres, 31. Every day, starting at 8 or 9 in the morning, while neighbors walk their kids to school, Angelina takes phone orders for chemicals: red phosphorus, hydriodic acid, Freon, iodine, caustic soda, hydrogen chloride gas. Some people use these substances to tan hides, bleach bones and process pulp. Others use them to cook methamphetamine.

Raborn and Cameron work for California’s Bureau of Narcotic Enforcement, a 400-person agency based in Sacramento. Raborn is 45, dark-haired and serious looking, with a closely trimmed beard and mustache. He came to the agency after 22 years as a sheriff’s deputy in rural Tulare County. The son of a sheriff, Cameron, 36, is taller and heavier than Raborn, with brown hair and a mustache. He, too, is something of a country boy, having grown up on Northern California’s coastal ranch country, then spending 10 years as a sheriff’s deputy in Northern California’s Lake County. It was as a deputy that he first worked narcotics, the most active front on Northern California’s crime battlefield, the detail that ambitious cops covet for its action and career rewards. “Dad tried it, and he hated it,” Cameron says. “I really enjoyed it.” Joining BNE became his goal. In 1997, he and Raborn roomed together at the agency’s academy in Sacramento. BNE was the big leagues, and moving to L.A. serious culture shock for the freshly minted agents. Neither expected to become a star any time soon. In their debut investigation, however, the rookies noticed a pattern in intelligence data that no one had seen.

The stimulant known as crank, speed, or crystal is a multibillion-dollar industry in California. Clandestine labs from the San Joaquin Valley’s farmland to the San Gabriel Valley’s suburbs and beyond produce so much meth that the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration has labeled California a “source nation.” The BNE busts more than three meth labs a day in the state, and the agency estimates the state’s output at more than 40 tons of meth a year. That’s $400 million wholesale at West Coast prices, uncut. Four Midwestern states are so badly hammered by California meth that they qualify for federal drug disaster aid. In these places, California’s meth is worth more than $1 billion on the street, a financial incentive that keeps thousands of people on both sides of the law working day and night in quiet neighborhoods and on busy highways across the Golden State.

This is the realm of daily commerce in which Raborn and Cameron found themselves. By connecting the dots between hundreds of seemingly unrelated records of chemical transactions, phone calls, highway chemical seizures and lab busts, they were able to diagram a supply line to the meth trade. The alleged hub: that house at 11614 Pope Ave.

*

AT 10:48 A.M. ON A WEDNESDAY, DAY 97 OF OPERATION BAY Bridge, Raborn and Cameron listen as Ceja talks to a man named Martin, who says he’s helping friends up north get supplies for a barbecue.

Martin says these friends need “lighter,” and that he understands the price is 5.

Wrong, Ceja says. The price is 6.

To the agents’ ears, “6” translates to $6,000, and “lighter” is hydrogen chloride gas.

Martin doesn’t like the price. He says he’ll check around.

“Get real, Martin,” Cameron says. “Where else are you gonna find HCl today?”

At 11:07 a.m., Martin calls back to say he’ll take the HCl for 6. Angelina tells him to come by in an hour.

At 11:29 a.m., she phones a man in South Gate and tells him to bring her a “nino”--another code word, a reference to an HCl cylinder, which is about as tall as a child.

He says he’ll be there in 20 minutes.

“Show time,” says Cameron.

Cameron and Raborn would prefer to be in the field, following the chemicals. Instead they are running the show, directing the operation from a windowless “wire room.” The assignment means making 50 to 100 phone calls a day from numbers listed on a full-wall “war board.” It also means constant decisions: Follow this, don’t follow that. Gotta find a crew--whom am I going to use? That’s hard because on any given day, some of their colleagues may have already been on from 5 a.m. till midnight. Not that Cameron and Raborn are spared. The state agency doesn’t have funds to pay for the four Spanish-language interpreters this job demands. The DEA does--at its Camarillo operation. So the feds loan the state their wire room, and that’s where Cameron and Raborn work, 60 miles up the coast from BNE’s L.A. headquarters and farther still from their own suburban homes. Cameron makes the drive from the South Bay before each of his 14- to 18-hour shifts. Raborn stays in a motel in Camarillo rather than commute. Which is why the agents empathize with their colleagues but don’t feel much guilt as they punch buttons on a speed dialer, setting off a chain reaction that cracks like a giant electronic whip across county lines, freeways, area codes and mountain passes, disrupting lives from Los Angeles to Fresno.

BNE agent Jeff Catchings is watching TV in the pilots lounge at an L.A.-area airport when his pager displays 999 999 9999. He jumps up and gets the pilot, an ex-Vietnam War helicopter gunship commander who now flies for the BNE.

“We got a row of nines,” Catchings says. “Time to go.” Minutes later, they’re in a hangar rolling out the plane known unaffectionately as the Vomit Comet.

In the wire room, Cameron presses a switch, activating a video camera outside the Pope Avenue address, bringing a live digital picture of the house and driveway to the monitor in front of him. At the same time, Raborn pages Vic Lacey, their BNE supervisor in Los Angeles, and tells him that a load of HCl is on the way to the house. That message triggers a command from Lacey to LA Team 28, an eight-person BNE plainclothes meth squad operating eight unmarked vehicles.

“Rock and roll,” Lacey says over the radio, and Team 28 is on the move. “Point is moving,” he says.

“Point” is BNE Special Agent Mitch Fox, who is leading LA Team 28 on a rolling surveillance.

At 12:55 p.m., Fox drives past the Pope Avenue house. He picks up the microphone, careful not to be seen. “I’ve got a light-blue Cougar in the driveway.”

Cameron and Raborn zoom the remote video camera in on the license plate and then on the man getting out of the car, whom they will soon identify as Martin. The monitor also shows another man--Cesar, it will turn out--as he comes out of the house wheeling a chest-high steel cylinder on a hand truck. The HCl.

Valve failure or breakage can turn a pressurized gas cylinder into an unguided missile that can penetrate concrete walls, destroying everything in its path.

“Careful, Cesar,” Cameron says to the computer screen. “Don’t drop it.”

Angelina watches from the house as the HCl is loaded into the Cougar’s trunk.

At 12:58 p.m., the video camera shows the Cougar pulling out of the driveway.

“The load is leaving the house,” Raborn announces. Fox is waiting around the corner from Pope to catch the Cougar when it turns at the end of the block. There it is.

“You got him?” Cameron asks.

Fox follows the car onto the 710 Freeway, northbound, hanging back. From the plane, Catchings--call sign 63--watches for a light-blue shape to merge into the multicolored ribbon of freeway traffic.

“63 has him,” he says. “You guys can drop back.” He doesn’t say anything to reveal that he is in the air. Crooks use police scanners, too.

The other seven Team 28 ground vehicles are strung out on the freeway behind Fox. They will trade positions during the trip. Martin drives his Cougar onto I-5 and eventually onto Highway 14, heading toward the Antelope Valley. Catchings tracks the Cougar as it leaves the freeway at Canyon Country and follows it across Sierra Highway to North Oak Park, where it pulls into the driveway of a house across the street from a school.

At 1:48 p.m., Catchings reports that the load has landed. Now the plane has to disappear temporarily because this is when crooks are likely to check the sky. So the plane flies off and Team 28 ground vehicles take up positions and watch the house.

At 5:31 p.m., a Team 28 agent sees a white Chrysler Towncar pull into the driveway and stop next to the Cougar, trunk to trunk. He watches two men get out of the Chrysler. Martin comes out of the house to talk to the two men as they transfer a heavy steel cylinder. Five minutes later, the two men are in the Chrysler, traveling back toward I-5 on Highway 14. Cameron and Raborn believe that the HCl is headed for the central San Joaquin Valley, where the bulk of California meth cooking is done.

“They’re going north,” Catchings, the in-air observer, says on the radio as the pilot loops toward the Newhall Pass. The summit is half an hour away by car. The plane bounces and pitches in the turbulence. An ominous purple whorl of thunderheads appears ahead, thousands of feet high. “That looks ugly,” the pilot says. “We can’t fly through this.”

This is a crisis. They need a bird on the north side of the pass. Raborn gets on the phone to BNE headquarters in Sacramento and asks to borrow a plane from the Fresno Methamphetamine Task Force. Sacramento says yes. Cameron asks Lacey, his supervisor, to call Agent Bill Olson, the only other Team 28 member besides Catchings who can do aerial surveillance without getting too sick to function.

*

BILL OLSON IS AT HOME in the Santa Clarita Valley, enjoying a rare day off with his son and daughter when he gets Lacey’s page. He recognizes the number and does not want to return the call. He’s assistant coach for his 9-year-old son’s baseball team and he keeps missing games because of Operation Bay Bridge. Some of the guys haven’t seen their kids in weeks. Cameron and Raborn understand. For three months they, too, have been absentee fathers. Cameron seldom has time to do more than give his 6- and 9-year-old boys kisses as they sleep. By working Saturdays, he has missed most of their baseball games. Raborn has a 12-year-old son. He’s lucky to see him every three weeks. The boy wants to go into law enforcement. Raborn is discouraging him.

“We’re northbound on 5,” Lacey tells Olson when he returns the call. “We need you to drive to Bakersfield to meet the Fresno bird there and track the chemical up into the valley.”

“When?” Olson asks, avoiding his 9-year-old’s gaze.

“Quick as you can get there,” Lacey says.

Flight time from Fresno to Bakersfield is just over an hour. That’s how much time Olson has to cover almost 90 miles by car. He puts his T-Bird’s pedal to the floor and blasts up I-5 at over 100 mph, passing everybody, including the white Chrysler and the team behind it. He covers the Grapevine in 22 minutes, hooks up with Highway 99 and roars into the Bakersfield airport as the Fresno plane is landing. Within minutes the plane is back in the air.

“Tell me what you’re driving past right now,” Olson says to the clandestine caravan, looking down at the flat, wind-swept landscape along Highway 99. He gets back descriptions: a Marlboro billboard, a green John Deere tractor hooked to a big yellow combine, a white water tank. “OK, I’ve got it,” Olson says. “You guys can drop back.”

The pursuit has passed through Kern County and into Tulare County, and for the next 90 minutes Olson focuses on the Chrysler’s tail lights, trying not to blink. A few minutes before 8 p.m., the Chrysler leaves the highway to stop at Las Playas Restaurant in Tulare. Olson can rest his eyes. For 39 minutes.

At 8:39 p.m., Agent Fox watches the two men come out of the restaurant and get back into the Chrysler. They continue north on 99 for 20 minutes. Then they leave the highway and drive northwest on rural two-lane roads. The tail cars hang back. They cannot let their headlights show in the Chrysler’s rearview mirrors.

“I don’t know where I am,” an agent says on the radio.

“Flash your high beams or hit your brakes so I can see you,” Olson says. The team is tracking the Chrysler on parallel roads. He sees one car’s lights flash.

“Take the next right to the first cross street and turn left,” Olson says. “But not until the car ahead of you is past.”

When the Chrysler crosses the county line, the Kings County Narcotic Task Force joins the surveillance.

At 10:20 p.m., the Chrysler stops at an isolated, darkened dairy. This could be the lab site. To find out, supervisor Lacey sends a team on a stealth approach called low-crawl surveillance. Another member of Team 28, Dave Dunwoody, and three Kings County agents suit up in camouflage with kneepads and face coverings, then jump up and down to make sure their gear doesn’t clank. They drive down a road lined with orange trees and get out of the truck a half mile past the dairy. The night is dark. Silent. Hunched over, Dunwoody leads the men single file down a row of crop trees.

One hundred yards from the dairy, they are crawling. Silence is everything. Bugs bite Dunwoody’s hands and face. He lets them bite. With his night-vision goggles, he can see a Rottweiler roaming. He stays motionless. The dog does not hear or smell him. He is there for more than an hour. Nothing. Then men come out of the building and go to the car.

At 1:17 a.m., Dunwoody whispers into a “bone mike,” which picks up sound from the vibrations of facial bones. “They’re getting ready to move.” The car starts, the plane moves back within visual range at 2,000 feet, and Team 28 musters out to follow. During the next 50 minutes, the Chrysler jags left, then hooks right--unnecessary turns to flush out a tail.

“He’s doing counter,” Olson says from the air. “Give him room.”

The counter-surveillance tactics suggest that the destination is close. Sure enough, the Chrysler stops at a solitary farmhouse outside the small community of Riverdale.

At 3:20 a.m. June 4, Lacey reports that the load has landed.

At 3:27 a.m., the surveillance is turned over to the Kings County Narcotic Task Force. It is quiet during the daylight hours of June 4. Late that night, two men arrive in a pickup truck and enter the garage. The task force supervisor calls Cameron and Raborn.

“I think the cookers just arrived.”

The team settles in. They need to be sure. Shortly after 1 a.m., their low-crawl surveillance men hear sounds that suggest the cooking is done and liquid methamphetamine solution is being poured through a bedsheet filter into a container. The next step will be to bubble it into crystal with hydrogen chloride gas.

The supervisor writes out a request for a search warrant and drives to a judge’s house.

The judge signs the warrant before dawn.

At 5:30 a.m., more than three dozen Kings County Narcotic Task Force officers assemble for a briefing. An hour before dawn, agents creep through the mist. Backed by a HazMat team, flak-jacketed SWAT officers wearing helmets and carrying machine guns move in on the farmhouse, the soft target. The Fresno team takes the hot target, a garage behind the farmhouse that is believed to contain the meth lab. A backup team covers them with a Benelli shotgun and an HK machine gun. A helicopter hovers. But the real threat here is not the men in the garage. It is the chemicals they are cooking. Agents have traced 40 pounds of red phosphorus and 27 pounds of crystal iodine to the garage. Also inside is a cylinder of hydrogen chloride, a gas the Occupational Safety and Health Administration calls a “‘highly toxic and reactive chemical with potential for a catastrophic event.” HCl can kill with one deep inhalation. So, in addition to flak vests, helmets and automatic rifles, the agents wear Level 2 Saranex containment suits, goggles, gloves and boots.

At 6:30, the SWAT team takes down the house. A dog barks furiously, alerting the men in the garage. When the meth squad bursts through the door, the two cooks are pouring toxic liquid residue through a hole in the garage floor. They bolt out the door and into a field but agents give chase, catching and handcuffing them in a vineyard.

The equipment is typical of what the BNE calls “a Mexican-national lab operation”: two huge chemical cooking flasks with 6-foot-high condensing towers, red phosphorus, crystal iodine, caustic soda and three cylinders of hydrogen chloride. Twenty pounds of cooked meth and 60 pounds of meth in solution. At a West Coast wholesale price of $5,000 a pound, this is $400,000 worth of meth, uncut, the agents say. Cut once, it’s worth $800,000. In the Midwest, where California meth goes to market at the wholesale price of $10,000 a pound, it’s more than $3 million worth of dope.

The kingpins who make millions on these operations are seldom caught. Angelina Ceja and Javier Torres’ alleged profit is the $4,900 the agents say they netted selling Martin a cylinder of HCl they bought for $1,100. For Operation Bay Bridge, it’s another link in the chain of criminal conspiracy evidence. Evidence compiled in nine months suggests that the two, working with family, in-laws and friends, move enough chemicals to cook 300 pounds of meth--$1.5 million worth--every day of the year.

*

CEJA AND TORRES LEARNED QUICKLY OF THE RIVERDALE BUST. IF they were worried it could be connected to them, they didn’t let their concern show. The agents continued to listen as they allegedly sold chemicals, and Team 28 kept following loads and busting lab sites--in La Puente, Compton, Sun Valley and Oro Grande. After five busts in June 1999, Ceja and Torres apparently realized Pope Avenue must be under scrutiny and moved to a house in Carson. By the end of July, the BNE was ready to drop the hammer. Based on Raborn and Cameron’s investigation, the agency filed a 173-count criminal conspiracy complaint against Ceja, Torres and dozens of others. On July 28, the BNE deployed more than 100 agents at staging points near the Carson house and eight other sites throughout the state.

At 7 a.m. July 29, supervisor Lacey watched the Carson house from across the street, ready to serve the warrant. He needed to know whether Angelina and Javier were inside. He cell-phoned Cameron and Raborn.

“We’ll call the house and find out,” Cameron said. Lacey hung on while a Spanish-speaking woman in the wire room phoned the Carson house and asked for Cesar.

Cameron and Raborn recognized the voice of the woman who answered: Angelina.

“Javier,” they heard her say, “go get Cesar.”

“Hit it,” Raborn said to Lacey. Lacey gave the signal and agents simultaneously raided the other eight locations. When the radio announced that the team had nailed Ceja and Torres, Raborn and Cameron slapped palms. Seventy-nine people were arrested on charges of conspiring to aid and abet the manufacture of methamphetamine and to distribute chemicals known to be used for its manufacture.

As the dust settled, Cameron took his family on a two-week vacation to Sonoma County. Raborn and his son hit the slopes in Mammoth. And in November, Raborn, who had technically overseen the case, received the BNE’s agent of the year award for the Los Angeles region.

As of late June, Martin and TK other defendants had pleaded guilty to those or lesser charges. Cesar, Ceja and Torres have pleaded not guilty and remain incarcerated, awaiting trial.