Raindrops in a Sea of Smuggling

This time, it was the driver’s hands that gave him away.

They shook so badly that when he handed his passport to Customs Inspector Mark Laven, the booklet fluttered like a bird’s wing. Laven all but rolled his eyes: Nothing subtle about this one.

Within minutes, the driver, a Mexican citizen, had been hustled into a holding cell and inspectors were ripping his blue pickup apart with an electric saw. They found what they expected--74 pounds of marijuana packed in cellophane, coated in motor oil to throw off drug-sniffing dogs and fitted neatly into a compartment in the roof.

Laven shrugged. Just another small-fry courier.

This is the most common kind of drug bust at the nation’s busiest port of entry. Although the giant container loads grab headlines, a huge quantity of illegal drugs moves across the border in a more mundane way--namely, in a stream of small loads hidden in cars and driven under inspectors’ noses by people reckless enough to play the odds.

Day in and day out, a good deal of the U.S. drug interdiction effort on the southern border consists of simply trying to sort out the regular people from the smugglers at border crossings.

San Ysidro is an especially intense smuggling corridor. So many drug couriers try to sneak into the country that the busts sometimes come every hour, and inspectors say it’s like playing a giant, endless game of cat and mouse across 24 lanes of asphalt--the wide stretch of Interstate 5 where cars from Mexico enter the United States.

Larry R. Latocki, customs assistant special agent in charge, estimates that 95% of all drug cases handled by U.S. customs in California are busts of small carloads. More than half of the marijuana--by far the most commonly seized drug--confiscated along the border in the last year came in small carloads, customs officials say. The average load is 120 pounds.

Such busts are so routine at the ports of entry that agents’ work takes on an assembly-line quality. Cars are dismantled, drugs measured and forms filled out with mechanical efficiency. On busy days, agents say they feel like doctors in a busy ER: There’s hardly time to process one 70- or 80-pound load before the next comes in.

There are variations, of course. One week the smugglers use middle-aged white women in nice cars. Then it’s deaf students from Mexico, or families, or elderly men in RVs, or college girls in convertibles.

“You get all gas-tank loads sometimes,” said Special Agent Ransom Avilla. “Then, it’s weird--the last five days it’s all been tire loads. . . . It’s like when every girl is suddenly named Chelsea.”

When drug traffickers’ cars are torn up, however, the results all look the same--the same professionally wrapped bags, the same hidden compartments.

And for all the interceptions, some experts estimate that U.S. law enforcement stops only one in five shipments on the border.

Picking Suspects in an Ocean of Cars

Inspectors work under blazing sun breathing thick exhaust fumes. It is brutal work. They suffer headaches and must rotate frequently.

One of the better ones on duty on this day is Mark Hill, a man with a hard squint and a deep tan. He stands amid a sea of idling cars with his arms crossed.

For workers at Hill’s level, San Ysidro offers plenty of gratification. Someone is caught several times a day by dogs or inspectors with a hunch.

“It’s fun, like hide and seek,” Hill said, his gaze never leaving the cars inching past. His eyes roam over a particular car: the driver. The hubcaps. The back seat. The driver.

What is he looking for? Ticks, peculiarities, Hill said. People who don’t make eye contact. People who are too friendly. People who read newspapers. Certain Nissans, SUVs, vehicles whose design incorporates ample hidden spaces.

“At first you look at every car,” Hill said. “Later you know what not to look at.”

On this morning, the first bust is made by Laven, a lanky inspector with sunglasses pushed up on his head. He has a habit of nibbling sunflower seeds to fight boredom--and an air of having seen it all.

Under Laven’s even gaze, the driver of the pickup simply couldn’t control his nerves, he said later.

It’s something that happens here a lot, inspectors say. People think they can play it cool. But when confronted, the lips tremble, the voice quavers and the hands shake.

The driver’s apparent anxiety prompts Laven to take another look at the pickup’s roof. It’s too thick. Most people wouldn’t notice. But to him it’s obvious. He seems almost personally aggrieved by the ineptitude of these smugglers.

“Look at this,” he said, slapping the top of the truck with the air of someone exposing bad craftsmanship. “The space discrepancy, the new carpet. . . . It’s a dead giveaway.”

A hole is drilled, and the contents of the roof are tested. Senior Inspector Ed Brown is called in to ply his power tools, and white fiberglass dust flies. But Laven, already bored, has gone back to his booth to seek bigger fish.

This is the routine, “all the time, around the clock, and at all the ports,” said John Kraemer, executive assistant U.S. attorney in the Southern District of California.

Customs officials say X-rays, residue tests and dogs so reliably indicate the presence of hidden drugs that they cannot remember a time when they had to return an innocent car to its owner after damaging it with drills or saws. Occasionally, though, they can’t quite figure out where the drugs are hidden and must give up--until the next time.

Brown described one truck that had been searched on several occasions before inspectors finally figured out where the drug compartment was--in the engine.

There are other ways to get drugs into the United States, of course--on boats, planes, through tunnels, on horseback, or by swimmers, and just about every other method the imagination can conceive. Cocaine is especially likely to come by sea, and large quantities of marijuana are intercepted by the Border Patrol between ports.

But that old standby--a hidden compartment in a passenger car--remains one of the simplest, quickest smuggling tactics used by trafficking organizations despite the risks.

Backtracking to the Bosses

In recent years, increased enforcement on sea routes, as well as new efforts to control illegal immigration, is thought to have had the side effect of shifting even more drug trafficking to cars.

Cars are convenient, and it can be as easy to appear invisible in a crowd as at sea or in the desert. There is no better crowd than the masses waiting at San Ysidro.

The numbing routine speaks to a larger reality: Very little of the smuggling is the work of individuals acting alone.

Law enforcement authorities believe that nearly all is the work of mid-level smuggling organizations, which break down large loads into smaller ones. The groups moving drugs through the San Ysidro crossing are connected--either directly or distantly, through tolls--to a single organism: the ruthless Arellano Felix organization, a Tijuana-based drug cartel run by brothers Benjamin and Ramon.

These medium-sized businesses --transport cells, as they are sometimes called--orchestrate the shotgun-style trafficking, in which a large boat or truckload of drugs is divided among a dozen cars, said Jayson Ahern, acting director of customs field operations.

This system minimizes risk. Enough shipments get through to keep the operation profitable. By splitting loads, “it’s like you’ve diversified your portfolio,” said Customs Special Agent Clark Settles.

Organizations may include an array of conspirators, from bosses, to recruiters, to packers, to mechanics who build compartments in cars.

Drivers are cannon fodder. They are considered expendable and are the ones most often arrested. Many are drug addicts or homeless people, or poor Mexicans desperate for cash.

Agents say payments of about $500 are typical to drive a carload of drugs across the border, although the job may draw as much as $1,200.

In state court, such drivers often face a marijuana transportation charge carrying a sentence of 16 months to three years.

In federal court, where many of the cases involving harder drugs end up, sentences can be stiffer. For typical marijuana loads, terms for first-time offenders range from one to four years; couriers of cocaine and other narcotics face sentences of 10 years or more.

The trafficking organizations frequently search for new recruits as old ones fall to the odds.

Gonzalo Curiel, chief of the narcotics enforcement section for the U.S. attorney’s office in San Diego, said it was once feared that middle-class American college students would flock to the drug trade. But it never happened. The reason? For most people the danger far outweighs the pay.

Not only is there the possibility of stiff penalties for those caught, but there is also the danger of running afoul of the cartels. In the world of Arellano Felix, “people are shot and left for dead, abducted, tortured,” Curiel said.

So even traffickers high up in transport cells, while rich, are often not extraordinary successes, Curiel said. Drug lords in Mexico and U.S. distributors make big money, but less so the people in between.

“It’s a fallacy, this movie image of the guy with a Lear jet,” Latocki said. “A lot of independent operators are just making enough to get by. . . . It’s people just out of the working class and into the middle class. The money goes out as fast as it comes in. It’s like when you get stuck in a job; they don’t know how to do anything else.”

Investigators believe that smugglers tend to keep their drivers as ignorant as possible to minimize vulnerability. Defense attorneys take this further, arguing that many drivers don’t even know there are drugs in their cars.

As a result, few drivers arrested at San Ysidro offer much information beyond a first name of their recruiter, or the spot where they were to leave the car--a supermarket parking lot, for instance.

So agents process most cases routinely, keeping an eye out for the small detail that gnaws at the imagination--”a gut feeling,” said Special Agent Cindy Johnson, “that there is just a little more to it.”

Following the Trail to the Suspected Boss

Agent Settles had one of those feelings recently. A driver was busted at a border station--a white man in his 30s with a nice car. A gum wrapper was in his pocket with an address written on it.

The address led to a house and identical cars, and more arrests. Through stings using cooperating defendants, authorities got more cars, more drivers, and more cars. By the time they closed in on the suspected boss of the organization--the white owner of a roofing business in Los Angeles--customs agents had arrested 30 people, seized 40 cars and confiscated 3,000 pounds of narcotics.

It was a rare payoff in the workaday onslaught of cases. Agents may process “20 or 30 cases before, you think, ‘Whoa, there is something here,’ ” Settles said.

Agents pursuing leads from San Ysidro sometimes set up drops using cooperating defendants or they pretend not to detect drugs, allowing suspects to pass through the border station so they can be followed--”a cold convoy,” in the parlance of drug interdiction.

But they must work fast. The smuggling cells place spotters in the sidewalk crowds at San Ysidro, or among the throngs of vendors. If the car is not in and out of the border station in an hour, the smugglers know it--just as they know who is on duty on a given day, or which dog is working which lane.

They are collecting intelligence on investigators even as investigators collect intelligence on them. The two sides constantly try to outmaneuver and outbluff each other in this high-stakes game.

Mostly, only the drivers take the fall. Hundreds of them. The U.S. attorney’s office in San Diego in recent years has been the busiest in the nation. Federal prosecutors there handle up to 1,700 such cases a year, and the district attorney’s office, which has stepped in to help the overburdened federal attorneys, handles a similar quantity.

Most are pot smuggling cases involving less than 200 pounds. Between drug and new illegal-immigration cases, the border courts are among the most overburdened in the country. San Diego’s federal judges declared a judicial emergency last year.

To trial attorney Shawn Khojayan the system is a remorseless expense of resources against the powerless. Among drivers “there are two types of people,” he said. “People who truly don’t know that there are drugs hidden in the car, and people who do know who are poor, desperate, or infirm. . . . It’s common folk. They are preyed upon by smugglers.”

Khojayan said he recently defended a day laborer from Mexico. The man is 47, a legal, permanent U.S. resident since 1973--”comparatively poor,” the lawyer said, “but not a pitiful man. He worked, had a loving family, paid his taxes.”

The laborer gave this account: He was hired in San Ysidro by a man who wanted him to drive a car over the border to get the tires fixed and offered $25. Customs inspectors searched the car at the border station, and found 4.45 kilos of methamphetamine. The laborer faced 20 years in prison.

He was acquitted after Khojayan argued that the man knew nothing about the drugs--and that customs officers had done nothing to investigate his protestations of innocence. Such defendants, even when found innocent, are often deported based solely on their arrest because of recent changes in immigration law, the lawyer said.

“Most of my clients are of Mexican nationality,” Khojayan said. “They don’t speak English, and all of them are just being processed in a machine.”

Another attorney, Guadalupe Valencia, told of 19-year-old Mexican client who knowingly agreed to drive a load of drugs over the border for $800, but said he thought it was marijuana. It wasn’t. It was 25 pounds of cocaine. He faces a mandatory 10-year sentence.

Why did he do it? “He comes from a poor family,” Valencia said. “He needed money really bad.”

But not all defendants are so purportedly ingenuous, said William Hayes, chief of the criminal division in the U.S. attorney’s office in San Diego. If penalties were lighter, he contends, smugglers would have an even easier time recruiting drivers.

“Are [drivers] less culpable and involved than people who own and sell the drugs? Yes. No one disputes that,” he said. “But you can’t say [that] if you break up your loads small enough, magically this will just become a misdemeanor.”

So it continues at San Ysidro, day after day, hour by hour.

Back to check on his morning’s bust, Inspector Laven wears a worried look. He has just waved a car on after the driver gave him muddled responses. “I thought I had something,” Laven said. “Maybe I should have stopped him.”

Then he shakes his head, shrugs and spits out another sunflower seed. “You can’t worry about it,” he said. “How many do we get out here, anyway--one in 10, maybe?”

And he heads back into the sea of cars.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Drug Busts

Marijuana seized by U.S. customs, primarily at ports of entry along the southwestern border:

*

2000: 1.1 million pounds

1999: 990,000 pounds

1998: 872,709 pounds

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Total marijuana seized on the southwestern border (including Border Patrol seizures):

2000: n/a

1999: 2.1 million pounds

1998: 1.5 million pounds

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Other U.S. customs drug seizures on the southwestern border in 2000:

Cocaine: 34,013 pounds

Heroin: 251 pounds

Methamphetamine: 1,294 pounds

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Sources: U.S. Customs Service, Office of National Drug Control Policy