Running Pot Where It's Not as Hot

By Guy D. Garcia

South Florida crackdown sends drug dealers elsewhere

Following a tip from an informant, law-enforcement officials in the small Massachusetts port town of Fairhaven tailed a tractor-trailer to Mullen's wharf earlier this month. As they watched, a 71-ft. fishing boat called Tiki X unloaded its cargo: 30 tons of pot. By dawn's light, police had arrested 26 men; all were later charged with drug trafficking and conspiracy to violate state narcotics laws. The next morning, about 400 miles southeast of Cape Cod, a Coast Guard cutter intercepted the Biscayne Freeze, a 240-ft. freighter registered in Panama. After firing five rounds from a .50-cal. machine gun across the Biscayne Freeze's bow, ten men boarded the ship, found 31 tons of pot aboard and arrested the crew, including 22 Colombian nationals. Seven days later, federal and local officials closed in on the freighter Indomable, believed to have loaded its cargo in Colombia, as it docked in the Maine town of Bremen. They confiscated 30 tons of marijuana and arrested 24 people, including eight Colombian nationals.

New England, with its busy harbors, craggy coastline and abundance of small, secluded airfields, has long had to endure a modest amount of drug smuggling. But in recent months the region's law-enforcement officials have truly had their hands full. Since the last week in June, 211 tons of pot have been intercepted (nearly ten times the smuggled marijuana taken in all of 1981), eleven smuggling vessels confiscated and 144 people arrested.

Why the sudden upsurge in smuggling activity? Explains Maine U.S. Attorney Richard Cohen: "This is some indication of the successful efforts of the South Florida task force. To a degree, Maine has been a recipient of some of the traffic and individuals that normally would have gone into South Florida."

The huge "Operation Florida," unveiled last January by the Reagan Administration, has attacked smuggling rings operating along the South Florida coast with a small army of Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), FBI and U.S. Customs agents, backed by E-3A Sentry planes and Army Cobra helicopter gunships. While the traditional routes through the Florida Keys and Miami have not been totally abandoned by smugglers, the operation has clearly thrown a scare into the drug underworld. Last week President Reagan vividly reaffirmed White House support for the campaign with a cheerleading visit to South Florida. He reviewed an impressive array of confiscated drugs, weapons and cash and paid tribute to the crew of the Coast Guard cutter Dauntless, which received a presidential citation for a two-year record of 126 arrests and the capture of 459,000 Ibs. of marijuana and 20 smuggling vessels. Later that day the President declared the effort "a clear and unqualified success," adding: "Our goal is to wreck the power of the Mob in America and nothing short of it. We mean to end their profits, imprison their members and cripple their organizations."

As the No. 1 point of entry for illegal drugs like cocaine and marijuana from Latin America, Florida is surely as good a place as any for the Government to launch its campaign. But an unintended consequence of the Florida heat has apparently been to move some marijuana and cocaine operations elsewhere: the southern Gulf states, the Northeast, even the West Coast, where the heat is not as intense. Around Houston, seizures of cocaine and marijuana are up 6% over the same period last year. One notable arrest in New Iberia, La., last May yielded 1,200 Ibs. of high-quality cocaine, worth an estimated $480 million. Farther north, some $1 billion worth of cocaine has entered Georgia since last July, in contrast to $85 million for the previous twelve months. And much farther north, Patrick T. O'Brien, assistant commissioner for enforcement of the U.S. Customs Service in New York, notes: "We've never had smuggling planes flying up here direct from South America before. We've never had these mother ships going up and down the coast."

The spirited and widely publicized efforts of the South Florida task force have pushed some smugglers to California. "Our intelligence has picked up a vast influx of Florida-based smugglers along the entire West Coast," says Commander Mike Shidle, chief of the intelligence and law-enforcement branch of the Eleventh Coast Guard District in Los Angeles. "We don't know if they are totally committed to this area for good, but they are coming."

Some law-enforcement officials complain that the South Florida buildup has sapped their efforts. "At least one-third of the office has been rotated down to Florida," says O'Brien. "It means that some lesser-priority problems will be ignored, and in some instances meaningful investigations will be delayed."

That might soon change. Last month the White House announced plans to create twelve new task forces, staffed with 1,000 investigators and 200 prosecutors, to do battle with drug traffickers across the country. Two task forces will be assigned to Atlanta and Houston to help cope with the Florida overflow that is plaguing other Southern states. Expected to be in full operation by next summer or fall, the program will cost between $75 million and $100 million next year and between $160 million and $200 million in 1984. The reinforcements will be welcome everywhere. Says Rolland Hughes, assistant special agent for the DEA in Los Angeles: "All we are doing now is maintaining. We're not cutting down on the drug trafficking per se. We think we are holding the lid on it, but believe me, it is one hell of a battle."

--By Guy D. Garcia.

Reported by Marilyn Alva/Miami and John E. Yang/Boston, with other bureaus

With reporting by Marilyn Alva/Miami, John E. Yang/Boston

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