SAILORS TURNED SMUGGLERS

By Elaine Shannon/Washington

Night after night, Nigerian gangsters trolled the bars and fleshpots of Naples for reckless young Yanks. The bait: a weekend excursion to Turkey, all expenses paid, and a fat wad of walking-around cash. The job: carrying a backpack stuffed with heroin on the return flight from Istanbul to Rome.

For a few U.S. sailors, it may have been an offer too good to refuse. The Pentagon confirmed last week that 20 Navy enlisted men and women, one lieutenant commander and at least one U.S. civilian were involved in an international drug-trafficking operation directed by Nigerian organized-crime barons. Five sailors have been convicted of drug-smuggling charges and are serving time in Italian prisons or the Navy brig in Rota, Spain. The rest are awaiting trial or further investigation.

Nigerian crime lords have earned a reputation as some of the world's most proficient drug smugglers. Savvy too: they realized their own comings and goings were being closely watched by antinarcotics agents in airports throughout Europe and the U.S. So they scoured after-hours joints in Navy ports of call, looking for dupes. "The key was a clean-cut appearance, a U.S. passport and the ability to be tempted by $25,000 to $30,000 for a weekend's work," says Lieut. Commander Bill Spann, the Navy spokesman in Naples.

For the Navy, the timing of the arrests could not be worse. The service is reeling from the fallout of the Tailhook sexual harassment scandal; a succession of cheating, drug-dealing and car-theft scandals at the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland; and the May 16 suicide of Admiral Jeremy ("Mike") Boorda, the Chief of Naval Operations. Boorda and other top Navy brass were briefed on the case several times. But Navy officials insist the smuggling investigation, code-named Operation White Stallion, was perceived by Boorda and his colleagues not as another blot on the service but as evidence of its hard-nosed antidrug policy. "We've said time and time again, there's no place for drugs in the U.S. Navy," says Rear Admiral Kendall Pease, the Navy's senior spokesman. "This shows we're serious."

Naval investigators launched White Stallion in May 1995 after two sailors based in Naples were arrested as they arrived at the Rome airport with 6 kg of Turkish heroin, expecting, as military personnel, not to be searched by customs. The sailors turned out to be couriers for Nigerians plying the Golden Crescent heroin trail. That route begins in the opium fields of Afghanistan, runs through refineries in Turkey and then the wholesaling hubs of Italy and terminates in needle parks throughout Western Europe.

The Naples conspiracy was cracked by a petty officer who went undercover and infiltrated a suspected social clique of young enlisted men and women who called themselves "the Regulators." Wearing a body wire and tape recorder, he eventually made direct contact with some Nigerians who tried to recruit him to go to Turkey for heroin and to Brazil for cocaine. Italian and Turkish police following his leads arrested seven people in Turkey and seized 4.5 kg of heroin. "We don't view this as a Navy problem or a Naples problem," says Spann. "This group of Nigerians is targeting U.S. personnel worldwide." Which is why the White Stallion case is galloping ahead as the U.S. Navy, Air Force and Drug Enforcement Administration investigate the preying of Nigerian underworld bosses on young Americans throughout Europe. "Several [of the sailors jailed] are cooperating," says Spann, and "there may in fact be more arrests."

--By Elaine Shannon/Washington