Pubdate: Sun, 22 Mar 2009
Source: Burlington Times-News (NC)
Copyright: 2009 Freedom Communications, Inc.
Contact: http://www.thetimesnews.com/sections/contactus/letter.php
Website: http://www.thetimesnews.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1822
Author: Robert Boyer
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/pot.htm (Cannabis)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/coke.htm (Cocaine)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/heroin.htm (Heroin)

ALAMANCE COUNTY A DRUG HUB FOR MAJOR DEALERS

Fantastic pay.

Exciting travel. Danger and violence.

Addiction and ruin entirely possible. A prison stay or early death likely.

This is how an honest job description for a drug dealer or courier 
might read. Not the most reassuring ad, but plenty persuasive for 
those with little education, money, scruples or hope.

Unlike legitimate businesses, illicit drug operations aren't 
advertising, of course. But that's done little to hamper them.

Major operators have made Alamance County a drug hub whose spokes 
spread throughout the East Coast and beyond, say Sheriff Terry 
Johnson and Wally Serniak, the resident agent in charge of the 
Greensboro office of the federal Drug Enforcement Administration.

And like something out of the "Godfather" movies, think of this as a 
family operation whose tentacles stretch across the U.S. border, 
lawmen say. Drugs, guns and a river of cash flow into and out of the 
county on real and virtual highways.

Sometimes the profits go out in bulk shipments of bills, sometimes in 
electronic transfers, still other times through laundering cash 
through legitimate local businesses.

The siren song? Head-swooning profits. Johnson, a former SBI 
undercover agent, dissects a hypothetical cocaine dealer's work to 
make the point.

A local dealer buys an ounce of cocaine for $1,200 and dilutes it by 
half. He then sells his diluted or "cut" product for $5,700, a profit 
of $4,500. The return is equivalent to a month's gross salary for 
someone making $54,000 a year.

Many dealers will make more on the transaction because they dilute 
their product by more than half, and local mid-level distributors and 
couriers can make a $200,000 a year, Johnson said.

The sheriff estimates that in Alamance County, there are roughly 200 
drug runners and distributors and about a half-dozen kingpins. Many 
have direct ties to drug cartels in Mexico.

The sheriff wouldn't name names but said major players in the local 
operations include several whom locals think are upstanding citizens. 
Along with the copious quantities of cocaine and marijuana, the 
Mexican drug operations export guns and ammunition, and a number of 
those doing the trafficking.

In a presentation Monday to the county commissioners, Serniak 
estimated that "at least 80 to 90 percent" of those arrested in two 
recent local enforcement operations were illegal immigrants.

But at the end of his presentation, in a response to a question from 
County Commissioner Tim Sutton, Serniak said the county's 287 (g) 
illegal immigration enforcement program is having "no effect" on drug 
trafficking in Alamance County.

Why? Many of the top local leaders are U.S. born, the second- and 
third-generation products of families who have been distributing 
drugs for some time, Serniak said.

The highly-structured and compartmentalized Fortune 500-like 
organizations insulate their major players and keep those working in 
one part of the operation in the dark about the other parts.

The local operations have no problem filling vacancies with those in 
Mexico who struggle under tough economic conditions, and with others 
from points north and south of the U.S. border.

ALAMANCE COUNTY HAS HAD A SERIOUS drug problem for more than 30 
years, Johnson said.

Previous sheriffs and other local authorities did what they could to 
stem the rising tide of illegal drugs, but largely ignored the major 
players who were setting up shop.

Those players also took advantage of a lack of cooperation between 
local, state and federal law agencies, and used money and family 
connections to get some within the sheriff's department to do their 
bidding, Johnson said. The sheriff said he believed there was a mole 
inside the department when he came into office in December 2002.

He reassigned his vice employees to other jobs, something he said 
earned him a lot of enmity from those investigators.

In 2003, less than a year after Johnson took office, Cynthia Huffines 
Turner, a sheriff's dispatcher, was charged with trafficking in and 
manufacturing marijuana. She was later convicted and received a 
suspended sentence. Turner had sensitive information about undercover 
investigators, Johnson said.

While Turner was a dispatcher, several undercover operations "just 
didn't seem to go right," Sheriff's spokesman Randy Jones said. Jones 
didn't say Turner was the source of any leaks, but added that "a lot 
of our vice operations seemed to be very successful after" she left 
the department.

In February 2006, sheriff's receptionist and translator Silvia 
Navarrete Duran was charged with conspiring to traffic in cocaine 
after her husband, Francisco Duran Avila, was charged with 
trafficking in cocaine and other offenses. Cooperation is strong now 
between his agency, local law enforcement, the State Bureau of 
Investigation, the DEA and other federal agencies, Johnson said. 
Despite those ties, and enforcement efforts resulting in local 
seizures of hundreds of pounds of marijuana and cocaine and millions 
in cash over the last several years, Johnson estimates that his 
department and other agencies fighting the drug trafficking in the 
county are catching only 1 or 2 percent of the illicit trade.

Cocaine and marijuana are the mainstays of the Alamance County trade. 
But the sheriff and Jones say heroin, a highly addictive narcotic, is 
making a comeback locally.

Profit and practicality are driving heroin's resurgence, and a shift 
from marijuana to cocaine.

With marijuana, a pickup truck load is worth about $1 million. For 
cocaine, a filled suitcase brings the same amount.

But when it comes to heroin, dealers need only to fill a lunch box to 
have $1 million worth.

Despite tough laws against heroin trafficking, the ability to make 
more with less is proving irresistible for those already conducting 
risky business, Jones said.

If there is a silver lining to this scenario, it's that the river of 
drugs flow mostly out of the county and aren't resulting in a major 
rise in overall crime. But the increasing gun traffic is behind 
rising violence here, Johnson and Serniak said.

Drug overdose deaths are also up, with four confirmed recent cases. 
Johnson, Jones and Serniak attribute those deaths to heroin. Since 
December, autopsy results from the Office of the Chief Medical 
Examiner in Chapel Hill show two overdose deaths caused by methadone, 
a drug used to treat heroin addicts.

The sheriff thinks he has now enough manpower to deal with the 
situation, but said more fine-tuning of enforcement efforts is 
needed. The sheriff's department currently has three investigators on 
state and federal task forces and is part of a local gang task force. 
In the meantime, Johnson said he is asking the federal government to 
designate the county as a High Intensity Drug Area so it can get more 
federal dollars to deal with the problem.

Having the local officers on those federal task forces is key because 
it provides more resources, Jones said.

Some have accused the sheriff of ratcheting up the rhetoric as a way 
to bolster his reelection chances in 2010. Serniak's presentation to 
the commissioners and Johnson's steady verbal drumbeat of Alamance 
County's supposed drug-hub status is a ploy to further expand the 
sheriff's budget, others say.

Absolutely untrue, Serniak and Johnson say. If anything, the sheriff 
said his straight-talk about the situation will probably hurt him at the polls.

His proposed budget to the county for 2009-10 is actually less than 
his current budget, he said.

OVER THE YEARS, Jones said, Alamance County has gained a reputation 
across the country as a distribution hub.

Say Burlington or Alamance County and lawmen in El Paso, Texas, and 
other faraway points nod with recognition, Jones said.

But does the widespread recognition, and the sheriff's 
pronouncements, hurt efforts to recruit business and industry to 
Alamance County? Burlington City Manager Harold Owen said he doesn't 
know. Owen said police Chief Mike Williams has confirmed that drug 
smuggling "through the area is significant" but said it has not led 
to a rise in local street-level crimes in Burlington.

"In terms of image, it's obviously a concern," Owen said. More police 
staffing for the city's drug enforcement efforts are part of the 
city's requests for federal stimulus money, the manager said. Johnson 
vows to continue to highlight the issue because "the public deserves 
to know." Locals can help best by feeding tips to his office and 
other law agencies, the sheriff said.

Sidebar

Some notable local drug seizures Feb. 2009 - 89 pounds of cocaine 
near Alamance-Caswell border Feb. 2009 - 60 marijuana plants, 26 
pounds of marijuana in Graham Aug. 2, 2004 - 120 pounds of cocaine 
(worth more than $10 million) from a vehicle near the Village of 
Alamance May 2003 - 1,000 pounds of marijuana and $50,000 from Haw River
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