Source: Washington Post Page: A1 Contact: 6 Nov 1997 Website: http://www.washingtonpost.com Letters form: http://washingtonpost.com/wpsrv/edit/letters/letterform.htm Mexican Drug Channels Spread Over U.S. Last of five articles By Roberto Suro Washington Post Staff Writer To his neighbors in a middleclass, predominantly Hispanic, Houston neighborhood, Chano Rojas seemed a quiet family man who lived in a small clapboard house and drove a slightly battered compact sedan. They rarely saw him do anything more adventurous than go out to a nearby restaurant for dinner with his wife and stepdaughter. A softeyed, 53yearold man with a toothbrush mustache, a little pot belly and slickedback black hair, Rojas set off most days for the old dockside neighborhood of Magnolia, which has welcomed Mexican immigrants as a point of first arrival for nearly a century. There, he was known as a oneman employment agency. He'd pay men cash to work a few hours unloading trucks, or simply to stand on a nearby street corner and watch for anybody who wasn't a neighborhood regular. The best jobs went to men who would be instructed to drive a car to Chicago, Washington or another city. Rojas would tell them to take their families, drive at the speed limit and drop the car at a specified address. Sometimes, Rojas had as many as a dozen people working for him. The jobs never lasted long; Rojas seemed to like turnover. But transience is expected in an immigrant neighborhood, and there are always new people happy to take a job even for a few days. Rojas is now serving a 30year federal prison sentence for drug trafficking. According to investigators who had him under surveillance for months, Rojas's recruits probably knew he was involved in some kind of criminal enterprise but may never have grasped its scope. In fact, the investigators themselves were stunned when they found nearly 120 pounds of cocaine — more than $1 million worth at wholesale prices — in his warehouse and more than $1 million in cash stuffed into a closet at home. "You would have never figured Chano Rojas as a major league coke dealer because everything he did blended into the community around him," said a Houston police detective who helped close the case. "It's that ability to fade into the woodwork of a big Latino neighborhood that makes Mexican dealers so elusive and so dangerous." The burgeoning drug traffic from Mexico has generated corruption, violence and a kind of lowintensity war along the 2,000mile border between Mexico and the United States. But mounting evidence from many sources — the Rojas case, a courtroom in Des Moines, wiretaps in Los Angeles, drug seizures in New Jersey — confirms that the problems have spread deep into the U.S. heartland. Mexican traffickers have established distribution networks capable of delivering marijuana, cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine to local retailers in most parts of the nation. Along the way, the traffickers are beginning to have a potentially profound effect on the MexicanAmerican communities in cities around the United States. Mexican drug syndicates opportunistically exploit the fact that their country is by far the largest source of new immigrants to the United States. They hide in the neighborhoods their conationals have established in every major city, and they recruit financially strapped newcomers as drivers, couriers and lookouts — the cannon fodder of their operations. "Often we are dealing with people who know how to operate here because they have spent time in the United States. They know how to gain access to businesses, services, vehicles, and they have access to a virtually unlimited supply of foot soldiers," said a senior Drug Enforcement Administration official based in Texas. "All that has helped the Mexicans gain dominance very quickly, and it also makes them much more dangerous in the long run." Although the number of individuals with any connection to the drug trade is only a tiny fraction of the nearly 7 million people born in Mexico now living in the United States, the growing prominence of the drug operations threatens to taint the whole of the Mexican immigrant experience, just as the Mafia cast a stigma that Italian immigrants struggled against for generations. Mexican immigrants and their U.S.born offspring constitute the only large segment of the U.S. population that is growing rapidly. Mexico as 'Scapegoat' "The American people could turn on Mexico very quickly and make it the scapegoat for their drug consumption problems, the same way they heaped blame in the past on the Colombian cartels or the Mafia," said Rodolfo de la Garza, a professor of government at the University of Texas in Austin. Currently, most Americans distinguish between the mostly poor Mexican immigrants they see living on this side of the border and the rich, deadly Mexican drug traffickers they perceive as living and operating in Mexico, said de la Garza, who has conducted extensive opinion research on attitudes toward Latinos and in Latino communities. "The distinction between good Mexican workers and bad Mexican drug kingpins could break down, however, and produce a much more widespread demonization of Mexicans in this country," he said. "And if the Americans turn on Mexico, it is the Mexican Americans who will get caught in the middle." Middleclass, Englishspeaking Mexican Americans are conservative on social issues and typically support strong measures against crime and drug abuse, de la Garza noted, but "a broad attack on Mexican dopers would send them into convulsions." On one level, they might feel ethnic loyalty toward Mexican immigrants and fear that they would get caught up in the stigmatization, he said. At the same time, they would react as angrily as any other community threatened by an influx of drugs. This dilemma is apparent in the way some prominent Latino advocates approach the drug issue. "Our communities suffer as much as any others from the public health costs and the crime problems associated with drug trafficking, but we are very conscious that at this point Latinos are already the target of a great deal of stereotyping that portrays them as criminals and of a more general antiimmigrant bias," said Charles Kamasaki, a senior policy analyst for the National Council of La Raza, a Washingtonbased umbrella group of Latino organizations around the country. "In this atmosphere, blaming America's drug problems on Mexico would really constitute a kind of pilingon, especially considering that America already had big drug consumption problems long before Mexican drug traffickers came on the scene," he said. Under different circumstances, Kamasaki said, "there might be a greater willingness to admit that there is an issue in our own community, but now, in this context, with the kind of stigmatization that already exists, it it very hard to imagine." Thomas Goldsbury, a teacher and community activist in a predominantly Latino Houston neighborhood, put it this way: "I see parents who are scared to death at what is happening to their kids but they are scared to death to admit it." Goldsbury said he has watched local teenage gangs go from mischief to felonies largely as a result of their involvement with drug trafficking. "Drugs are the easiest form of income for a teenage boy who doesn't have any skills and who doesn't speak much English," said Goldsbury, who lives and works in area of southwest Houston crowded with large immigrant families and identified by police as a prime recruiting ground for Mexican traffickers seeking drivers and lookouts. It is, increasingly, an area where drugs are sold and consumed. "The parents are the weakest link in the whole chain because they are usually working two jobs and they simply don't find out what their kids are doing until it is too late," Goldsbury said. "You are talking about newcomers who do not feel like they belong here yet and who are still struggling to survive. All that makes them and their children very, very vulnerable." In the U.S. Heartland The impact of the rise of the Mexican drug traffickers reaches far beyond border cities like San Diego or El Paso, and beyond other cities with traditionally large Mexican American communities like Houston or Chicago. It reaches deep into the heartland, touching unlikely places — like Judge Carol Egly's courtroom in Des Moines. In the summer and fall of 1995, young Mexicans began appearing before Egly as defendants. They had no credible identity papers and rarely spoke any English. They seemed poor but were carrying thousands of dollars worth of drugs, usually methamphetamine, a highly addictive stimulant. "We didn't know who they were, where they had come from or what they were doing," Egly said recently. About that time, Egly also started seeing young Iowans who arrived in a frenzy. "They were literally climbing the walls," she said. "Several times a day we'd have people too incoherent to be arraigned, too noisy and lunatic to handle in a courtroom." Some had committed bizarre crimes, like the young man who pistolwhipped his grandparents or the woman who went on a checkforging spree in her sister's name. After several had been referred for psychiatric treatment, jail officials discovered these suspects were methamphetamine users. It took Egly a while to realize she was seeing two small pieces of a much bigger puzzle — the rapid expansion of the Mexican traffickers' reach. These organizations had grown large enough and extensive enough to become the primary impetus for an epidemic of methamphetamine use that was sweeping the Midwest. "All of a sudden we are looking at a very large and efficient drugdealing operation that seems to have popped up out of nowhere and that has made a real change in the life of this community," she said. "How did that happen? I think we should know." A few recent lawenforcement operations illustrate this widening impact: Seven tons of cocaine were seized and 35 people arrested in an investigation last summer that uncovered Mexican traffickers operating in New York City, which had long been considered a stronghold of the Colombian cartels. The cocaine arrived from the border area in tractortrailers with false compartments or hidden in hollowedout stacks of plywood, and much of the operation was run from headquarters in Los Angeles. Another Mexican drug organization discovered this year operated with distribution cells in New York, Philadelphia, Chicago and the border region. Police seized nearly two tons of cocaine hidden in a 30ton shipment of carrots that was on its way from McAllen, Tex., to wholesalers on the East Coast. More than 50 individuals have been prosecuted for running a network that linked drug suppliers in Mexico and distributors in rural areas and small towns in eastern Kentucky. Two families dominated the network, which federal officials allege is responsible for importing more than 11 tons of marijuana since 1992. There was a time when most Mexican traffickers were merely smugglersforhire in the employ of the Colombian cartels. But then, according to a DEA intelligence analysis, they began demanding payment in drugs rather than cash, and dealing the drugs on their own behalf. It is a pattern exemplified by the career of Carlos Rodriguez. All through the 1980s, Rodriguez dispatched cocaine shipments from the Rio Grande Valley to Los Angeles and New York, usually aboard 18wheelers fitted with secret compartments. Rodriguez, who became a government informant after he was busted, testified recently that he had worked loyally for Colombians who told him nothing more than where to pick up the cocaine in Mexico and where to drop it off in the United States. On delivery, they paid him in cash for his services. But a few years ago, Rodriguez said, he began dealing with the Mexican cartel allegedly headed by Juan Garcia Abrego, the only Mexican kingpin ever brought to trial in the United States. Eventually, Garcia Abrego's lieutenants told Rodriguez to stop dealing with the Colombians. "Well, we were being absorbed by the organization they had," Rodriguez said. Testimony by Rodriguez and several other traffickersturnedinformants at Garcia Abrego's federal court trial in Houston this spring offered glimpses of the transformation of the Mexican American drug distribution rings. Acting on instructions from Mexico, they set up sham businesses to provide an infrastructure for their efforts — everything from a truckrepair shop in Houston, where secret compartments were fitted in place, to an electronics wholesaler in Brownsville, Tex., where tons of cocaine that had just crossed the border were repackaged for delivery to American cities. "The Mexicans had a smuggling infrastructure in place for decades — they had the people, the front operations and a familiarity with this country — and so the transition into fullscale drug trafficking was very easy for them," said Joseph A. Vanacora, special agent in charge of the DEA's Chicago office. Several large Mafia families, like the Gambinos, evolved out of a specific geographic area; similarly, most of the big African American gangs, including the Gangster Disciples, the Crips and the Bloods, started out in one neighborhood. These groups have usually undertaken a variety of pursuits, sometimes endeavoring to control all the criminal activity on their turf. Mexican drug traffickers, by contrast, move around a vast territory in two nations. And they have a singleminded focus. "Why dabble in loansharking or prostitution when you are making unlimited profits moving cocaine?" Vanacora asked. "The answer is: You don't, unless you were doing that other stuff before you got into coke." Even within the world of drugdealing the Mexicans have defined clearcut roles for themselves. "The Mexicans are not trying to control street sales," Vanacora said, noting that even though the biggest profits are to be made at the retail level, that is also where the worst violence takes place. "They have no interest in turf wars — that they leave to the gangs," Vanacora said. "The Mexicans are interested in moving drugs and selling them — selling them in large quantities to anyone who can pay." Playing CatchUp The Mexican trafficking groups have expanded so fast that officials are obliged to play catchup. "We are at about the same stage with the Mexicans that we were at with La Cosa Nostra in the early 1950s," said a veteran FBI supervisor, who asked not to be named. "We know they have big organizations because we can see the effects, but we don't really know how they operate." In congressional testimony, DEA chief Thomas A. Constantine said of the Mexican cartel bosses: "These organized crime leaders are far more dangerous, far more influential and have a great deal more impact on our daytoday lives than their domestic predecessors." Constantine recalled that when law enforcement made a case against a Mafia boss, "he could be located within the U.S., arrested and sent to jail." The leaders of Mexican organizations, on the other hand, "operate from the safety of protected locations and are free to come and go as they please within their home countries." That pattern — of strings being pulled from the relative safety of Mexico — was allegedly found in the case of Jorge Velazquez. Authorities said their investigation of Velazquez, now awaiting trial on drug charges, offered them one of their most intimate looks at the workings an alleged Mexican drug organization. In the summer of 1995, Velazquez went on a househunting trip to Country Club Hills, Ill., a quiet, workingclass suburb south of Chicago. The real estate agent who took him around recounts that Velazquez was accompanied by a woman, apparently his wife, and two children. Eventually, authorities said, he rented a modest threebedroom house on West 189th Street, but he was never seen again in Country Club Hills. Starting in October, two men appeared to be living in the house, quietly going about their business and never attracting much attention — at least not until one Saturday afternoon in January, when squads of local police officers and federal agents descended on the place. Inside, they discovered nearly 300 pounds of cocaine and $240,000 in cash. But the most important find was a ledger that allegedly detailed the operations of a drug distribution ring that had produced sales worth more than $22 million in about 100 days. Federal court documents, including a conspiracy indictment against Velazquez and 15 others, depict an organization that was flexible, fast and highly compartmentalized. The Country Club Hills house served only as a warehousing and distribution point, and it was only meant to operate for a few months. Inside, investigators found several beds and television sets, but no other furniture. More important, they found no guns. Despite the massive quantities of cocaine and cash they handled, the three or four men who worked the operation were apparently confident they operated in utter secrecy. Every transaction and every expense — gasoline, rental cars, food and the cell phones that ultimately gave them away — were recorded in the ledger, down to the penny. At Christmas, the alleged cocaine trade took a break. A man was sent up from Mexico to watch the stash, authorities contend, while the usual crew spent the holiday with their families in Mexico. When the police busted them in January, the men were expecting an order within days to fold up the operation and go home. One of them had already promised his wife he would not be away much longer. He has now been in jail for a year and a half. About six people helped run the Country Club Hills house, according to the allegations. They were the cocaine equivalent of migrant workers who had come up to handle a harvest and would not tarry on this side of the border. Even before they headed back to Mexico, another crew was supposed to be on the way to set up another house that would handle the same customers in the Chicago area. Cocaine allegedly came to the house by way of smugglers who appeared to be working along the Rio Grande in southeastern Texas. Investigators said they are not sure how it arrived. Periodic telephone calls from Los Angeles would instruct the men at the house to put a specified quantity of the drug in a car that was to be parked at a designated location, usually a shopping center parking lot. Sometimes they would meet customers to exchange the drugs for cash, investigators said, but contact was always kept to a minimum. According to investigators, the cocaine was going to wholesalers, almost all of them Mexicans, who were themselves often a step or two removed from the street gangs and dealers who sold the drugs to users in the form of crack. The cash collected from these transactions allegedly was immediately dispatched to Mexico by way of a separate transportation network handled by smugglers based in El Paso. Velazquez allegedly handled all of these operations by remote control. A physician by training, he was known only as "El Doctor" to many of his associates. According to federal investigators, he traveled to the United States occasionally to check on his operations but conducted most of his business from a ranch in the western Mexican state of Sinaloa. It was there, beyond the reach of U.S. law enforcement, that Velazquez allegedly negotiated the sales that were consummated in suburban Chicago parking lots. Price, quantity and destination were all decided in Sinaloa. The men accused of actually exchanging cocaine for cash in Chicago were just soldiers. And investigators say they believe that the Country Club Hills operation was just one of several that Velazquez allegedly managed. Nearly four months after the Country Club Hills house was raided, Velazquez made a trip to Los Angeles for a day, allegedly to confer with one of his top lieutenants. Federal officials had been listening over wiretaps as he made arrangements for the rendezvous. The two men were arrested as they chatted in a parking lot. El Doctor will go on trial in Chicago this fall. © Copyright 1997 The Washington Post Company