Mexican drug cartels set up shop in Atlanta
‘New Southwest border’ attracts narcotics trade
By BILL TORPY
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Sunday, October 12, 2008
When U.S. law enforcement officials last month busted a Mexican drug cartel moving tons of dope and millions of dollars, they announced it in Atlanta.
The distribution ring stretched from Colombia to New York to Italy, but the operation’s key hub was Atlanta. Long a commerce and transportation center for giants like UPS and Delta Air Lines, Atlanta tags itself as an “international city.” This time, it embodied that definition in an illicit way.
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LOUIE FAVORITE / lfavorite@ajc.com/AJC Staff
Authorities show off the 187 lbs of crystal methamphetamine and 41 kilos of cocaine (not in this picture) seized by DEA in Gwinnett County in 2006.Enlarge this image
NICK ARROYO/AJC
Police seized 310 kilos of cocaine at this Lawrenceville house in 2005..BY THE NUMBERS
$30 million — Amount of shrink-wrapped, vacuum-packed U.S currency confiscated in 2007 being sent through Atlanta to Mexico.
4 — The number of times between January 2005 and August 2006 that drug officials in the Atlanta area broke the record for the size of a methamphetamine bust in the eastern United States. The amounts grew from 125 pounds to 341 pounds.
507 — The initial number of arrests recorded in September when authorities busted a Mexican distribution ring that ran through Atlanta and stretched from Colombia to Italy.
16,771 — The number of kilograms of cocaine seized in the September bust.
9 — Number of drug-related kidnappings attributed to Mexican distribution rings in Gwinnett County this year through July.
Source: U.S. Department of Justice
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Federal drug agent Jack Killorin calls Atlanta “the new Southwest border.”
“All the things that make this area attractive to perfectly legitimate businesses make it attractive to drug smugglers: transportation, good communications, population, even good climate,” said Killorin, who heads the Atlanta high-intensity drug trafficking area task force, or HIDTA. “It’s a city with deep attachments to other areas. It has population connections to other cities. It has social connections.”
Mexican distribution rings supply about 90 percent of the cocaine, 80 percent of the methamphetamine and half of the marijuana used in the United States, estimates Rodney G. Benson, the agent in charge of the Drug Enforcement Administration office in Atlanta. A huge proportion of the payload headed for the Atlantic seaboard, the Southeast and the Midwest flows through Atlanta’s interstates, a federal report said this year.
The transformation of narcotics trafficking to the Mexican networks started shifting in the 1990s. Experts say it’s a combination of population shifts, supply chain improvements, product development, criminal outsourcing, even the North American Free Trade Agreement.
“Drug distribution is capitalism at its most basic form,” said Gwinnett County District Attorney Danny Porter. “[Mexican rings] delivered a better product — better, cheaper, faster. Americans just got pushed out of the market.”
Porter was first elected in 1992, when the cocaine trade was run by a consortium of Cubans, Colombians and locals.
“If you put a starting date [on the Mexican involvement], it’s the explosion in the Latin community since the [1996 Atlanta] Olympics,” he said.
Gwinnett’s Hispanic population is approaching 20 percent. This has allowed traffickers to follow the population flow, giving them a measure of comfort in the community and an ability to hide in plain sight, he said.
The shift of the narcotics trade to Mexican cartels, which had for years supplied marijuana to the United States, came in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Cocaine had come from Colombia to Florida by boat or was flown in to small airfields in the southern United States. In fact, one of the first big drug cases Porter encountered as district attorney was a group of Cubans living in rural Gwinnett who frequently traveled to Florida to retrieve hundreds of kilos of cocaine coming in by boat.
But increased interdiction of the Colombian-Cuban delivery routes and the opening of the United States’ border to trade handed the Mexicans an opportunity.
“The Colombians realized they could hire them out [to transport drugs] and reduce the risk,” said Jim Martin, a federal prosecutor in Atlanta who has handled drug cases for nearly 30 years.
The networks have honed their distribution machinery. One transport team hands a shipment to another, with each crew knowing little or nothing about the next. This isolation lessens the chance of a disruption to the rest of the chain if there is a bust.
Extracting information after an arrest is a chore. “Developing a cooperation within the Mexican organization is an obstacle not as easily overcome as with other ethnic groups,” Martin said. Part of it is a code of honor not to talk, he said. But more is fear of retaliation to their families back home.
“They’re more difficult to infiltrate,” said Terry Pelfrey, who supervises GBI drug agents in North Georgia. “As the Hispanics moved in, some bad apples moved in with them. But with so many illegal immigrants, it’s harder to know who is who.”
Adelina Nicholls, executive director of the Georgia Latin Alliance for Human Rights, said: “It is not a representative behavior of that community at large.”
She said guns and the money that finances drug crimes in Mexico are supplied by American consumption. “It works both ways.”
Martin said the distributors will work with Americans, bringing into Atlanta shipments in the hundreds of kilograms and then breaking them down to 30- to 50-kilo lots before sending them elsewhere. But increasingly, the Mexican cartels want to keep the business in the family and are expanding to control a layer or two of distribution under the wholesalers’ level.
Benson of the DEA spoke of the operations like Fortune 500 organizations. “The shipment in Atlanta gets turned over to a regional coordinator who then oversees the movement of that product to their established customer base,” he said. “They have those mapping what’s going in and what’s going out.”
There are money counters, book balancers and workers heat-sealing blocks of cash in plastic wrapping to prevent pilfering. Then the cash is smuggled back to Mexico.
The cartels seized an opportunity in the late 1990s with meth, shipping huge batches to America.
Scores of labs operated here in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Pelfrey said, but the number dropped after 2005 when Georgia limited the sale of cold remedies used to make meth.
In January 2005, authorities confiscated 125 pounds in DeKalb County. It was said to be the largest bust ever on the East Coast. In March 2005, they got 174 pounds of crystal meth in Gwinnett. In August 2006, a bust in Gwinnett yielded 187 pounds. A week later, another bust in Gwinnett doubled that.
Authorities say recent busts in the region coupled with increased enforcement in Mexico have caused a shrinking supply and spiked the kilo price of cocaine to above $25,000 in Atlanta.
A Justice Department analysis in June detailed those successes but added, “Mexican trafficking organizations will quite likely become further entrenched” in Atlanta.
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