For nearly a year, 18-wheel trailer trucks, driven by truckers recruited in Michigan, have been rolling northward from the Mexican border to New York, delivering tons of concealed cocaine and marijuana and carrying back millions of dollars in illegal drug profits.
Federal officials said the truckers were dispatched by Mexico’s most powerful drug trafficking syndicate, once headed by the late Amado Carillo Fuentes, which set out to seize a share of the New York market, the country’s most lucrative, even when it meant encroaching on territory that was the domain of Colombian drug cartels.
On Monday, federal law enforcement officials put a crimp in the smuggling operation by arresting 29 people in sweeps from the New York region to Battle Creek, Mich., to Albuquerque. In announcing the arrests, federal officials provided a clearer picture of the scope and extent of the Mexican push into the New York region and the role of the Carillo-Fuentes syndicate.
“We find them not just in Los Angeles and Houston and Chicago but in the New York City metropolitan area,” said Thomas Constantine, the head of the Drug Enforcement Administration.
Monday’s sweeps were not the first involving the Mexican syndicate, and law enforcement officials say that their battle with the Mexican traffickers is not over. Since December at least 61 other suspects have been arrested around the country, including in Chicago. Federal agents have seized more than 11 tons of cocaine, almost 7 tons of marijuana and more than $18 million in drug profits that traffickers failed to smuggle back into Mexico. Officials promised on Monday that more arrests would follow.
The arrests highlight the latest strategic shift by Mexican drug barons, who have graduated from transporting cocaine and heroin for the Colombians to distributing much of the drugs themselves.
By demanding up to half of what they smuggled as payment from the Colombians, the Mexicans carved out their own markets in the West Coast, the Southwest and parts of the Midwest. Until now, they left the East to the Colombians and their Dominican distributors.
The crackdowns have hit the Carillo-Fuentes syndicate, the largest of four Mexican trafficking organizations, when it has yet to recover from the death of its 42-year-old leader. He died early last month, apparently from a heart attack, after undergoing liposuction and plastic surgery at a Mexican clinic to alter his appearance.
It is unclear whether the Colombian cartel is ceding territory in New York willingly. But a DEA report noted that “Colombia-based traffickers appear willing to turn over some of the tasks of wholesale-level cocaine distribution and money-laundering to their counterparts operating from Mexico” in order to avoid the daily risks of drug trafficking in cities like New York.
The Carrillo-Fuentes organization, which operates from Juarez, the Mexican border city, outfitted the trailer trucks with sliding compartments in the roof to conceal the cocaine. To divert suspicion, the traffickers hired drivers who did not look Mexican in Battle Creek and later in Albuquerque. An official said that some drivers received about $5,000 to take drugs to New York and take money back.
The 29 arrests on Monday included nine truckers, all U.S. citizens. Of the rest, most were Mexicans, and included workers and managers in the cartel, officials said.
Law enforcement officials say that they began to investigate the Carillo-Fuentes connection on Dec. 3, 1996 after discovery of 5.3 tons of cocaine stashed in a warehouse in Tucson. The investigators learned that three other loads totaling another 5 or 6 tons had left the Tucson warehouse by truck for New York. Law enforcement agents seized 1.5 more tons of cocaine in El Paso. And a state trooper in Tyler, Texas, found 2,700 pounds of marijuana in one truck heading to New York and $2 million in cash in another returning from New York.
On June 11, drug agents found 1,350 pounds of cocaine hidden inside a stack of plywood in a warehouse in Jersey City, N.J. “It was hollowed out like a coffin inside, and all the coke was there,” one agent said.
A parallel investigation uncovered the smuggling of at least one and a half tons of cocaine a month in crates of fruit and vegetables from Mexico.
