AGENTS' DRUG SEIZURE TOTAL FROM BOATS REACHES $25M

Federal agents scooped another 198 pounds of cocaine from the bowels of a
70-foot converted fishing boat from Haiti on Thursday, bringing the
two-week total seized from five Haitian freighters to more than $25 million
in drugs.

So well concealed were the 90 wrapped "bricks" that agents of U.S. Customs,
FBI and the Drug Enforcement Administration had been unable to find them
over the last two weeks - even though sources from inside a Haitian drug
smuggling organization insisted they were there.

"We knew it was there, and we couldn't find it," said Customs Supervisor
Bobby Rutherford, who has supervised the daunting effort of hauling the
ships onto dry dock and cutting through the steel hull from the outside.
"Without sources we'd never find it."

The Anita, seized Jan. 29 after FBI agents received inside information on a
huge shipment of cocaine on five separate freighters, was swarmed with
Customs agents, inspectors and dockworkers who refused to give up the search.

They spent $10,000 just to dry-dock the vessel, thousands more cleaning out
and disposing of several feet of bilge and raw sewage collected at the
bottom of the boat, and hundreds of hours drilling and searching for the
cocaine to no avail - until Thursday.

As with the four other ships, which yielded a total of 2,987 pounds of
cocaine, the smugglers had cut into a 12-inch hollow of the thin keel
structure at the rear bottom of the vessel, stuffed the cocaine inside,
added a layer of mud to circumvent Customs drills, then expertly welded it
shut.

The welds were sanded smooth, the patch repainted and then doused with acid
to make it appear weathered. Then the entire bottom of the boat was filled
with foul bilge.

"We've spent far more to search this boat and find this cocaine than [the
boat] will fetch at auction," said Rutherford, who valued the boat at about
$75,000. Customs is inquiring about government artificial reef programs to
see if the boats can be donated and sunk in exchange for sharing the costs.

The seizures at the Miami River have sent shivers through federal agents,
alarmed at the sophistication of smugglers from Haiti, a country emerging
as the central transshipment point for Colombian cocaine.