FEDERAL VICE AGENTS TOUT SUCCESSES

Metro Atlanta may get a little bloodier. Call it a sign of success.

Jack Killorin, who heads a federal narcotics task force, said his
agents are rolling up drug-trafficking organizations to the point
that they have decreased the quality and raised the price of drugs on
the street.

He credits last year's spike in area burglaries, robberies and car
thefts in part to criminals forced to pay more for their illicit drugs.

If law enforcement someday succeeds in breaking up established drug
territories - the real sign of success from a metropolitan
perspective - it could mean a similar spike in murders, as drug
organizations vie for a larger market share.

"If the market here gets unstable down to the street, then the
streets will get bloody," said Killorin, director of Atlanta High
Intensity Drug Trafficking Area Task Force (HIDTA). "I don't think
we're there yet."

He isn't praying for bloodshed - even if it results in the bad guys
only shooting each other. The last thing he wants is Atlanta to look
like Miami in the mid-1980s.

It already looks too much like that for his taste.

Killorin and his kindred have dubbed metro Atlanta the "Miami Vice"
of the 21st century, quipping that if TV detectives Sonny Crockett
and Rico Tubbs went undercover today, it would be in Gwinnett,
Fulton, Cobb and DeKalb counties.

The region may lack cigarette boats, South Beach and bikini-clad
bodies, but it is loaded with cocaine - along with methamphetamine,
marijuana and heroin - and guns and gangsters.

Metro Atlanta has always served as a drug distribution point for the
South, whether it was moonshine in the 1940s or cocaine in the 1980s
But in recent years, it has taken on the role of a national
distribution center, warehousing illicit drugs and filling orders for
shipments to Eastern and Midwestern cities.

"These are guys who are dealing with hundreds of kilos at a time and
millions of dollars a month," Killorin said. "These are big-time players."

He can point to several coups he and his 100-plus agents, drawn from
various local, state and federal police, have tallied. The most
recent was in December, when, working with the Drug Enforcement
Administration, they shut down two trafficking operations, seizing
millions of dollars in drugs and $10 million in cash.

"The organizations we are looking at here are global operations,"
said Rodney Benson, special agent in charge of DEA's Atlanta office.
"The lion's share of the narcotics is originating from Mexican
drug-trafficking operations. Their representatives are deployed up
here to warehouse the shipments."

Metro Atlanta became an outpost of organized crime for reasons of
geography, logistics and immigration. It also has a strong and
diverse market for drugs - powder cocaine for the suburbs, crack
cocaine for the city, crystal meth for the exurbs and Ecstasy for
Midtown raves - for the cartels to fill, Killorin said.

Moreover, the region is a transportation hub - by rail, air and
interstate highways and even by sea, by way of Savannah - to make it
a natural distribution point, whether to New Jersey or Chicago.

"We've got the busiest airport. We've got three major interstates
passing through. We're just accessible," said Atlanta Police Lt.
Robert Browning, deputy director of HIDTA. "It is not that the drugs
are coming to Atlanta and stopping. This is the transportation route
for the whole East Coast."

The reason is simple logistics. Cocaine is still manufactured in
South America, but instead of being shipped directly to the U.S. by
plane or ship - as was the case in the Miami Vice heyday - the
Columbia cartels are now selling it to Mexican cartels.

Those organizations then ship it, along with marijuana,
methamphetamine and heroin, to Atlanta, a major metro area with a
large Hispanic population in which the traffickers can hide.

They often hide shipments in cargos of legitimate goods that
thousands of trucks ferry across the border each day. Drug shipments
even have been hidden with truckloads of produce bound for the state
Farmer's Market in Forest Park, according to the 2007 HIDTA annual report.

The cartels' operatives in metro Atlanta repackage the drugs for
distribution in the region or shipment elsewhere, Benson said. Then,
millions in dollars are transported back to Atlanta, where the cash
is packed and shipped to Mexico.

The trafficking organizations rent houses in affluent neighborhoods
in Cobb and Gwinnett counties that shield them from surveillance
because they're on large, private lots, the HIDTA report noted.

"We see a lot of stash houses in suburban neighborhoods," Benson said.

Gwinnett, in particular, has been the center for major raids
involving methamphetamine, marijuana and cocaine. Authorities have
found homes in Buford, Norcross and Dacula that did not have much
furniture but had large caches of drugs.

DEA agents in the last three years have made two of the largest
seizures of methamphetamine on the East Coast in Gwinnett. In Buford,
$50 million worth of crystal meth was seized in 2006, which topped a
previous record set in Lawrenceville, where $17 million of crystal
meth was seized in 2005.

Killorin noted Georgia passed a law in 2005 restricting the sale of
pseudoephedrine, a necessary ingredient for methamphetamine
production, in response to the meth epidemic sweeping rural Georgia.

The law substantially undermined local production, but the Mexican
cartels easily filled the void, possibly even increasing the amount
of the drug available.

"Instead of mom and pop labs, we are now looking at product coming
from what could only be described as industrial-size labs in Mexico,"
Killorin said. "The north Georgia meth producers are almost a
historical reference."