INNOCENT ACCOMPLICES

The Clues Came In Small Bundles Infants Often 'Rented' Away From Their
Parents To Serve As A Front For A Large Drug-Smuggling Ring.

CHICAGO - He knocked on the door of the squalid basement apartment, looking
for a young couple. Their baby girl had been stopped at an airport
thousands of miles away, and it wasn't her first suspicious trip.

The 8-month-old had already traveled to Panama and London five times,
usually in the arms of strangers and often exposed to danger. The latest
trip had ended abruptly with an arrest - at Heathrow Airport.

"Your baby was with a woman who was caught with drugs," U.S. Customs agent
Pete Darling told the parents. "Can you folks tell me what's going on?"

Calmly, the couple claimed their child had been taken from a babysitter's
house and they had filed a kidnapping report.

Darling noticed the parents were sickly looking and the apartment was a
mess: dirty dishes in the sink, the smell of marijuana in the air.

He knew something was terribly wrong.

What Darling didn't know was he had begun to unravel an international drug
smuggling ring - a multimillion-dollar business that stretched from fleabag
hotels in Panama to the gritty streets of the Bronx to the industrial heart
of England.

And it ran through the drug-ridden, decaying South Side neighborhood where
Darling now stood - the place the smugglers turned to for a precious
commodity: Babies.

As he prowled the terminal at Atlanta's Hartsfield International Airport,
Mike McDaniel was already suspicious.

For weeks, the Customs inspector had been encountering women, some with
babies, passing through en route to Chicago, who claimed they had visited
husbands or boyfriends in the military in Panama.

But their stories were fishy.

The hotels they claimed they stayed at were nowhere near military bases.
McDaniel happened to know that because he had served in the U.S. Army in
Panama. And in another coincidence, he had grown up near Chicago, so he
realized the women lived in the same neighborhood.

McDaniel had done some luggage searches, but nothing turned up.

Then, McDaniel stopped Donna Washington, who said she had taken her
grandson to see his father, stationed in Panama for the Army.

But she wasn't able to tell him her son's address or rank.

When McDaniel looked inside her luggage, he found six large baby formula
cans and a seventh small one. He shook them and one rattled. Something
solid was inside.

He tested liquid from one can. The result: cocaine.

He tested a piece of pellet from the solid-sounding can. The result: heroin.

Washington feigned surprise.

But her attitude turned indignant as McDaniel picked up the baby's bottle,
twisted off the cap and sniffed it.

"What kind of person do you think I am?" she asked.

He didn't answer.

Customs agents now had two arrests - London and Atlanta - with the same
pattern.

Both women carried other people's babies, lived in Englewood, Ill., and
were accused of smuggling drugs in the same ingenious way: infant formula
cans - using toddlers as decoys.

Darling, a newcomer to Chicago and the Customs Service, started piecing
together the puzzle. It was 1999, and this was his first big case.

Accompanied by a Chicago police officer, Darling returned to the couple
whose baby had been stopped in London. "You guys have got to tell me the
truth," he told them.

The parents, drug-addicted and HIV positive, confessed and told Darling
that a neighborhood woman, Selina Johnson, had asked to be their baby's
godmother, promising free milk and clothes for the child.

Johnson was more than 6 feet tall and charismatic: As the so-called first
lady of the Sisters of the Struggle - a female auxiliary of the Gangster
Disciples street gang - she could deal drugs in her neighborhood with impunity.

The couple told Darling that when their baby was 3 weeks old, they allowed
Johnson to take her for a few days - not even asking where they were going.

They eventually admitted they had "rented" their baby to be used as a decoy
for drug smugglers. The going rate: about $200-$400 a trip.

Other women, too, had taken their baby, they said.

They rattled off names but didn't always know precisely where the women lived.

Darling took notes, his mind racing with a new reality: This drug ring was
much bigger than he thought.

A paper trail would provide many clues.

Darling and federal prosecutor Scott Levine spent months poring over
customs records and airline tickets, tracking the couriers' travels.

The smugglers flew from Panama City and Montego Bay and Kingston, Jamaica,
to Chicago, New York, London and Birmingham, England, bringing in more than
100 kilos of cocaine and 6 kilos of heroin.

The couriers were paid up to $4,000 a trip; some also received drugs.

Much of the drugs were concealed in formula cans the smugglers figured
would escape detection by drug-sniffing dogs. Cocaine was liquefied in
Panama and injected into the can, which was then soldered and the label
reattached.

Small cans could bring big cash.

A kilo of cocaine (about three cans) that cost $5,000 in Panama could reap
$20,000 or more in the United States and double that in England. Once it
was cooked into crack and sold as dime bags, the profit multiplied by
several times.

Jamaicans, Colombians, Panamanians and Americans all participated in the
conspiracy.

Fake passports and driver's licenses were obtained, and the couriers, many
of them addicts themselves, took their own children or carried "rented"
babies on dozens of trips - a scam, says Levine, that posed extraordinary
dangers.

"Can you imagine," the prosecutor fumes, "a drug addict from Chicago
traveling in a foreign country where she does not even speak the language,
taking care of a baby she has never seen, attempting to score some heroin
.. while she waits for cocaine-filled baby formula cans to arrive?"

That happened to the child identified in court records as "Baby 8." Her
travels began when she was deposited in an empty hotel bathtub in Panama
because she wouldn't stop crying.

She was sickly, abnormally small - and just 3 weeks old.

Taking down a drug ring is like dismantling a pyramid, stone by stone, from
the bottom up.

In this case, Levine and fellow prosecutor David Hoffman, both veterans of
the drug wars, "flipped" the baby-carrying couriers, then worked their way up.

It wasn't long before several couriers had confessed and two leaders - Troy
Henry and Orville Wilson, both Jamaicans - were cooperating. Wilson, in
turn, told prosecutors the formula cans were the brainchild of Clacy Watson
Herrera, a Colombian charged with supplying most of the drugs.

Levine couldn't help thinking it was sheer luck that none of the 22 babies
was injured or mistakenly given cans filled with drugs.

It would take 2 1/2 years to make the arrests. The last was Selina Johnson,
the recruiter, who swallowed 20 to 30 dime bags of crack to hide evidence
when she was apprehended.

Over the next two years, 48 defendants pleaded guilty, including Johnson,
who received a 10-year sentence. The couriers were sentenced to five to 10
years in prison; the parents who rented their babies, between 10 months and
eight years. The only person who stood trial received a life sentence.

One last defendant, a leader who obtained drugs and organized several
Jamaican trips, will be sentenced Wednesday.