SMUGGLERS REFINE TRICKS TO PASS STRICTER SECURITY

Border Agents Confiscating Record Amount Of Narcotics, But Stable Price On
The Street Reflects Drug Rings' Success

WASHINGTON -- Smugglers are finding new ways to get cocaine, heroin and
Ecstasy into the United States, even as increased security at U.S. borders
and airports is leading to record drug busts, authorities say.

In recent months, U.S. officials have been surprised by the ingenuity of
South American, Mexican and European drug-smuggling rings, whose operations
virtually shut down just after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks because of
dramatically increased security at U.S. borders.

When the rings tried to re-establish smuggling routes later in the fall,
border agents began seizing unprecedented amounts of drugs. At key
crossings in California and South Texas, seizures of cocaine and marijuana
doubled from the same period the previous year.

Now, authorities acknowledge that drug rings are figuring out how to avoid
FBI, Customs, Coast Guard and other law enforcement agents who have formed
what officials call a "goal-line defense" against terrorism. In some cases,
traffickers are taking advantage of gaps in enforcement that were created
when agents who once chased smugglers were shifted to duties along the borders.

The smugglers' success is reflected in the availability and stable price of
cocaine, heroin and other illegal drugs. In Miami, Chicago and Los Angeles,
dealers' prices for the drugs -- the surest measures of supply -- have not
changed since Sept. 11, authorities say.

"I thought after 9/11 things would slow down because there would be no way
to get the drugs into the country," says Tom Donahue, executive director of
the Chicago High Intensity Drug Trafficking Agency, one of 28 federally
funded anti-drug task forces across the nation. "But (the flow of drugs
into the USA is) bigger and better than ever. The price is the same. We're
not experiencing shortages in heroin, cocaine and marijuana. And Ecstasy is
on the increase."

Arrests in the past few months indicate that smugglers are using creative
new tricks and are refining some old ones:

* Traffickers in the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean are chaining
drug-filled metal containers to the undersides of luxury cruise ships and
sending divers to retrieve the booty after the ships dock in U.S. ports.

* Heroin smugglers from Mexico and Colombia have begun dissolving cocaine
in a liquid solution, soaking shirts and sweaters in it, drying them and
then packing the heavy, stiff clothing in suitcases to try to avoid
pat-down searches and drug-sniffing dogs at airports and border crossings.
Once the smugglers arrive at their U.S. destinations, they soak the
clothing in water to draw out the drug, and then let the solution evaporate
back into powder form.

* Ecstasy traffickers from northern Europe are experimenting with new land
and sea routes to get the club drug into the USA. Before Sept. 11, the
traffickers typically recruited people to tape vacuumed-packed plastic
packages of Ecstasy pills to their bodies, dress in business attire and fly
the drugs into East Coast airports. But since U.S. airports increased
pat-down searches and passenger screenings, Ecstasy rings have tried using
different routes and atypical vehicles to try to avoid baggage checks and
cargo X-rays.

In November, Customs agents stopped a 34-year-old man who crossed from
Matamoros, Mexico, to Brownsville, Texas, in a commercial bus. He had
51,250 Ecstasy tablets in the false bottom of a suitcase. The street value
of the tablets: $1.02 million to $1.3 million.

* In numbers that haven't been seen for years, drug-carrying speedboats are
tearing across deep-ocean routes in the Caribbean, where Coast Guard
cutters have abandoned some anti-drug patrols since Sept. 11.

"Our adversary is greed and the human imagination," says Joseph Webber,
special agent in charge of the U.S. Customs investigations office for the
New York City area.

The smugglers' changes in strategy come as law enforcement agencies that
have tracked drug kingpins and their couriers for two decades have become
more concerned with patrolling harbors, providing air marshals, guarding
airports and securing the borders.

The U.S. Coast Guard, usually a lead player in catching drug smugglers, has
pulled its patrols closer to the 95,000 miles of coastline and inland
waterways it is charged with protecting, says Cmdr. Jim McPherson, a Guard
spokesman. More than 75% of the Coast Guard cutters, helicopters and other
assets previously used to search the sea for illegal immigrants and drug
traffickers now are assigned to terrorism-related tasks, he says.

Coast Guard cutters escort cruise ships and oil tankers into port, guard
nuclear power plants and secure the area around Guantanamo Bay Naval Base
in Cuba, where 300 al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters are being held. About half
of the Coast Guard's special agents who usually investigate drug and
immigration cases now are flying on commercial jets as air marshals.

"It's a problem," McPherson says of the war on terrorism's impact on other
duties. "Our fisheries patrols are down. Our pollution patrols are down.
Are we doing as many drug patrols? Probably not doing as many as we did
before, but we are making some substantial busts. That may be because the
smugglers are trying to test us."

A Pause In Drug Trafficking

In the days immediately after the attacks on New York and Washington, drug
smuggling into the USA essentially stopped. Airports were closed, and
agents along the nation's borders were put on the highest level of alert.
Foreign drug rings held back their shipments, authorities say, apparently
waiting for soft spots to emerge in the new security efforts.

"I think everyone, including drug dealers, was traumatized by 9/11," says
Bill Ruzzamenti, director of the Central Valley California High Intensity
Drug Trafficking Agency, another of the federally funded anti-drug task
forces. The agency includes local, state and federal officers from nine
counties from Bakersfield to Sacramento.

Sept. 11 "was probably the only day in history where we had no narcotics
operations in the (San Francisco) Bay area," says Bob Prevot, interim
director of Northern California's anti-drug task force and a lieutenant in
the San Mateo County Sheriff's Office.

In the first two weeks after the attacks, drug seizures by Customs agents
dropped 60% from the previous year, despite intensified border searches.
"Traffickers watch TV and read newspapers, too," says Dean Boyd, a Customs
spokesman. "They watch us very closely. They may have decided to wait (a
while) before they risked it."

But drug smugglers can sit on their inventories only so long before their
losses begin to outweigh any risks of having couriers get caught.
Traffickers generally store drugs in stash houses in Europe and Mexico
until they can smuggle them into the USA. With every day, the hazards and
costs increase: Rival drug rings might steal the stash. Local police might
find it. Traffickers also need to move the drugs so they can pay suppliers
and employees, who can be violent if they aren't paid promptly.

So after nearly a month-long lull in smuggling, the dam burst in early
October. Drug rings started to aggressively move their products again, and
Customs, Coast Guard and Drug Enforcement Administration agents began
making record busts.

Marijuana seizures at 10 border crossings from Mexico into South Texas
doubled from the year before. From Oct. 1 through Dec. 31, Customs agents
seized 42,276 pounds of marijuana, worth about $17 million to the
distributors who sell to the street dealers. During the same period,
Customs seized 2,650 pounds of cocaine on the Mexican border with
California, more than twice the amount seized a year earlier. The cocaine
was worth about $20 million at the distributor level, officials say.

During one 15-day period in February, officers from Donahue's task force in
the Chicago area seized 4,000 pounds of cocaine, an unusually large amount
worth an estimated $45 million at the distributor level.

Despite such record seizures and unprecedented border security, authorities
say it's clear that smugglers remain quite successful at getting drugs to
U.S. buyers.

"There's a demand for drugs in this county. They will find ways to get
drugs in. Our job is to figure out what method they've switched to," says
Gary Grimm, coordinator of the intelligence center for South Florida's
regional anti-drug task force. "The traffickers have lots of money, and
they are thinking about it all the time. The smuggler just gets more creative."

'A Cat And Mouse Game'

Smugglers still try their luck with older methods, such as hiding
contraband beneath legal products in cargo ships and trucks, and using
elderly people or children to carry drugs on international flights on the
theory they are unlikely to be searched.

Some traffickers wrap drugs in fabric softener sheets or other smelly
things to try to confuse drug-sniffing dogs, a variation on earlier efforts
to pack drugs in aromatic coffee shipments.

On March 1, U.S. agents searching a ship from Jamaica that had docked in
Miami found two tons of marijuana hidden in boxes of yams. Nine days
earlier, Customs inspectors at Miami International Airport arrested a
wheelchair-bound, 81-year-old woman traveling from London after they found
9,931 Ecstasy tablets in her suitcase. Her traveling companion, a
56-year-old man who spoke through a German interpreter, had 5,630 Ecstasy
tablets in his suitcase, officials said.

Grimm says he expects to see more cocaine, heroin and marijuana traffickers
return to the sea routes they favored during the 1980s now that the Coast
Guard's attention is focused closer to shore. Just before Thanksgiving,
Customs and the Coast Guard on routine patrol just south of the Puerto Rico
coast intercepted a 33-foot speedboat carrying more than a ton of cocaine,
worth an estimated $23 million at the distributor level.

The notion that drug rings could be emboldened by reduced enforcement in
some areas alarms many lawmakers, who are beginning to question whether the
new attention to terrorism will set back gains made in the war on drugs.

In California's Central Valley last fall, officials complained to the FBI
after the bureau gave anti-terrorism assignments to six agents who had been
investigating drug rings in the state's primary methamphetamine production
area. The FBI's move came about the time that the DEA office in the area
temporarily reassigned four of its seven agents to be air marshals and
assist in security for the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City.

After the lawmakers expressed concern that methamphetamine producers who
had been driven from the area were returning to set up meth labs, the DEA
shifted four agents back to the area.

"It's not that I quarrel with the FBI's decision. We all need to wage an
effective war on terrorism," says U.S. Rep. Calvin Dooley, a Democrat from
California's Central Valley. "But we can't disarm our federal efforts to
combat drug production and use."

With resources stretched thin, intelligence-gathering on drug rings and
terrorism threats is crucial, DEA administrator Asa Hutchinson says. "We
have to adjust and react as quickly as the traffickers do," he says.

At the anti-drug task force's intelligence center in South Florida,
analysts try to compensate for the lack of patrols by outsmarting
smugglers. The analysts plot previous seizures, calculate moon phases and
wave heights and track weather patterns to try to predict what paths the
smugglers might pick in a vast ocean.

"It's somewhat of a cat and mouse game," Webber says. "The endgame is to be
looking forward: What is their next move? Because they'll never stop trying."