RAINDROPS IN A SEA OF SMUGGLING

While Large Drug Hauls Get Headlines, Most Loads Of Pot Slipped Through
San Ysidro Are Small, Flooding Across The Border In A Tide Of Cars.

SAN YSIDRO, Calif. -- This time, it was the driver's hands that gave him
away.

They shook so badly that when he handed his passport to Customs
Inspector Mark Laven, the booklet fluttered like a bird's wing. Laven
all but rolled his eyes: Nothing subtle about this one.

Within minutes, the driver, a Mexican citizen, had been hustled into a
holding cell and inspectors were ripping his blue pickup apart with an
electric saw. They found what they expected--74 pounds of marijuana
packed in cellophane, coated in motor oil to throw off drug-sniffing
dogs and fitted neatly into a compartment in the roof.

Laven shrugged. Just another small-fry courier.

This is the most common kind of drug bust at the nation's busiest port
of entry. Although the giant container loads grab headlines, a huge
quantity of illegal drugs moves across the border in a more mundane
way--namely, in a stream of small loads hidden in cars and driven under
inspectors' noses by people reckless enough to play the odds.

Day in and day out, a good deal of the U.S. drug interdiction effort on
the southern border consists of simply trying to sort out the regular
people from the smugglers at border crossings.

San Ysidro is an especially intense smuggling corridor. So many drug
couriers try to sneak into the country that the busts sometimes come
every hour, and inspectors say it's like playing a giant, endless game
of cat and mouse across 24 lanes of asphalt--the wide stretch of
Interstate 5 where cars from Mexico enter the United States.

Larry R. Latocki, customs assistant special agent in charge, estimates
that 95% of all drug cases handled by U.S. customs in California are
busts of small carloads. More than half of the marijuana--by far the
most commonly seized drug--confiscated along the border in the last year
came in small carloads, customs officials say. The average load is 120
pounds.

Such busts are so routine at the ports of entry that agents' work takes
on an assembly-line quality. Cars are dismantled, drugs measured and
forms filled out with mechanical efficiency. On busy days, agents say
they feel like doctors in a busy ER: There's hardly time to process one
70- or 80-pound load before the next comes in.

There are variations, of course. One week the smugglers use middle-aged
white women in nice cars. Then it's deaf students from Mexico, or
families, or elderly men in RVs, or college girls in convertibles.

"You get all gas-tank loads sometimes," said Special Agent Ransom
Avilla. "Then, it's weird--the last five days it's all been tire loads.
. . . It's like when every girl is suddenly named Chelsea."

When drug traffickers' cars are torn up, however, the results all look
the same--the same professionally wrapped bags, the same hidden
compartments.

And for all the interceptions, some experts estimate that U.S. law
enforcement stops only one in five shipments on the border.

Picking Suspects in an Ocean of Cars

Inspectors work under blazing sun breathing thick exhaust fumes. It is
brutal work. They suffer headaches and must rotate frequently.

One of the better ones on duty on this day is Mark Hill, a man with a
hard squint and a deep tan. He stands amid a sea of idling cars with his
arms crossed.

For workers at Hill's level, San Ysidro offers plenty of gratification.
Someone is caught several times a day by dogs or inspectors with a
hunch.

"It's fun, like hide and seek," Hill said, his gaze never leaving the
cars inching past. His eyes roam over a particular car: the driver. The
hubcaps. The back seat. The driver.

What is he looking for? Ticks, peculiarities, Hill said. People who
don't make eye contact. People who are too friendly. People who read
newspapers. Certain Nissans, SUVs, vehicles whose design incorporates
ample hidden spaces.

"At first you look at every car," Hill said. "Later you know what not to
look at."

On this morning, the first bust is made by Laven, a lanky inspector with
sunglasses pushed up on his head. He has a habit of nibbling sunflower
seeds to fight boredom--and an air of having seen it all.

Under Laven's even gaze, the driver of the pickup simply couldn't
control his nerves, he said later.

It's something that happens here a lot, inspectors say. People think
they can play it cool. But when confronted, the lips tremble, the voice
quavers and the hands shake.

The driver's apparent anxiety prompts Laven to take another look at the
pickup's roof. It's too thick. Most people wouldn't notice. But to him
it's obvious. He seems almost personally aggrieved by the ineptitude of
these smugglers.

"Look at this," he said, slapping the top of the truck with the air of
someone exposing bad craftsmanship. "The space discrepancy, the new
carpet. . . . It's a dead giveaway."

A hole is drilled, and the contents of the roof are tested. Senior
Inspector Ed Brown is called in to ply his power tools, and white
fiberglass dust flies. But Laven, already bored, has gone back to his
booth to seek bigger fish.

This is the routine, "all the time, around the clock, and at all the
ports," said John Kraemer, executive assistant U.S. attorney in the
Southern District of California.

Customs officials say X-rays, residue tests and dogs so reliably
indicate the presence of hidden drugs that they cannot remember a time
when they had to return an innocent car to its owner after damaging it
with drills or saws. Occasionally, though, they can't quite figure out
where the drugs are hidden and must give up--until the next time.

Brown described one truck that had been searched on several occasions
before inspectors finally figured out where the drug compartment was--in
the engine.

There are other ways to get drugs into the United States, of course--on
boats, planes, through tunnels, on horseback, or by swimmers, and just
about every other method the imagination can conceive. Cocaine is
especially likely to come by sea, and large quantities of marijuana are
intercepted by the Border Patrol between ports.

But that old standby--a hidden compartment in a passenger car--remains
one of the simplest, quickest smuggling tactics used by trafficking
organizations despite the risks.

Backtracking to the Bosses

In recent years, increased enforcement on sea routes, as well as new
efforts to control illegal immigration, is thought to have had the side
effect of shifting even more drug trafficking to cars.

Cars are convenient, and it can be as easy to appear invisible in a
crowd as at sea or in the desert. There is no better crowd than the
masses waiting at San Ysidro.

The numbing routine speaks to a larger reality: Very little of the
smuggling is the work of individuals acting alone.

Law enforcement authorities believe that nearly all is the work of
mid-level smuggling organizations, which break down large loads into
smaller ones. The groups moving drugs through the San Ysidro crossing
are connected--either directly or distantly, through tolls--to a single
organism: the ruthless Arellano Felix organization, a Tijuana-based drug
cartel run by brothers Benjamin and Ramon.

These medium-sized businesses--transport cells, as they are sometimes
called--orchestrate the shotgun-style trafficking, in which a large boat
or truckload of drugs is divided among a dozen cars, said Jayson Ahern,
acting director of customs field operations.

This system minimizes risk. Enough shipments get through to keep the
operation profitable. By splitting loads, "it's like you've diversified
your portfolio," said Customs Special Agent Clark Settles.

Organizations may include an array of conspirators, from bosses, to
recruiters, to packers, to mechanics who build compartments in cars.

Drivers are cannon fodder. They are considered expendable and are the
ones most often arrested. Many are drug addicts or homeless people, or
poor Mexicans desperate for cash.

Agents say payments of about $500 are typical to drive a carload of
drugs across the border, although the job may draw as much as $1,200.

In state court, such drivers often face a marijuana transportation
charge carrying a sentence of 16 months to three years.

In federal court, where many of the cases involving harder drugs end up,
sentences can be stiffer. For typical marijuana loads, terms for
first-time offenders range from one to four years; couriers of cocaine
and other narcotics face sentences of 10 years or more.

The trafficking organizations frequently search for new recruits as old
ones fall to the odds.

Gonzalo Curiel, chief of the narcotics enforcement section for the U.S.
attorney's office in San Diego, said it was once feared that
middle-class American college students would flock to the drug trade.
But it never happened. The reason? For most people the danger far
outweighs the pay.

Not only is there the possibility of stiff penalties for those caught,
but there is also the danger of running afoul of the cartels. In the
world of Arellano Felix, "people are shot and left for dead, abducted,
tortured," Curiel said.

So even traffickers high up in transport cells, while rich, are often
not extraordinary successes, Curiel said. Drug lords in Mexico and U.S.
distributors make big money, but less so the people in between.

"It's a fallacy, this movie image of the guy with a Lear jet," Latocki
said. "A lot of independent operators are just making enough to get by.
. . . It's people just out of the working class and into the middle
class. The money goes out as fast as it comes in. It's like when you get
stuck in a job; they don't know how to do anything else."

Investigators believe that smugglers tend to keep their drivers as
ignorant as possible to minimize vulnerability. Defense attorneys take
this further, arguing that many drivers don't even know there are drugs
in their cars.

As a result, few drivers arrested at San Ysidro offer much information
beyond a first name of their recruiter, or the spot where they were to
leave the car--a supermarket parking lot, for instance.

So agents process most cases routinely, keeping an eye out for the small
detail that gnaws at the imagination--"a gut feeling," said Special
Agent Cindy Johnson, "that there is just a little more to it."

Following the Trail to the Suspected Boss

Agent Settles had one of those feelings recently. A driver was busted at
a border station--a white man in his 30s with a nice car. A gum wrapper
was in his pocket with an address written on it.

The address led to a house and identical cars, and more arrests. Through
stings using cooperating defendants, authorities got more cars, more
drivers, and more cars. By the time they closed in on the suspected boss
of the organization--the white owner of a roofing business in Los
Angeles--customs agents had arrested 30 people, seized 40 cars and
confiscated 3,000 pounds of narcotics.

It was a rare payoff in the workaday onslaught of cases. Agents may
process "20 or 30 cases before, you think, 'Whoa, there is something
here,' " Settles said.

Agents pursuing leads from San Ysidro sometimes set up drops using
cooperating defendants or they pretend not to detect drugs, allowing
suspects to pass through the border station so they can be followed--"a
cold convoy," in the parlance of drug
interdiction.

But they must work fast. The smuggling cells place spotters in the
sidewalk crowds at San Ysidro, or among the throngs of vendors. If the
car is not in and out of the border station in an hour, the smugglers
know it--just as they know who is on duty on a given day, or which dog
is working which lane.

They are collecting intelligence on investigators even as investigators
collect intelligence on them. The two sides constantly try to
outmaneuver and outbluff each other in this high-stakes game.

Mostly, only the drivers take the fall. Hundreds of them. The U.S.
attorney's office in San Diego in recent years has been the busiest in
the nation. Federal prosecutors there handle up to 1,700 such cases a
year, and the district attorney's office, which has stepped in to help
the overburdened federal attorneys, handles a similar quantity.

Most are pot smuggling cases involving less than 200 pounds. Between
drug and new illegal-immigration cases, the border courts are among the
most overburdened in the country. San Diego's federal judges declared a
judicial emergency last year.

To trial attorney Shawn Khojayan the system is a remorseless expense of
resources against the powerless. Among drivers "there are two types of
people," he said. "People who truly don't know that there are drugs
hidden in the car, and people who do know who are poor, desperate, or
infirm. . . . It's common folk. They are preyed upon by smugglers."

Khojayan said he recently defended a day laborer from Mexico. The man is
47, a legal, permanent U.S. resident since 1973--"comparatively poor,"
the lawyer said, "but not a pitiful man. He worked, had a loving family,
paid his taxes."

The laborer gave this account: He was hired in San Ysidro by a man who
wanted him to drive a car over the border to get the tires fixed and
offered $25. Customs inspectors searched the car at the border station,
and found 4.45 kilos of methamphetamine. The laborer faced 20 years in
prison.

He was acquitted after Khojayan argued that the man knew nothing about
the drugs--and that customs officers had done nothing to investigate his
protestations of innocence. Such defendants, even when found innocent,
are often deported based solely on their arrest because of recent
changes in immigration law, the lawyer said.

"Most of my clients are of Mexican nationality," Khojayan said. "They
don't speak English, and all of them are just being processed in a
machine."

Another attorney, Guadalupe Valencia, told of 19-year-old Mexican client
who knowingly agreed to drive a load of drugs over the border for $800,
but said he thought it was marijuana. It wasn't. It was 25 pounds of
cocaine. He faces a mandatory 10-year sentence.

Why did he do it? "He comes from a poor family," Valencia said. "He
needed money really bad."

But not all defendants are so purportedly ingenuous, said William Hayes,
chief of the criminal division in the U.S. attorney's office in San
Diego. If penalties were lighter, he contends, smugglers would have an
even easier time recruiting drivers.

"Are [drivers] less culpable and involved than people who own and sell
the drugs? Yes. No one disputes that," he said. "But you can't say
[that] if you break up your loads small enough, magically this will just
become a misdemeanor."

So it continues at San Ysidro, day after day, hour by hour.

Back to check on his morning's bust, Inspector Laven wears a worried
look. He has just waved a car on after the driver gave him muddled
responses. "I thought I had something," Laven said. "Maybe I should have
stopped him."

Then he shakes his head, shrugs and spits out another sunflower seed.
"You can't worry about it," he said. "How many do we get out here,
anyway--one in 10, maybe?"

And he heads back into the sea of cars.