FEDEX EMPLOYEES ARRESTED IN DRUG-RING RAIDS

Drugtraffickers used a network of Federal Express drivers and couriers
to ferry more than 120 tons of marijuana from California to the East
Coast over the last two years, federal drug officials said yesterday.
The officials said they had arrested 45 people, including 22 Federal
Express employees, among them a high-ranking security official and
customer service representatives. Officials also seized about 16 tons
of marijuana, 18 firearms and more than $4 million in cash and assets.

The arrests took place in Atlanta, Boston, Fort Lauderdale, Fla.,
Hartford, Los Angeles, Newark and New York, said Joe Keefe, head of
the special operations division at the Drug Enforcement
Administration.

The investigation began after a tip from Federal Express in July 1998,
but was impeded by insiders involved in the ring, officials said.

More than 100 people have been taken into custody since the
investigation began, and additional arrests are expected.

Officials painted a picture of a sprawling, sophisticated operation in
which one of the world's largest drug organizations, the Arrelano
Felix gang, based in Tijuana, Mexico, supplied more than $140 million
worth of marijuana to the traffickers by smuggling it across the
Mexican border into the Los Angeles area. The marijuana was wrapped in
cellophane, packed in cardboard boxes that weighed 30 to 100 pounds
and sometimes sprinkled with fabric softener or laundry detergent to
mask its odor, Mr. Keefe said.

The leader of the ring, Mark A. Morant of California, was still at
large last night, officials said. They said Mr. Morant designated a
handful of lieutenants to recruit Federal Express drivers as drug
couriers. The couriers would typically make about $2,000 a week.

>From California, the shipments -- most packed in containers no larger
than a box of copying paper -- were flown across the country,
officials said. Shipments to New York City or Newark went directly to
local airports, while packages sent to other East Coast cities or to
the Midwest passed through a Federal Express transfer station in Memphis.

The drugs avoided detection because a company security specialist,
identified in court papers as Ecclesiastes Robinson, provided the
traffickers with "valuable internal security intelligence," according
to an affidavit signed by two D.E.A. investigators. Mr. Keefe said Mr.
Robinson, who is now in custody in Brooklyn, worked with three Federal
Express customer service representatives in New York to ensure that
the packages could not be tracked by their computer-coded labels.

"They basically manipulated things so that the drug shipments
disappeared from the system," Mr. Keefe said.

Robert A. Bryden, vice president of the FedEx Corporation, said the
company began aiding the investigation after an employee discovered a
suspicious package that drug agents determined contained marijuana.

Once the shipments arrived at their destination, Federal Express
drivers on Mr. Morant's payroll would pick them up at various
airports, Mr. Keefe said. The packages were always addressed to one of
about 130 companies, all of them made up by the traffickers.

One shipment of marijuana was addressed to 555 West 57th Street in
Manhattan, where the drug agency once had its New York field office,
Mr. Keefe said.