SEVERAL LEVELS IN COCAINE TRADE

TAMPA - From the jungles of South America to U.S. city streets, the cocaine
business has many profiteers.

For a street drug dealer, a kilogram of cocaine is a big investment. It
might cost as much as $17,000 and be broken down into hundreds of hits of
crack.

So how does a cocaine shipment of almost five tons, like the one hauled
into St. Petersburg on Monday, make its way to the street? And what kind of
impact would that shipment have had on the drug trade in the Bay area?

"It would have a huge impact," said Capt. Ken Dodge of the Tampa Police
Department s narcotics bureau, "but I doubt very much [all of it] was set
to pour into Tampa and St. Pete."

Even if the shipment had been destined for Florida's west coast - and
investigators declined to say Monday whether it was - Dodge said it was
more likely the cocaine would have been sent on to Orlando, Miami and Ft.
Lauderdale.

Tampa Bay would have been an unusual destination for the shipment, Dodge
said. Shipments that big usually come in through ports like Miami and New
York.

The anatomy of a shipment that large, Dodge said, usually goes something
like this:

The cocaine is processed in laboratories in the jungles of South America
and stored in shacks by the ton. When high-level dealers get ready to make
a purchase, they go in on it together and put up a down payment, along with
a transaction fee, a boat fee, and a fee to the pickup person.

"The shipment should be all ready to cut," Dodge said. Once it gets to the
U.S. mainland, he added, "The trick is to unload it as quickly as you can."

Once it's in a U.S. distribution pipeline, Dodge said, the cocaine will be
cut at least three or four more times before it gets to a street crack
dealer. At every step, even as the cocaine is diluted, its price goes up -
rising from $9,000 a kilo at its source in South America to about $17,000 a
kilogram by the time it gets to the street.

But the street price isn't fixed; it can be influenced by things like
supply and demand, and quality.

The assistant special agent in charge of the Drug Enforcement
Administration office in Tampa, Bob Michelotti, said Monday that the
cocaine seized from the Rebelde hasn't been analyzed yet, so its purity is
unknown.

Even so, Michelotti said, he'd estimate the shipment to have been worth a
fortune, even wholesale - probably exceeding $73 million.