DRUG AGENTS' CHALLENGE: HEROIN 'SWALLOWERS'

NEW YORK -- To a Colombian woman just 21 years old and dirt-poor, the
chance to earn $10,000 was too enticing to turn down. So she swallowed one
tiny balloon after another packed with heroin -- nearly a pound in all --
and boarded a flight to New York.

Sent by traffickers back home to deliver the heroin to wholesalers in New
York, she began a race against time to clear customs at Newark
International Airport before the dozens of thumb-size pellets passed
through her intestines or disintegrated in her stomach, triggering a
potentially fatal overdose.

"I needed the money," she said. "They always look for young people who need
money."

Known on the streets and by federal agents as swallowers, the young woman
and scores of others like her have become an important link in a heroin
trafficking chain that extends from Colombia to New York. The trade is not
new: New York has long been a prime destination for smuggled heroin, not
only as a bustling international transport hub but also as a market in its
own right, where as much as half of the heroin in the United States is
consumed.

But the flow of the drug -- which has declined in price as it has risen in
purity -- is escalating. At Newark and Kennedy International Airport, 75
percent of drug investigations now involve heroin, according to U.S.
Customs Service officials.

Federal agents have expanded their operations at the airports in their
ever-evolving cat-and-mouse game with traffickers -- one that now largely
pivots on catching the couriers who smuggle heroin in their luggage, under
their clothing and, increasingly, inside their stomachs.

"There's no question there are more internal carries," said John C.
Varrone, the special agent in charge of Customs Service investigations in
New York and New Jersey. "The most preferred method now used by drug
couriers is to smuggle internally, primarily by swallowing."

Customs inspectors said they have found drugs on airline passengers as old
as 84 and as young as 13. Traffickers are using more and more women to
swallow the heroin, often more than 100 pellet-like little balloons at a
time, in the hopes they will arouse less suspicion at checks.

For the swallowers, being paid thousands of dollars per trip is hardly easy
money. Ruptured balloons, a consequent massive drug overdose and possibly
fatal coma are not uncommon. Neither is getting caught: the number of
swallowers stopped by the authorities in New York increased last year to
319, from 273 in 1997 and 233 in 1996, according to Customs officials.

Couriers have also turned up dead near Newark and Kennedy, the authorities
said, their stomachs ripped open to salvage the heroin inside.

"I don't think the public is aware how vicious these organizations are,"
said Lewis Rice Jr., the special agent in charge of the Drug Enforcement
Administration's operations in New York. "The people who use heroin at a
party don't think about what it took to get there."

Last year, Customs agents and inspectors in New York and New Jersey
intercepted 1,066 pounds of heroin, about one-third of federal seizures of
heroin in the United States.

Colombian traffickers, who the authorities say are responsible for 70
percent of the heroin sold on the East Coast, have blitzed New York so
relentlessly that heroin has declined in price while its street purity has
soared. An analysis of drugs bought by undercover agents in 1997 and 1998
found the purity of heroin sold in parts of Brooklyn and the Bronx above 90
percent, compared with barely 5 percent in the early 1980's.

"It takes an organization less effort to fill up a courier with heroin than
to package and ship a larger amount of cocaine with the same value," said
Varrone, explaining why heroin is now the product of choice for smugglers.

The Colombian woman said she underwent a 15-day procedure to prepare her
body for ingesting the heroin, including prepping her throat by swallowing
grapes and then carrots shaped like pellets. The day before the trip, she
said, the courier is taken to a pharmacy and injected with a relaxant to
facilitate swallowing. "They don't tell you the size of the pellets," she
said in a recent interview. "They say it's very easy."

Before the flight, she said, a swallower is given a pill to control the
bowels, and a tranquilizer and a liquid anesthetic to numb the pain. "The
pellets usually scratch your throat and it starts to bleed."

To catch smugglers, Customs officials scrutinize passenger manifests of
flights before arrival. In the terminals, they employ drug-sniffing dogs
and the intuition of roving inspectors. Kennedy has installed a $100,000
body scanner that detects drugs concealed inside clothing.

But with more heroin carried on or inside the body, the inspectors have had
to resort to more invasive X-rays, pat-downs or strip searches of suspects,
who may be detained and given a laxative on the suspicion they have
swallowed drugs.

The growing use of heroin swallowers has coincided with a boom in air
travel, engendering a new strategy in which customs inspectors stop far
fewer travelers, but grill those more thoroughly.

"If we stopped everybody coming in would we get more?" asked John J.
Martuge, the customs area director at Kennedy. "Yes. But would Congress
stand for that kind of scrutiny? It would bring air traffic to a screeching
halt."

In turn, Colombian traffickers routinely dispatch a handful of couriers
unknown to each other on the same flight, counting on one arrest to
distract inspectors while the others slip unnoticed into the United States.
"If you can get five swallowers on a plane and one gets caught and four get
through, you've had a good day," Rice said of the traffickers.

Last year, 50,892 airline passengers were searched nationwide, of whom 709
underwent X-rays. Heroin and other contraband were found on 2,116
passengers, or 4 percent of those searched, but in 28 percent of those
subjected to X-rays, according to customs statistics. At Kennedy and Newark
Airports, 61 percent of the passengers stopped and X-rayed were found
smuggling drugs; in Miami, the figure approached 70 percent.

But the searches have not come without controversy. Travelers have sued the
Customs Service, alleging that they were stopped and searched because of
their race or ethnicity. Some of the cases have been dismissed; others are
pending.

"Court decisions support the right of governments to search people coming
into the country," said Raymond W. Kelly, the customs commissioner and
former New York City police commissioner. He denied that inspectors
profiled potential couriers by race or ethnic group, adding that, "What we
do is focus on high-risk flights from high-risk countries."

Of the 50,892 passengers searched nationwide last year, according to
Customs statistics, 15,379 were Hispanic, 13,183 were white, 6,641 were
black and 3,841 were Asian. The rest (11,857) were not identified by race.

Heroin trafficking is driven not merely by demand but also by
breathtakingly lucrative profits. A kilogram, or 2.2 pounds, of heroin
refined in Colombia from $4,000 worth of opium gum can fetch from $75,000
to $100,000 on arrival in New York. The kilo delivered by the courier is
immediately taken to a drug "mill," where it is cut with a diluent and
repackaged in about 35,000 glassine envelopes for sale at $10 -- a "dime
bag" -- netting a total of $350,000 on the street.

For the 21-year-old Colombian woman and other swallowers, their mission is
to get rid of the ingested heroin before it gets absorbed into the
bloodstream from the stomach, with possibly fatal consequences. When a
pellet wedges in the intestine, death is slower but more agonizing, said
Dr. Sally L. Satel, an addiction psychiatrist.

The Colombian courier, who spoke on condition that her name not be used for
fear that traffickers would harm her family, said her first trip left her
hospitalized.

"On my first trip, the pellets were not properly wrapped, and when I
swallowed them, I became dizzy, very tired and nauseous," she said. After
delivering the heroin, she said, she went into a coma for five days.

Yet she made two more trips. She said swallowers usually make 10 trips
before the organization lets them quit. "Because when you get involved,
they always need you," she said. "They look for you. And when you say no,
they say they know where your family is and where your kids are, and please
to do them this favor."

Kelly of customs described the traffickers as predatory in their
recruitment. "They use women," he said in a telephone interview from
Washington. "They use pregnant women. They use children. They use any means."

During the last half of 1998, customs officials counted six travelers
nationwide who subsequently turned up dead with heroin in their stomachs.
Five of the bodies were found within a short drive of Newark Airport. The
sixth, in Chicago, involved someone who traveled through Kennedy Airport.

There have been other such fatalities. Between May 1995 and last October,
four bodies, some of them gutted, were crammed into suitcases or bags and
dumped in western Queens. The Queens County District Attorney Richard A.
Brown concluded that the victims were swallowers who failed to excrete
their drug loads.

"What happens is the individual sitting in a room with the drug dealers
starts to get sick, the condoms burst," he said. "They let that individual
die and once he's dead, they cut him open and get the drugs and dump him in
a desolate area."

The flow of Colombian heroin also is increasingly routed through Nigeria,
drug agents said. But because the trip is considerably longer, the couriers
often hide the drugs under their clothes or in luggage or packages they
carry aboard airplanes.

One such courier, a 30-year-old Nigerian woman who was traveling with her
infant son, was arrested in September at Newark Airport after being found
carrying a box containing four pounds of heroin hidden under smoked fish.
The inspector, she said, "felt that the box was funny." She added: "He just
pinched it with his knife and he saw the drugs."

She said the traffickers never told her how much heroin she was carrying.
"I just knew it was drugs in the bag," she said. The woman, who is serving
38 months in a federal prison, admitted having made two earlier drug-runs
because she and her husband, who, she said, earned $35 a month back home
between them, needed the money. "I decided I should do what I had to do,"
she said.

Federal agents try to use arrested couriers to trace the drugs back to the
trafficking rings. But Lloyd Epstein, a New York lawyer who has defended
heroin swallowers, said most couriers do not know anyone substantially
higher in the trafficking ring and have nothing to offer beyond a telephone
number.

"These people are paid for their stomachs, not their minds," he said.

The Colombian courier's smuggling days are over. She was arrested at Newark
airport last fall after making her third trip; another courier identified
her to drug agents.

She faces a minimum of 20 years in a federal prison.