MAJOR ARIZ. POT SMUGGLER OF '80S IS BURIED AFTER SHOOTING IN MEXICO

DOUGLAS - A former Douglas man convicted of running a
multimillion-dollar marijuana smuggling operation in the 1980s was
shot and killed early Monday in Mexico.

Manuel Federico Meraz Samaniego, 50, better known in his world as ``El
Tepiro,'' was buried yesterday in Agua Prieta, Sonora.

He was shot about 2 a.m. Monday at his home in a small farming village
near Casas Grandes, Chihuahua.

According to Chihuahua Judicial Police investigators, Samaniego died
of a single gunshot in the left side of his upper torso. He was
allegedly shot by Francisco Ortiz Vargas, 34, in what is believed to
have been an ongoing dispute with the former drug kingpin.

Police discovered Ortiz's bullet-riddled body a short time later.
Investigators are looking into allegations that Ortiz's murder was an
act of vengeance committed by one of Samaniego's brothers.

Samaniego's drug-trafficking organization had gone on from the
mid-1970s until the mid-1980s. Investigators said that in just one
six-month period, the organization smuggled more than 45 tons of
marijuana valued at more than $21 million into the United States.

Samaniego's drug empire began to unravel with a 1983 raid on his
luxurious Douglas home. Although Samaniego escaped arrest in that
raid, he was captured by FBI agents in Pico Rivera, Calif., two years
later while visiting at his mother's home.

In 1986, he was convicted in Pima County Superior Court on charges of
selling, transporting and furnishing marijuana for sale and was
sentenced to 12 years in prison.

During the trial, he was portrayed by prosecutors as a ruthless drug
trafficker, but the court received many letters of support from people
who attested to his philanthropy among the poor in the border region.

One month later, he was convicted in U.S. District Court on federal
drug trafficking charges and sentenced to 15 years in prison.

A year later, Samaniego and another inmate escaped from the state
prison in Tucson by hiding in a storage box on a scrap-metal truck
leaving the prison.

In 1992, Samaniego, a Mexican citizen who had lived most of his life
as a legal resident in the United States, was paroled from the Arizona
Department of Corrections and turned over to the custody of the
Immigration and Naturalization Service for deportation as a criminal
alien.

Walter Nash III, who represented Samaniego in Arizona and in another
drug-trafficking case in New York, said that while some people who
engage in the drug business can be very violent, Samaniego was ``a
gentle and very mellow guy and a terribly devoted father.''