DRUGS AIL NEW ORLEANS

Dealers Who Fled to Houston After Katrina Built Closer Ties With Suppliers

SLIDELL, LA. - It was just before dawn one day in May when the pickup
truck arrived at the two-story house in this middle-class suburb,
which had been hit hard by Hurricane Katrina.

But unlike most of the trucks in the city now, it was not carrying
construction supplies.

Federal agents, who were hiding in the bushes, say the truck was
bringing 50 kilograms of cocaine, worth $5 million, from Houston to
the murder-racked streets of nearby New Orleans. They also say that
the shipment, seized May 18, was at least five times as large than
the typical drug delivery before the storm.

The drug trade in New Orleans is flourishing again, after its
dealers, who evacuated to the regional drug hub of Houston, forged
closer ties to major suppliers from the Mexican and Colombian
cartels. They have since brought back drugs to New Orleans in far
larger shipments than before, as the seized truck illustrates,
essentially creating violent distribution gangs now spread over a
much bigger area.

As a result, law enforcement officials in New Orleans and Houston are
struggling to keep up with the changes as the region's drug trade
merges to a greater extent than ever before, adding to the murder
rates in both cities.

A Deadly Development

As the drug-dealing returns, its effects are proving deadly for New
Orleans, where the police say that fights over turf for distributing
the drugs are the main reason for a spike in killings that threatens
the city's recovery. Even though its population is less than half of
what it was before the storm, New Orleans recorded 22 homicides in
July, the same amount that it averaged each month in the three years
before the hurricane.

Several poor neighborhoods in Houston, which has long been the main
supply hub for drugs flowing across the southwest border, have been
reeling as well. According to the Houston Police Department,
Hurricane Katrina evacuees have been the suspects or victims in 44
homicides there, including many tied to gang-related drug dealing.
And 14 percent of Houston's felony narcotics arrests in the first six
months of this year involved people displaced by the storm.

Sgt. Brian Harris, a Houston police homicide investigator, said that
one evacuee was a suspect in three killings in Houston before he was
arrested in March with a cache of drugs near New Orleans, where he
was also wanted on murder charges. Harris said several others once
linked to a New Orleans gang had been linked to four murders and 28
other crimes in Houston.

Some of the crimes involved New Orleans gang members fighting one
another over drugs and women during New Orleans music nights at
Houston nightclubs, Harris said, adding that he and other Houston
officers were initially shocked by how many witnesses refused to cooperate.

New Orleans police officials have long complained that fears among
witnesses about retaliation have hampered their ability to stop the
drug trade. But to the Houston police, persuading witnesses to talk
"was like trying to educate foreigners in the ways of the United
States," Harris said.

Still, the Houston police have made enough arrests for word to get
around that it is much harder to get out of jail there than it is in
New Orleans.

So some of the drug dealers have returned to New Orleans along with
their customers, while others are now commuting between the two
cities, law enforcement officials say.

Cities Cooperate

Federal agents and police in both cities have stepped up cooperation
in tracking these movements, and they are pushing for more intelligence.

One of their biggest priorities is to try to choke off the supply of
cocaine and heroin moving from Houston to New Orleans, usually in
concealed compartments in vehicles zipping down Interstate 10.

William J. Renton Jr., the special agent in charge of the New Orleans
office of the federal Drug Enforcement Administration, said that
before the storm, "whenever we'd seize drugs destined for the greater
New Orleans area, it was mostly 5 and 10 kilograms." But since then,
he added, "even guys who may not have been the biggest dope peddlers
in the city went to Houston and met people who were involved in
supplying, and new or deeper relationships developed."