WHERE WAS ALL THAT POT GOING?

JAMESTOWN -- Underwear and marijuana make for a strange cargo. But somebody
in a Jamaican port packed more than 2 1/2 tons of pot into a shipment of
T-shirts bound for Kentucky -- and police are trying to figure out who was
supposed to pick it up on this end.

Workers at the Fruit of the Loom plant in Jamestown found the pot -- 5,200
pounds of it -- hidden in a truckload of T-shirts Tuesday.

"I think the focal point will be who was it going to?" said Jamestown
Police Chief Joey Hoover.

Federal agents said it was the largest amount of processed marijuana -- pot
ready for street sale -- ever seized in Kentucky.

"We're all ecstatic that we found the dope," said Richard Sanders, head of
the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration office in Louisville.

But much work remains to answer questions such as who ordered the pot,
where it was headed and whether it was to be parceled out from Russell
County or moved somewhere else, Sanders said.

Paul Chambers, head of investigations for the U.S. Customs Service in
Kentucky, said one "good possibility" is that someone at the Fruit of the
Loom plant was part of the smuggling operation.

However, it is also possible that someone was supposed to intercept the
shipment before it reached the plant, but missed it, Chambers said.

Sanders estimated the pot had a wholesale value of $7.5 million. There had
been no arrests by late yesterday.

The marijuana was packed inside a load of T-shirts in Kingston, Jamaica,
then delivered by ship to Jacksonville, Fla., Sanders said.

Fruit of the Loom makes fabric at the Jamestown plant, then ships it to
Jamaica where lower-paid foreign workers sew it into T-shirts. The
Jamestown plant then brings the shirts back to be distributed around the
United States.

The T-shirts and pot were in a 40-foot container that can be lifted whole
off the ship and put on a tractor trailer. That means it may not have been
opened before the contract delivery truck set out for Kentucky.

The customs service got a tip about the load of marijuana and followed the
truck from Florida to the Jamestown plant, where it arrived Monday, said
Chambers, the customs agent.

Federal agents would not discuss the source of the tip or what other
information they got.

Police had hoped to follow the truck to its destination to try to catch the
major drug trafficker who arranged for the shipment. But when employees at
Fruit of the Loom started unloading the truck Tuesday about 2 p.m. CDT,
Customs and DEA agents moved in, assisted by local and state police.

The pot was packed into a hollowed out spot in the middle of the trailer,
so that the first third of the load was T-shirts, then pot surrounded by
boxes, then more T-shirts, Hoover said.

The pot was compressed into bricks, then wrapped in plastic and duct tape
and smeared with grease to try to evade drug-sniffing dogs, said Lt. Shelby
Lawson of the Kentucky State Police.

Fruit of the Loom employees were unloading the boxes by hand when they
found the pot.

"We knew we were in something we weren't supposed to be in as soon as we
saw it," said plant manager Don Cooper.

Cooper said an employee told a supervisor and someone at the plant called
police, but federal agents were already moving in.

Police said Fruit of the Loom allowed a search of the plant and is
cooperating with the investigation.

However, the company could face sanctions if its import policies were not
adequate to control smuggling, Chambers said.

Fruit of the Loom spokesman Marett Cobb said the company has not had any
similar incidents to his knowledge and that the company is cooperating with
police. He refused to answer other questions, including whether the company
will do its own investigation into possible smuggling by employees.

The Jamestown plant is one of the Fruit of the Loom factories that have
seen widespread layoffs as the company moved production overseas. There are
about 750 employees in Jamestown, down from more than 3,000 in the early
1990s.

Some police said it's unlikely that Russell County, with a population of
16,000, was the final destination for the pot -- at least not all of it.

That would be a massive amount of marijuana even for Kentucky's largest
cities, Hoover said.

Kentucky is one of the leading domestic producers of marijuana, and has
also become a significant way station in bringing in foreign pot -- mostly
from Mexico -- and distributing it in the United States.

Traffickers here sometimes mix cheaper, lower-quality foreign pot with the
high quality Kentucky marijuana to boost supplies.

Federal agents said they did not know whether that's what was going to
happen with the pot seized in Jamestown.

State police and National Guard troops burned the pot yesterday in London,
where the agencies maintain a permanent site for that purpose.

Pungent black smoke rolled into the air as officers cut open the bricks of
pot and torched them with gasoline and flares.

Lawson said the pile of pot was so large it would take until today to
finish burning it.

Checked-by: Joel W. Johnson