DEEP THROAT'S ADVICE APPLIES TO DRUG TRADE:
FOLLOW THE MONEY

They are twins, separated not at birth but later. Delivery of illegal drugs
and the billions of dollars paid for them are linked closely and were
handled by the same crooks in a criminal chain, but no longer.

When law enforcement agents would make a successful bust, they'd sometimes
corral the crooks, the drugs and the money in one convenient place. Drug
criminals don't accumulate their huge and obscene profits by being naive or
stupid, so they soon established separate organizations to handle the money.

Puerto Rico became a favorite spot not only for the transshipment of
narcotics, but also for the importing of drug money. Once the cash was on
the island, it was laundered through banks and sent electronically anywhere.

The tactic through which the large flow of illegal drug money into Puerto
Rico was reduced to a trickle offers a successful model to be emulated
elsewhere. As always, however, in anything to do with narcotics smuggling,
the results also show the flexibility and sophistication of the dirty money
handlers, who inevitably find another way.

The drugmoney transporters are nothing if not bold. In the early 1990s air
passengers from the nearby Dominican Republic an exchange point for
drugs from Colombia began arriving in Puerto Rico with large sums of
cash, far more than the legal limit of $10,000 per person crossing into
U.S. territory.

In just one month, September 1993, about $600 million was brought into San
Juan by couriers from the Dominican Republic. Before long, though, the flow
of cash was cut to $5 million a month through a combination of strong
enforcement, confiscation of money that was brought in over the limit
and an order from the Treasury Department.

The Geographic Target Order set a much lower legal ceiling, $750, for cash
brought into Puerto Rico. Customs and other agents watched carefully for
evidence of lying on official forms, and whenever someone was caught
bringing in more than $750, the money was confiscated and kept.

Strong move and good work. Then, of course, the money couriers began flying
to Miami. When that route turned sour, it was off to New York and Newark.
And Haiti, instead of the Dominican Republic, began to used as a
transshipment point. The lessons should be clear: Use target orders much
more frequently, in many more places, to disrupt the money laundering
process as much as possible.

Moreover, is $10,000 in cash a reasonable limit in these days when
legitimate businesses transfer funds in other ways? It's time for Congress
to reexamine modern financial practices and set a limit that not only
reflects today's reality, but also makes profits tougher for drug kingpins.

Money transporters and launderers of course make use of every available
method. They use mules, checks, money orders, currency exchange outlets.
They wash the money through casinos, of which there are many in Puerto Rico.

And they follow the smuggling pattern of their fellow criminals on the drug
smuggling side of the enterprise. Frank J. Figueroa, special agent in
charge of Customs in Puerto Rico, recalls the seizure of cans of pineapple
stuffed with currency, wrapped to protect against damage from pineapple juice.

Each can was prepared carefully by the smugglers so it weighed precisely
the same as cans actually filled with pineapple. That sort of ingenuity can
draw a grudging admiration, but it's also a reminder of resourcefulness
misdirected so it leads to more addiction and larger fortunes for drug
millionaires.

DRUGS' CORRUPTING INFLUENCE TEARS APART SOCIAL FABRIC OF PUERTO RICO

In the time of Christopher Columbus, Puerto Rico was a natural transfer
point for gold and silver shipped from Latin America to Europe. The island
commonwealth still has that kind of role, although unwillingly, as a
transshipment station for cocaine and heroin produced in Colombia and
destined for the mainland United States.

They're not clean exchanges, these transactions involving narcotics and
money. Something damaging spills over into Puerto Rico itself, like a
tanker leaking oil in the harbor, imperiling life and the environment.

The violent impact of illegal narcotics on Puerto Rico demonstrates how
drugs harm a society, in this case an island of 3.5 million residents where
the effects are contained and perhaps more clear. The grim impact is a
jarring reminder of another powerful reason to combat illegal narcotics:
Drugs tear apart the fabric of neighborhoods, cities and, in this case, an
entire island.

Until the past few years, Colombian drug bosses hired local Puerto Rican
gangs to do the dirty work, making sure the cocaine and heroin were
received and sent to the next destination. Now the Colombians themselves
manage a distribution and transfer network in Puerto Rico, although local
gangs often run by teenagers in public housing projects compete with
them for territory.

This tense circumstance leads to violent confrontations within local
gangs, between Colombians and Puerto Ricans or involving illegal aliens
from the Dominican Republic and the result often is murder. Anibal
Torres, director of the Special Investigations Bureau of Puerto Rico's
police, this summer established a special unit of 20 agents and detectives
to target drugrelated killings.

They have a large caseload, because the percentage of homicides that are
drugrelated has increased steadily over four years. In 1994, of 995
homicides in Puerto Rico, 52 percent were tied to drugs. Last year, of 868
homicides, 70 percent were drug related, and so far this year the
percentage has edged past 75 percent, although the total number of murders
and other violent crimes is dropping.

The statistics, disturbing as they are, don't convey how terrible these
killings can be. In October, five gang members from the Dominican Republic
were gunned down in four days; one of them was riddled with 15 bullets. The
trends toward multiple killings, gangland style, and the use of automatic
weapons are especially jolting.

Outside of organized gangs, ordinary people too are harmed by Puerto Rico's
popularity as a transfer point. Instead of cash, some gang members are paid
in cocaine, and become dealers in the community.

Use of illegal drugs has climbed dramatically, and many families are hurt
badly. Gang members sell the drugs in Puerto Rico or to relatives in the
U.S., sometimes acting as their own ``mules'' to carry narcotics to the
mainland.

If anyone needs a clear and powerful reason, or another reason, to oppose
drugs, just look at Puerto Rico. Narcotics are ripping apart the island's
social fabric.

VIRTUAL SEIGE

By Ivelaw Griffith Special to the SunSentinel

The musings of poets often have a remarkable way of capturing the triumphs
or travails of life's drama, even when the stanzas are not written with a
specific social reality in mind. Such is the case with the poem You Are
Involved, written four decades ago by noted Caribbean poet Martin Carter;
it captures the essence of the contemporary drama of drugs in the
Caribbean, and in the entire hemisphere.

Carter wrote: Like a jig shakes the loom, like a web is spun the pattern
all are involved! all are consumed!

The drama of drugs is, indeed, allconsuming, acted out on the economic,
political, criminal justice, foreign policy, security and other stages of
societies of the Americas in ways citizens are not always conscious about.
It knows no boundaries of race, color, economic status, creed, the
ruralurban divide, occupation or other societal distinction, having become
a pernicious equal opportunity phenomenon.

A few vignettes give a sense of the Caribbean drama of drugs.

Cocaine seizures in 1993 for just five Caribbean countries the
Bahamas, Belize, the Dominican Republic, Haiti and Jamaica totaled about
3,300 kilograms. The 1995 seizures for those same nations were almost 6,000
kilos.

Operation Dinero, an international money laundering sting conducted out
of Anguilla, led to the seizure of 9 tons of cocaine and $90 million worth
of assets, including expensive paintings, Pablo Picasso's Head of a Beggar
among them.

In June 1993 there was a strange shower over the Demerara River in
Guyana: 364 kilos of cocaine and $24,000. It came from a plane making an
airdrop, part of a ColombiaVenezuelaGuyanaU.S. drug network.

Between 1993 and 1996, more than 5,000 Jamaican deportees were returned
to the island, most for drugrelated crimes in the U.S., Canada and Britain.

Last July 21 witnessed one of the largest single cocaine seizures in the
Caribbean Basin; 4,175 kilos of cocaine was retrieved from the Rickey II, a
Colombian cargo ship that had stopped in Venezuela.

This fall, Operation Rain targeted drug traffickers, weapons smugglers
and money launderers in the U.S. Virgin Islands; it resulted in the arrest
of 19 people, including members of the social and business elite there, and
confiscation of $240,000, vehicles, speed boats and bank accounts.

The drug phenomenon involves not merely trafficking of drugs through the
Caribbean. It is multidimensional involving four main aspects: marijuana
and crack production, consumption of those drugs plus heroin, trafficking
of all three drugs and laundering of the proceeds of drug sales.

For me, the drama of drugs has clear security implications; not just
because of the aspects mentioned above, but because:

1. Those aspects have multiple consequences and implications, such as
increased crime, corruption and arms trafficking.

2. The aspects and their consequences have increased in scope and gravity
over the last decade.

3. They have dramatic impact on agents and agencies of national security
and good governance.

4. The sovereignty of many countries in the region is under a virtual drug
siege.

Sovereignty itself has many dimensions. Not only is the sovereignty of
Caribbean countries compromised by actions of drug operations, but it has
been a sore point of bilateral antidrug efforts between the U.S. and some
nations in the region.

It led to a plunge in relations between the U.S. and Barbados and Jamaica
over the refusal of those countries to sign ``shiprider'' agreements they
felt stood to undermine their sovereignty. U.S. officials even threatened
to decertify Jamaica.

That drugcentered, sovereigntydriven controversy prompted the May 10,
1997 summit between President Clinton and 15 Caribbean leaders in Barbados.
It was the first time a U.S. president traveled to the Caribbean to talk
with regional leaders.

The matter was resolved there, with agreement on slightly different
``shiprider'' deals. U.S. authorities are now more sensitive to sovereignty
of small states.

Understandably, narcotics countermeasures need to be multidimensional. But
they also need to be multilvel and multiactor.

Multilevel national, regional and internatational because drug
operations and related problems are national and transnational, and
multiactor for those reasons plus the fact Caribbean governments lack
financial and other capabilities to meet the threats and challenges.

Antidrug efforts require involvement not only of governments, but also of
corporate bodies, nongovernmental organizations and international
governmental groups, such as the Regional Security System in the East
Caribbean and the Organization of American States.

Indeed, the involvement of the average citizen is also important. For the
drama of drugs presents the kind of travail to Caribbean and other
societies such that, remembering the words of poet Martin Carter, unless
all are involved, all are consumed.

IVELAW GRIFFITH is an associate professor of political science and
Caribbean specialist at Florida International University. His latest book,
Drugs and Security in the Caribbean: Sovereignty Under Siege, was published
this year by Penn State Press.

AN ENDLESS STALEMATE

By James G. Driscoll Editorial Writer

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico Relentlessly, by sea and air, drug smugglers speed
toward Puerto Rico. In ``go fast'' boats packed with cocaine and heroin,
they race the 482 nautical miles from Barranqullla, Colombia, then quietly
nose their craft ashore at night.

In lowflying planes, they find clandestine landing strips tucked in
outoftheway fields. Or they airdrop illegal drugs into Puerto Rican
waters, where small boats wait with lights out, engines silent.

In huge container ships sailing for San Juan, the fourth largest cargo port
under the U.S. flag, smugglers hide thousands of pounds of cocaine. From
the nearby Dominican Republic across the Mona Passage, they transport drugs
in primitive boats with a modern touch hollowedout trees powered by
twin outboard motors and riding low on the water that are otherwise
loaded with illegal migrants.

Puerto Rico can't avoid being a magnet, the drug smugglers' gateway of
choice to mainland United States. Such an honor.

Every day, 70 or more scheduled airline flights leave this Green Island for
Miami, New York, Chicago or other mainland cities. Every week, dozens of
ships set sail from San Juan's seaport, heading west. Such an opportunity.

Because Puerto Rico is U.S. territory in that sense, not unlike Florida
or New York it always has been immensely attractive to ruthless
smugglers. Once the narcotics have made it to this island, drug criminals
become confident the next step will be relatively easy: moving the
narcotics to the mainland.

They bribe airline employees in San Juan, Miami and New York to grease the
path for cocaine or heroin into the United States. They line up corrupt
seaport workers, here and in Florida, to handle and deliver drugs carried
by ship.

On the mainland, desperate addicts await, as drug criminals make huge
profits from the pathetic fools who abuse narcotics. And on this island,
the number of murders soars as the drug trade's malignant side effects
snuff out life.

Drug smugglers, though, do not go unchallenged, nor do they always succeed.
The war against drugs is being waged fiercely, unremittingly from here in
an unprecedented form of close cooperation among law enforcement agencies.

Traffickers are caught and sent to prison. Drugs are seized and smugglers
jolted off balance by a wellcoordinated attack from a half dozen U.S.
agencies, 18 island nations and the British, Dutch and French who
control remnants of their old empires in the Caribbean.

When the smugglers' complex crime networks are shattered by law
enforcement, they quickly move to other routes. At that uncertain time,
while setting up a new infrastructure and recruiting fresh crooks, they
become more vulnerable to the aggressive agents who pursue them.

These criminals are clever, but far from mistakefree. Their boats run out
of gas, they crash into rocks, they communicate on open radio channels.
They are betrayed by informers.

Sometimes they lose, bigtime. On Oct. 3, agents seized 3,415 kilograms of
cocaine more than 7,500 pounds that had been hidden inside a
container ship, the Sea Ranger, at the Port of San Juan.

Sometimes their losses are smaller. On Oct. 1 at Luis Munoz International
Airport, two passengers were arrested by U.S. Customs for transporting 3.3
kilograms of heroin concealed inside shoes and aerosol spray cans.

Does anything essential change in the drug war because of this? It's not
easy to say this, considering the valor and determined work of hundreds of
law enforcement agents. The answer, however, must be a qualified no.

Without unrelenting pressure from law enforcement, drug criminals would be
free to do as they choose. Narcotics prices in the United States would
drop, leading to more misery.

These skirmishes with smugglers, however, result in an endless stalemate
across the Caribbean. Each sides wins at times, and loses at other times,
with neither able to declare overall victory.

I've gotten to know some law enforcement agents in Puerto Rico who do
superb work, in the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Coast Guard,
Customs and the island's police. They realize their work is necessary but
not sufficient to deal effectively with drug abuse.

For a lasting effect, there must be a steady reduction in demand for
illegal drugs coupled with continuing the valiant fight throughout the
Caribbean.

Copyright © 1997, SunSentinel Company and South Florida Interactive, Inc.