Mexicans Join Drug Underworld in New York

By CLIFFORD KRAUSS

NEW YORK Expanding eastward since their frequently violent seizure of
drug markets in California and Texas, Mexican drug cartels have planted
their first beachhead in the New York metropolitan area over the last few
months, according to law enforcement officials.

So far, the Mexican cartels are largely playing a subsidiary role to
Colombian groups already entrenched here. Shipping tons of cocaine and
marijuana by truck from the TexasMexico border to northern Queens for
distribution throughout the northeast, the Mexican groups are also
smuggling Colombian cartel drug profits in bulk cash from New York to
Mexico for laundering in Mexico's loosely regulated banking system,
according to FBI officials.

The Mexican cartels have had little impact so far on retail street
trafficking operations in New York City, not yet affecting local prices and
supplies in any measurable way. But that could quickly change, law
enforcement officials warn.

Just last month, the Drug Enforcement Administration and New York City
police intercepted, hidden among crates of carrots, a 1.6ton Mexican
cocaine shipment with a potential street value of $100 million the
largest stash of cocaine intercepted in the city since the height of the
crackcocaine epidemic in the late 1980s.

"The Mexican drug trafficking groups are an increasing phenomenon here,"
said Lewis Schiliro, a special agent in charge of the FBI's New York
Criminal Division.

The effort by the Mexican druglords to establish important operations in
the most important United States hub of Colombia's Cali cartel comes at the
same time they are making increasingly aggressive efforts to overtake Cali
operations in the coca fields of Bolivia and Peru and in the jungles of
Colombia itself, drug experts say.

Officials said FBI wiretaps and informers have indicated that the Mexican
groups are just beginning to sell cocaine directly to Dominican
organizations based in Harlem, Washington Heights and the Bronx,
circumventing the Cali organization, which has traditionally served as the
local wholesale source for Dominican distributor kingpins.

"The Mexicans are becoming competitive with the Colombians," said Robert S.
Silbering, New York City's special narcotics prosecutor. "We haven't seen
violence between them yet, and whether or not that will happen is difficult
to say."

Smallscale Mexican groups have trafficked marijuana in Buffalo and other
cities in western New York for more than a decade. With the growth of
Mexican immigration in the area in recent years, some of the immigrants
have taken lowlevel jobs for the Colombian organizations in New York City,
Bergen County, N.J., and around Long Island.

But the Mexicans had remained out of the cocaine trade in any "management"
level until now, according to law enforcement officials.

One Colombian cartel or another has controlled New York's wholesale cocaine
trade since the early 1970s. With the advent of the highvolume
crackcocaine market in the mid 1980s, local Dominican groups became more
important on both the retail and wholesale levels, but the Colombians
continued to dominate international trafficking not only into New York but
into the rest of the United States as well.

When increasingly effective law enforcement efforts blocked drug shipments
through the Caribbean and more drugs began flowing through Central America
and Mexico in the late 1980s, the Mexican cartels grew richer and bolder.
At first they worked with the Colombians in California and Texas, as they
are doing now in New York, but they eventually began wresting control from
local groups across the MexicoU.S. border.

For example, the Tijuana cartel, one of a handful of top Mexican mafias,
ordered an affiliate gang called the Logan Heights Calle 30 to carry out a
series of executions to take control of the San Diego market, according to
the DEA The same group ordered an assassination in the fashionable
community of Coronado, Calif., in the middle of rush hour last December,
according to the agency.

Through all the tumult out west, the Colombians retained dominance of the
cocaine trade in New York and even expanded into heroin. But now their
operations in New York have been put into some disarray, since one of the
two major Colombian kingpins who controlled Cali cells here was gunned down
by security forces in Colombia last year, and the other was jailed in
Colombia more than a year ago, federal officials said.

In recent months, the Mexican groups have begun making deals with coca
growers in the Andean mountain ranges in Bolivia and Peru, undercutting the
traditional Colombian buyers.

And in a new development, the Mexican cartels are making contacts with
leftist Colombian guerrillas who operate near coca fields and cocaine
laboratories in Colombia, according to a DEA official with access to
intelligence information.

The growing Mexican role in the drug trade fueled a highpitched debate in
Congress last month over the Clinton administration's decision to certify
Mexico as a reliable drugfighting partner.

Federal law enforcement authorities said they first became aware of the
magnitude of the Mexican trafficking role in New York last month when they
intercepted an 18wheel truck trailer, parked near La Guardia Airport, that
was stuffed with cocaine hidden in a shipment of carrots. The DEA has
linked that, as well as $1.3 million in cash at a safe house at 6260 Grand
Central Parkway in Rego Park, Queens, to a single Mexican drug
transportation cell.

"What was different about this organization was the fact that Mexican
traffickers were supplying lowerlevel Colombian distribution groups in New
York City," DEA Administrator Thomas Constantine told a Senate
Appropriations subcommittee earlier this month.

"In most previous cases, Colombian traffickers in the U.S. controlled the
top supply and distribution levels, relying on traffickers from the
Dominican Republic to distribute cocaine at lower levels."

DEA officials said that the local leader of the cell was Geraldo Gonzalez,
39, a Mexican arrested last month who has told agents that he comes from
Michoacan state in Mexico and has lived in recent years in Cicero, Ill.,
and Los Angeles.

Mr. Gonzalez, who is being held without bail at Rikers Island prison, has
refused to cooperate with investigators. But DEA officials said they hoped
to learn which cartel had sent the shipment from Mexico.

An entry in a logbook found in the confiscated truck indicated that the
supposedly innocent carrot shipment had crossed into the United States
through McAllen, Texas, which DEA officials say could mean that the cell is
controlled by remnants of the Gulf cartel once run by Juan Garcia Abrego,
who was arrested in Mexico last year, extradited and convicted on drug
charges in the United States.

The officials said it was also possible that the cell was connected to
Amado CarrilloFuentes, currently the most powerful Mexican drug kingpin,
whose Juarezbased cartel still retains close to ties to the Cali cartel.

Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company