ALAMANCE COUNTY A DRUG HUB FOR MAJOR DEALERS

Fantastic pay.

Exciting travel. Danger and violence.

Addiction and ruin entirely possible. A prison stay or early death likely.

This is how an honest job description for a drug dealer or courier
might read. Not the most reassuring ad, but plenty persuasive for
those with little education, money, scruples or hope.

Unlike legitimate businesses, illicit drug operations aren't
advertising, of course. But that's done little to hamper them.

Major operators have made Alamance County a drug hub whose spokes
spread throughout the East Coast and beyond, say Sheriff Terry
Johnson and Wally Serniak, the resident agent in charge of the
Greensboro office of the federal Drug Enforcement Administration.

And like something out of the "Godfather" movies, think of this as a
family operation whose tentacles stretch across the U.S. border,
lawmen say. Drugs, guns and a river of cash flow into and out of the
county on real and virtual highways.

Sometimes the profits go out in bulk shipments of bills, sometimes in
electronic transfers, still other times through laundering cash
through legitimate local businesses.

The siren song? Head-swooning profits. Johnson, a former SBI
undercover agent, dissects a hypothetical cocaine dealer's work to
make the point.

A local dealer buys an ounce of cocaine for $1,200 and dilutes it by
half. He then sells his diluted or "cut" product for $5,700, a profit
of $4,500. The return is equivalent to a month's gross salary for
someone making $54,000 a year.

Many dealers will make more on the transaction because they dilute
their product by more than half, and local mid-level distributors and
couriers can make a $200,000 a year, Johnson said.

The sheriff estimates that in Alamance County, there are roughly 200
drug runners and distributors and about a half-dozen kingpins. Many
have direct ties to drug cartels in Mexico.

The sheriff wouldn't name names but said major players in the local
operations include several whom locals think are upstanding citizens.
Along with the copious quantities of cocaine and marijuana, the
Mexican drug operations export guns and ammunition, and a number of
those doing the trafficking.

In a presentation Monday to the county commissioners, Serniak
estimated that "at least 80 to 90 percent" of those arrested in two
recent local enforcement operations were illegal immigrants.

But at the end of his presentation, in a response to a question from
County Commissioner Tim Sutton, Serniak said the county's 287 (g)
illegal immigration enforcement program is having "no effect" on drug
trafficking in Alamance County.

Why? Many of the top local leaders are U.S. born, the second- and
third-generation products of families who have been distributing
drugs for some time, Serniak said.

The highly-structured and compartmentalized Fortune 500-like
organizations insulate their major players and keep those working in
one part of the operation in the dark about the other parts.

The local operations have no problem filling vacancies with those in
Mexico who struggle under tough economic conditions, and with others
from points north and south of the U.S. border.

ALAMANCE COUNTY HAS HAD A SERIOUS drug problem for more than 30
years, Johnson said.

Previous sheriffs and other local authorities did what they could to
stem the rising tide of illegal drugs, but largely ignored the major
players who were setting up shop.

Those players also took advantage of a lack of cooperation between
local, state and federal law agencies, and used money and family
connections to get some within the sheriff's department to do their
bidding, Johnson said. The sheriff said he believed there was a mole
inside the department when he came into office in December 2002.

He reassigned his vice employees to other jobs, something he said
earned him a lot of enmity from those investigators.

In 2003, less than a year after Johnson took office, Cynthia Huffines
Turner, a sheriff's dispatcher, was charged with trafficking in and
manufacturing marijuana. She was later convicted and received a
suspended sentence. Turner had sensitive information about undercover
investigators, Johnson said.

While Turner was a dispatcher, several undercover operations "just
didn't seem to go right," Sheriff's spokesman Randy Jones said. Jones
didn't say Turner was the source of any leaks, but added that "a lot
of our vice operations seemed to be very successful after" she left
the department.

In February 2006, sheriff's receptionist and translator Silvia
Navarrete Duran was charged with conspiring to traffic in cocaine
after her husband, Francisco Duran Avila, was charged with
trafficking in cocaine and other offenses. Cooperation is strong now
between his agency, local law enforcement, the State Bureau of
Investigation, the DEA and other federal agencies, Johnson said.
Despite those ties, and enforcement efforts resulting in local
seizures of hundreds of pounds of marijuana and cocaine and millions
in cash over the last several years, Johnson estimates that his
department and other agencies fighting the drug trafficking in the
county are catching only 1 or 2 percent of the illicit trade.

Cocaine and marijuana are the mainstays of the Alamance County trade.
But the sheriff and Jones say heroin, a highly addictive narcotic, is
making a comeback locally.

Profit and practicality are driving heroin's resurgence, and a shift
from marijuana to cocaine.

With marijuana, a pickup truck load is worth about $1 million. For
cocaine, a filled suitcase brings the same amount.

But when it comes to heroin, dealers need only to fill a lunch box to
have $1 million worth.

Despite tough laws against heroin trafficking, the ability to make
more with less is proving irresistible for those already conducting
risky business, Jones said.

If there is a silver lining to this scenario, it's that the river of
drugs flow mostly out of the county and aren't resulting in a major
rise in overall crime. But the increasing gun traffic is behind
rising violence here, Johnson and Serniak said.

Drug overdose deaths are also up, with four confirmed recent cases.
Johnson, Jones and Serniak attribute those deaths to heroin. Since
December, autopsy results from the Office of the Chief Medical
Examiner in Chapel Hill show two overdose deaths caused by methadone,
a drug used to treat heroin addicts.

The sheriff thinks he has now enough manpower to deal with the
situation, but said more fine-tuning of enforcement efforts is
needed. The sheriff's department currently has three investigators on
state and federal task forces and is part of a local gang task force.
In the meantime, Johnson said he is asking the federal government to
designate the county as a High Intensity Drug Area so it can get more
federal dollars to deal with the problem.

Having the local officers on those federal task forces is key because
it provides more resources, Jones said.

Some have accused the sheriff of ratcheting up the rhetoric as a way
to bolster his reelection chances in 2010. Serniak's presentation to
the commissioners and Johnson's steady verbal drumbeat of Alamance
County's supposed drug-hub status is a ploy to further expand the
sheriff's budget, others say.

Absolutely untrue, Serniak and Johnson say. If anything, the sheriff
said his straight-talk about the situation will probably hurt him at the polls.

His proposed budget to the county for 2009-10 is actually less than
his current budget, he said.

OVER THE YEARS, Jones said, Alamance County has gained a reputation
across the country as a distribution hub.

Say Burlington or Alamance County and lawmen in El Paso, Texas, and
other faraway points nod with recognition, Jones said.

But does the widespread recognition, and the sheriff's
pronouncements, hurt efforts to recruit business and industry to
Alamance County? Burlington City Manager Harold Owen said he doesn't
know. Owen said police Chief Mike Williams has confirmed that drug
smuggling "through the area is significant" but said it has not led
to a rise in local street-level crimes in Burlington.

"In terms of image, it's obviously a concern," Owen said. More police
staffing for the city's drug enforcement efforts are part of the
city's requests for federal stimulus money, the manager said. Johnson
vows to continue to highlight the issue because "the public deserves
to know." Locals can help best by feeding tips to his office and
other law agencies, the sheriff said.

Sidebar

Some notable local drug seizures Feb. 2009 - 89 pounds of cocaine
near Alamance-Caswell border Feb. 2009 - 60 marijuana plants, 26
pounds of marijuana in Graham Aug. 2, 2004 - 120 pounds of cocaine
(worth more than $10 million) from a vehicle near the Village of
Alamance May 2003 - 1,000 pounds of marijuana and $50,000 from Haw River