DRUG WAR HITS CLOSER TO US

Five men dead in an apartment. In a county that might see five
homicides in an entire year, the call over the sheriff's radio
revealed little about what awaited law enforcement. A type of crime,
and criminal, once foreign to this landscape of blooming dogwoods had
arrived in Shelby County. Sheriff Chris Curry felt it even before he
saw the grisly scene. He called the state. The FBI. The DEA.

"I don't know what I've got," he warned. "But I'm gonna need
help."

The five dead men lay scattered about a living room. Some showed signs
of torture: Burns seared into their earlobes revealed where modified
jumper cables had been clamped as an improvised electrocution device.
Adhesive from duct tape used to bind the victims still clung to wrists
and faces.

As a final touch, throats were slashed, post-mortem.

It didn't take long for Curry and federal agents to piece together
clues: A murder scene, clean save for the crimson-turned-brown stains
now spotting the carpet. Just a couple of mattresses tossed on the
floor. It was a typical stash house.

But the cut throats? Some sort of ghastly warning.

Curry would soon find this was a retaliation hit over drug money with
ties to Mexico's notorious Gulf cartel.

Curry also found out firsthand what narcotics agents have long
understood. The drug war, with the savagery it brings, knows no
bounds. It had landed in his back yard, in the foothills of the
Appalachians, around the corner from The Home Depot.

One thousand, twenty-four miles from the Mexico border.

Forget for a moment the phrase itself - "War on Drugs" - much-derided
since President Richard Nixon coined it. Wars eventually end, after
all. And many Americans wonder today, nearly four decades later, will
this one ever be won?

In Mexico, the fight has become a real war. Some 45,000 Mexican army
troops now patrol territories long ruled by narcotraffickers. Places
like Tijuana in Baja California. Reynosa, across the Rio Grande from
Texas. But also resort cities like Acapulco, an hour south of the
place where, months ago, the decapitated bodies of 12 soldiers were
discovered with a sign that read: "For every one of mine that you
kill, I will kill 10."

More than 10,560 people have been killed since 2006, when Mexican
President Felipe Calderon took office and launched his campaign
against the organized crime gangs that move cocaine, methamphetamine,
marijuana and heroin to a vast U.S. market.

The cartels are fighting each other for power, and the Calderon
administration for their very survival.

"He has deployed troops. He has deployed national police. He's trying
to vet and create units ... that can effectively adjudicate and turn
back the years of corruption," says John Walters, former director of
the U.S. Office of National Drug Control Policy. "When there was less
visible destruction, it was because they were in control. Now, he has
destabilized them."

But the cartels have also brought the fight to us. In 230 U.S. cities,
the organizations maintain distribution hubs or supply drugs to local
distributors, the federal government reports. Places like Miami and
other longtime transportation points along the Southwest border. But
also Twin Falls, Idaho. Billings, Mont. Wichita, Kan. St. Louis. Milwaukee.

Even Shelby County, where the quintuple homicide occurred just outside
the Birmingham city limits and a half-hour's drive north of
Columbiana, the county seat.

"We became a hub without knowing it," Sheriff Curry
says.

The talk of the day is "spillover" violence - at once the stuff of
sensationalism but also a very real concept.

In Phoenix, police report close to 1,000 kidnappings over the past
three years tied to border smugglers moving people or drugs or both.
In Atlanta, a major distribution hub for the Gulf cartel,
trafficker-on-trafficker violence has become more common as the
cartels impose tighter payment schedules and grow less tolerant of
extending credit, says Rodney Benson, chief of the Drug Enforcement
Administration there.

Greg Borland heads the DEA office in Birmingham. Since the murders
last August, he's seen the fear in his neighbors' eyes, faced the
questions of: How did this happen? Why here? Why now?

"They're absolutely shocked. To me it's like: Why? It's everywhere,"
he says. "Maybe it was only by the grace of God that it hadn't
happened already."

Those in the know understand that drug-related violence is hardly
unusual. What's new is where that violence is erupting, where
distribution cells and hubs and sub-hubs have surfaced.

How an apartment in Alabama became the site of a drug hit in many ways
tells the story of the narco-trade in America in 2009, and of the
challenges we face in combatting a blight that has spread to big
cities and small.

Before Aug. 20, 2008, when the five men were found, the assumption had
been that the big drug hauls were passing through.

Alabama had long had its share of street dealers. Homegrown pot passed
hands, then powder cocaine and crack. Soon meth labs cropped up here
and there.

"Just a local issue," says Curry. "But over time it's escalated into a
sophisticated transportation structure."

First came the rise of the Mexican cartel, brought about in the late
'80s and early '90s after authorities cracked down on Colombian
traffickers. The Colombians aligned with the Mexicans for
transportation, then began paying their Mexican subcontractors in cocaine.

As more Colombian traffickers were brought down, the Mexicans took
over both transportation and distribution. A decade ago, 60 percent of
the cocaine entering the United States came through Mexico. Today that
figure is 90 percent.

Texas and other border states become primary distribution hubs, and
distributors were comfortable there, says Greg Bowden, who heads the
FBI's violent crime task force in Birmingham. "Now," he says, "they're
comfortable here, in Memphis, in Atlanta. They moved their home bases
to these little pockets."

One reason for that shift is the ability these days to "blend in in
plain sight," as the Atlanta DEA chief puts it.

The flood of Hispanic immigrants into American communities for work
helped provide cover for traffickers looking to expand into new
markets. Shelby has long been Alabama's fastest-growing county, and
the number of Hispanics grew 126 percent from 2000 to 2007.

But there is another reason this area, and others, have become what
some agents call "sub-hubs."

With some 4.9 million trucks crossing into the United States from
Mexico every year, tractor-trailers have become a transportation mode
of choice among traffickers. Drugs head north, but weapons and cash
also head back south.

Shelby County is a trucking mecca, with highways 65, 20, 59 and 459
running east, north, south and west. Once reluctant to haul drug
shipments too far beyond a border state, drivers are willing to take
more chances now, because there are so many trucks on the road, Bowden
says.

Amid all of this, an operation moved into Shelby County, leading to
the call on Aug. 20.

A simple welfare check brought deputies to the Cahaba Lakes Apartments
off Highway 280, 11 miles from downtown Birmingham. Interviews with
family members and associates helped investigators piece together a
sketchy portrait of what happened.

Agents described it as friendly competition turned deadly among a
group of distributors from Atlanta and Birmingham that often sold and
shared drug loads when one or the other group was running low. At some
point, about a half-million in drug money went missing. One group
suspected the other of taking it, and went after the five men at
Cahaba Lakes.

The money was never found.

Whether an order came directly from Mexico, investigators don't know.
The DEA's Borland notes that making a direct connection between the
street level folks charged in the killing and a specific cartel "boss"
isn't easy in a business with so many players at various levels.

"We don't have canceled checks of their dues payments to the cartels.
But we know that they were moving large quantities of drugs, which are
probably brought in here under the supervision of the Gulf Cartel,
because the Gulf Cartel is the dominant one here," he says.

Since the incident, Curry has assigned one deputy to a DEA task force,
another to work with the FBI. At the behest of the Department of
Homeland Security, he joined in a conference call with police chiefs
and sheriffs in border states to discuss what he now calls "a common
problem."

And he answers, as candidly as possible, his citizens' questions when
they ask him about this "new" threat.

"South of our border: gunfights, violence - it is a normal, accepted,
expected behavior," he says. "That has now moved into our borders."