ATLANTA BURBS HAVE AMENITIES FOR DRUG TRAFFICKERS

LILBURN, Ga. -- Azaleas bloom brightly in front of two-story homes on
quiet streets where speed humps enforce the 20 mph speed limit.
Neighbors wave and smile at passers-by, drawn to the booming Atlanta
area by its accessible transportation, increasingly diverse population
and urban amenities.

But others are drawn to the quiet suburbs in the hopes that law
enforcement or their business competitors will miss what happens
inside - the movement of tons of illegal drugs, millions of dollars in
cash and sometimes lethal discipline of wayward employees.

"This county's awash in drugs," said Gwinnett County Assistant
District Attorney Keith Miles.

The placid nature of Gwinnett County and other nearby counties has
drawn workers for Mexican drug cartels to suburbs like Lilburn,
northeast of Atlanta. Interstate 85 provides convenient transport, and
the area's exploding Latino population makes it easy for Mexican
traffickers to blend in.

Over the last five to seven years, the Atlanta area has become the
main distribution hub to move drugs and cash throughout the East, Drug
Enforcement Administration officials say. The cartels are drawn to
Atlanta by the same conveniences that have attracted corporations here
over the last decade or so - access to major transportation systems
and proximity to large population centers.

But Georgia-based corporations don't bring with them the kind of
disciplinary practices the cartel-affiliated workers have imported
from Mexico. Dominican citizen Oscar Reynoso, 31, was lured to Lilburn
from Rhode Island last July to settle a $300,000 debt to the Mexican
Gulf Cartel. Dehydrated, gagged and badly beaten, Reynoso was found
chained to a wall in a basement. The onslaught of law enforcement on
the scene shocked neighbors, said resident Maria Ramos.

That same month, police in another Gwinnett County suburb shot and
killed a suspected kidnapper as he tried to pick up a $2 million
ransom owed to his cartel bosses.

Authorities have also won a string of high-profile drug busts in
recent years, including Project Reckoning, which targeted the Gulf
cartel, and Operation Xcellerator, which hit the Sinaloa cartel. In
fiscal year 2008, federal authorities seized about $70 million in
drug-related cash in Atlanta, more than any other region in the
country, according to DEA records. Already this fiscal year in Atlanta
they've seized about $34 million.

Project Reckoning alone seized $60 million and more than 40 tons of
illegal drugs over nearly two years. That operation also resulted in
the arrest of 175 people over two days, including 43 in the Atlanta
area.

"We've seen this coming for a while, with bigger seizures of drugs and
cash," Miles said.

Whereas five years ago a 1-kilo cocaine seizure was a big deal, said
District Attorney Danny Porter, it is common now for law enforcement
officers to seize 10, 20 or even 50 kilos in a single bust.

And while the overall number of drug cases has actually dropped,
Porter said, the number of cases involving organized distribution
groups has increased.

Chuvalo Truesdell, a DEA spokesman in Atlanta, said known Mexican drug
cartel members have been arrested in the Atlanta area.

While the command and control structures tend to be complicated and
compartmentalized, the cartels' basic operations are simple, said
Rodney Benson, the DEA special agent in charge of Atlanta.

Drugs destined for Atlanta are brought across the U.S.-Mexico border
into Texas in relatively small quantities - 20 to 25 kilos -
frequently hidden in secret compartments in personal or commercial
vehicles. They are accumulated near the border, and then larger
shipments are sent along Interstates 10, 20 and 40 to Atlanta, often
in commercial trucks carrying legitimate cargo.

Once the drugs reach the Atlanta area, they are taken to stash houses
and broken down into smaller shipments that are sent via Interstates
75, 77 and 85 to cities like Miami, New York and Detroit. Cash
collected is heat sealed in plastic to prevent tampering and sent on
the reverse journey back to Mexico.

In suburban Atlanta, Mexican drug trafficking organizations generally
rent nondescript houses in middle-class neighborhoods in suburbs like
Lilburn. They often have one house for storing and processing drugs,
one house for storing and processing money and a third for conducting
transactions, so when an arrest happens at one house, they don't lose
everything, Porter said.

Unlike the Colombian traffickers in south Florida in the 1980s, the
Mexican cartels tend to keep a low profile, said Jack Killorin,
director of a government program to fund drug-fighting efforts in the
region.

"They tend not to be too bling and high-living," he said. "They're
very quiet, they try to stay hidden in the communities. They want to
be low key. They prefer not to be observed. They're serious
businessmen - they bring their drugs here and money back, and that's
what they focus on."

Drug-fueled violence has increased in Mexico in response to President
Felipe Calderon's crackdown after he took office in December 2006, and
spillover violence is a rising fear.

The violence in the Atlanta area, like in other distribution hub
cities, tends to be limited to those involved in the drug or human
trafficking trade, authorities said.

But Miles said he thinks the violence is already increasing and cited
about a dozen unsolved homicides in Gwinnett County that he believes
are drug related. He cited a case in which two men apparently shot
each other to death in a house where a money counter was found. As
busts net increasingly large amounts of drugs and cash, he said, law
enforcement officers are also finding more and bigger guns.

"You don't have shootouts in the street, but who's to say that's not
coming? I think it is," Miles said. "I see it getting worse before it
gets better."

Atlanta was designated a High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area, or
HIDTA, in 1995. The city's designation has been broadened over the
last two years to include 12 counties in Georgia and five in North
Carolina. The Atlanta HIDTA program, directed by Killorin, uses
federal grant money to fund anti-drug efforts by local, state and
federal law enforcement agencies.

Porter said he believes the coordinated efforts are paying off, but he
acknowledged some problems. While his office would often like to
immediately arrest any dealer who's putting drugs on the street,
federal authorities often want to hold off to use that smaller dealer
as an entry into the operations so they can bring down a larger chunk
of a cartel's network.

"That tension is always there and if we don't cooperate well there are
issues," Porter said. "In the face of what we're dealing with, though,
we have to work together and put our differences aside."