NEW ROLE FOR OLD HAND IN DRUG WAR

Mark Trouville, in Charge of the Drug Enforcement Administration's
Miami Field Division, Has Been on the Front Lines of the U.S. War on
Drugs for More Than Two Decades.

As a rookie federal agent in 1979, Mark Trouville made a beeline to
Miami to join the Drug Enforcement Administration in an impossible
mission: fighting the sudden surge of South American cocaine washing
through South Florida.

"It really was the Wild West," said Trouville, recalling the
region's cocaine-cowboy days.

A decade later, as a senior DEA agent in Los Angeles, Trouville again
found himself on the new front lines of the nation's drug war: the
southwestern border with Mexico.

Today, Trouville, 49, is back in South Florida, trading in his gold
chains as an undercover agent for the button-down attire of a top
administrator. For the past year, he's been in charge of the DEA's
Miami office, managing about 500 agents in Florida and the Bahamas.

Like Trouville himself, the drug trade has grown up, with Miami still
a capital for the Colombian cartels.

But the white powder that once flowed through South Florida is now
smuggled through southwestern border states. Mexican traffickers, in
turn, have become as powerful as the Colombian syndicates.

An estimated 90 percent of all Colombian cocaine travels through
Central America and Mexico -- via land or water routes -- to
California, Arizona and Texas, according to a report last week by the
Justice Department's National Drug Intelligence Center.

The rest goes from Colombia through Jamaica, Haiti, the Dominican
Republic and Puerto Rico to South Florida.

The radical shift has been under way since the late 1980s. The
government's crackdown in the Caribbean corridor forced Colombian
syndicates to turn to Mexican partners to move cocaine through the
porous, 2,000-mile southwestern border, the eastern Pacific Ocean and
the western Caribbean.

Former front-line agents such as Trouville witnessed that sea change.
In 1989, he led a group of DEA agents in Southern California who made
the world's largest cocaine seizure: 21.5 tons, plus $12 million in
cash.

The DEA raided a warehouse in Sylmar, Calif., where the cocaine was
piling up because of a conflict between Colombian distributors and a
Mexico-based group hired to transport it across the border. The
Mexicans refused to release the cocaine to the Colombians until they
were paid for their transportation services.

Colombian narco-traffickers responded to the staggering seizure by
paying Mexico-based smugglers up to 50 percent of each cocaine
shipment in product rather than in cash.

"Since the Sylmar seizure, the drug organizations have been much more
careful about storing that much cocaine in one spot," Trouville said.

The drug trade's geographic shift has prompted the DEA to send more
resources and manpower to the southwestern border, resulting in more
arrests, more convictions and more seizures.

Despite bigger cocaine hauls in the border states, the DEA's Miami
field division -- along with the U.S. attorney's office -- continues
to play an outsized role in the seemingly endless war on drugs. The
reason: The Colombian cartels still have their "command and control"
centers linked with longtime distribution networks in South Florida
and New York.

Trouville said the DEA has increasingly relied on confidential
informants, wiretaps, foreign police forces and extraditions to
interrupt the Colombian pipeline and networks in Mexico and the Caribbean.

A case in point: the DEA's joint investigation with Immigration and
Customs Enforcement of the reputed Cali Cartel founders, Gilberto and
Miguel Rodriguez-Orejuela, reportedly responsible for 80 percent of
the cocaine on U.S. streets in the last decade. The brothers,
extradited in 2004-05, face a federal trial in Miami in September.

Another major case: the DEA's probe of alleged drug trafficking in the
administration of deposed Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide,
who was ousted in 2004.

Federal prosecutors in Miami have won convictions against about 20
smugglers, former national police officers and Aristide's former
presidential security chief. They lost one case, against the head of
Haiti's anti-drug brigade, at trial last year.

Today, the last defendants, a former security chief for American
Airlines in Port-au-Prince and her husband, will stand trial on
charges of conspiring to import cocaine into the United States.

Aristide, exiled in South Africa, has been under scrutiny by a federal
grand jury, but no charges have been brought against him.

Trouville declined to comment about the Aristide probe, but said Haiti
remains a priority with other Caribbean nations as a hub for Colombian
drug traffickers.

As Trouville sets big-picture goals for the DEA's Miami division, he
wants to continue attacking "the command and control" centers of
U.S. and global drug organizations to cripple their narcotics supplies
and money-laundering operations.

"Our job is to look south," said Trouville, who came to Miami after
running the DEA's New England field division in his native Boston.
"We're the gateway for drugs coming into the United States."