PIEDMONT TRIAD KEY DRUG HUB

When six local sheriff's departments teamed up this month to seize drugs
and $78,000 in cash from two Randolph County houses, they were trying to
put a crimp in a massive drug pipeline that extends from Mexico to the
Piedmont Triad's more rural communities.

Local and federal law enforcement officials say Mexican criminals control
most of the marijuana trafficking in North Carolina, as well as much of the
cocaine and methamphetamine trade. And the eastern part of the Piedmont
Triad, particularly Alamance County, has become a distribution hub not only
for North Carolina but also for other East Coast states, they say, in part
because Interstates 40 and 85 run through the county.

"Almost everyone who's in the law-enforcement business will tell you that
(Mexicans) have practically taken over the marijuana trade," said Guilford
County Sheriff BJ Barnes.

Law enforcement officers and drug-crime experts say that with the dramatic
growth of the state's Latino population, it became much easier for drug
traffickers to blend into those local communities.

"There are some good Latino people that have settled here," said Alamance
County Sheriff Terry Johnson. But, he added, "A lot of those that are
coming over illegally from Mexico find themselves unemployed. . You have a
lot of the Latino community that are struggling to survive by selling drugs
because of the job situation."

Deputies from across the Piedmont Triad arrested six Latinos this month in
a major drug bust in Randolph County. The deputies seized more than 100
pounds of marijuana, 3 pounds of cocaine, money and guns.

According to the National Drug Intelligence Center's 2002 National Drug
Threat Assessment, most of the marijuana imported into the United States
came from Mexico. Comparatively little marijuana is cultivated on a large
scale in the United States.

In addition to marijuana grown in Mexico, Mexican traffickers also import
cocaine produced in Colombia into the United States and North Carolina, and
they bring methamphetamines manufactured in large Mexican drug labs or in
the southwestern United States to the state, federal sources say.

"It is a tremendous challenge for law enforcement statewide," said David
Gaddis, the Drug Enforcement Administration's top North Carolina agent.
"Across the board in North Carolina you would find very few fluent Spanish
speakers in the law enforcement community."

Differences in culture also make investigators' jobs tougher. In Mexico,
Barnes said, police are often corrupt and can't be trusted, and some
Mexicans may assume police here are the same.

"Because of cultural differences and what they've been used to in Mexico,
having folks cooperate with police is a little more difficult," he said.
"Because of that it's hard for the good folks here who may have some
information to feel confident enough to talk to law enforcement."

Juan Rios, a family-services specialist with the Randolph County
Partnership for Children and a Latino activist, said some Latinos are
committing drug crimes.

"There are black sheep in every single ethnic group," he said. But, he
added, he and other Latino leaders want to work with local police to attack
the problem.

"We want to come to the sheriff's department and help them," he said. "We
don't want to be seen in the community like we're a threat."

Rios and other Randolph County Hispanics are forming the Randolph County
Latino Coalition, and one of the issues the group wants to address is drug
trafficking by Latinos.

Hard numbers on the scope of Latino involvement in drug trafficking are
difficult to come by. The state collects arrest statistics categorized by
race but not by ethnicity. Only a few local law enforcement agencies keep
track of arrest data by ethnicity.

At the end of 1995, 10 Hispanics were serving time in state prisons for
drug trafficking. By October last year, that number had risen to 400, the
N.C. Department of Correction says.

In Randolph County, 66 percent of the 62 people charged with trafficking
drugs from 2000 to 2002 were Hispanic; about 26 percent were white, and the
remaining 8 percent were black.

Most of the drugs entering the state come in over the highways, often
hidden in secret compartments in cars or packed into trucks with other
cargo. Money -- often tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash
- -- leaves the state the same way.

"We work northbound for drugs and southbound for money," said Davidson
County Sheriff Gerald Hege, whose department conducts drug-interdiction
patrols on the interstates. In the past six weeks, he said, his department
has seized more than $400,000, he said.

Though Mexicans dominate the trafficking of large amounts of drugs, the
dealers who sell it on the streets, as well as their customers, come in all
racial and ethnic categories.

Typically, Mexican dealers will bring large quantities of drugs to a "stash
house," and then lower-level dealers will come to the house to pick up
their portion of it. That's where sheriff's deputies made their Randolph
County bust two weeks ago.

North Carolina's network of interstate highways also makes the state an
attractive drug-trafficking hub.

"Ten years ago any kind of large quantity of cocaine or heroin was coming
from Philadelphia or New York," Gaddis said. "Now it's going in the
opposite direction from North Carolina to Philadelphia or New York.