Pot Smugglers' Paradise

Drug runners easily elude police in Florida Keys

In the past three years, the smuggling of drugs from Latin America has become Florida's growth industry, a multibillion-dollar business involving private airlines and speedboats, Mafia connections and high-priced lawyers. Arrayed against them is the collective might of the U.S. Customs Service, the Coast Guard and the Drug Enforcement Administration, as well as local lawmen. The good guys are clearly losing the battle. Last year Feds in the Southeast seized roughly 1.4 million lbs. of marijuana, with a street value of $420 million, and 533 lbs. of cocaine worth $133 million. But perhaps ten times that amount got through. A pound of marijuana costs $40 in Colombia and brings $500 in New York. Says Don Turnbaugh, chief of Customs patrol in Miami: "The situation is out of control. We're fighting at best a holding action. To think of stopping them is absurd."

TIME Correspondent Richard Woodbury reports from the scene:

The game is played out nightly in the inlets and beaches of Florida's 1,200-mile coastline, along back-country roads and at dirt airstrips. Fishermen churning home to Miami through the Cape Florida channel may be startled to find a white Customs launch bearing down on them. Blue-shirted men with bolstered revolvers play a high-intensity beam through cabins and scan decks with night-vision goggles. Near by on the Miami River, other officers crouch in a thicket of weeds, training binoculars on a rusting banana boat, watching for seamen debarking with suspicious packages. To the south at Key Largo, deputy sheriffs with high-powered rifles cruise through mangrove swamps, on the prowl for marijuana runners.

For a time, pot runners virtually owned the place, bringing to real life the

Key Largo of Bogart and Bacall. They hacked their own roads through the mosquito-ridden mangrove, sealed them off with padlocked gates, and even staked out a sheriffs substation with a walkie-talkie lookout to learn of patrols. But lately the police have regained the initiative.

As Sergeant Robert Brack, 29, edged his maroon sedan through the underbrush, his headlights picked out two giant vans. Suddenly there was a roar of boat engines and rifle fire. Pinned down, Brack held off the attackers until help came. Two shrimp boats packed with pot ran aground in the confusion. Surrounded in the thicket, a gang of eleven men was captured, along with $14 million in grass.

The smugglers spend heavily for good equipment, whereas "Customs," as one of them puts it, "have to go to Congress just to get an airplane." Indeed, the Feds' best material comes from what they have confiscated from smugglers. Three of Customs' aging Florida fleet of eight planes are trophies of pot busts.

The Feds boast more than 100 boats, but the fastest Coast Guard launch will travel only 28 m.p.h. The smugglers' sleek ocean racers, stripped of galleys and bunks for greater capacity, can do 50 m.p.h. fully loaded. "We are outmanned and outrun," says Coast Guard Commander John Ikens. "They have more money than we do."

On both sides, it is a war of ingenious technology. The drug runners pack their craft with ten-channel digital scanners to monitor lawmen. Surplus nightscopes from the Viet Nam War enable them to spot a cutter in the darkest channel at three miles. Federal infiltrators occasionally manage to install transponders on the enemy aircraft to chart their whereabouts. But the drug runners have "fuzz busters," electronic devices that warn when they are on the radarscope.

The Feds rely heavily on informants and undercover men. Last year DEA agents masquerading as buyers maneuvered a small fishing boat up to an aging freighter off the Bahamas and made a pot purchase. Then a cutter emerged from hiding, pouring a fusillade of 3-in. cannon fire over the ship's bow as the crew attempted to jettison its 54-ton marijuana cargo. But good intelligence is thin and expensive. Informants get up to $2,500 and a share of the confiscated gear, but the enemy has its own network of counter-intelligence agents. They have attempted to bribe Coast Guardsmen for patrol schedules. Now even routine sailings from Miami are kept secret.

The Coast Guard has boosted patrols by one-third, stages surprise harbor blockades and keeps a near continuous surveillance of the Windward Passage, the major shipping route north. A "hot list" of known pot boats has helped officials make 70 seizures in the past three years. But some of the biggest busts have come by accident: a cabin cruiser, floundering under its own weight of pot off Fort Lauderdale, was forced to radio authorities for help. Another ran into a bridge.

Prosecution is hampered by hazy, antiquated law. The Feds' chief tool is a Prohibition-era statute, the Hovering Vessels Act. But nabbing a ship in the act of unloading is a rarity. The Coast Guard has authority to board an unmarked vessel on the high seas, but possession of drugs is not a crime beyond the twelve-mile limit.

Finally, the odds of beating a drug charge are good. Miami has 30 lawyers who specialize in drug cases. Federal prosecutors are so swamped that they rarely bother with pot cases of less than one ton. Many prosecutions are assigned to state courts, where a conviction is often followed with light punishment for first offenders. Typical sentence: six months.

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