The Colombian Connection

Like a bird searching for scraps of food, the little Cessna circled lazily over the green hillsides. Below, everything looked peaceful. The one thatched hut nestled in a clearing appeared deserted. This was remote Guajira province in northern Colombia, which stretches from the Caribbean up into the rugged hills and ravines of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta. Suddenly three shots rang out, reported TIME Correspondent Donald Neff. His Cessna twisted into a steep climb and fled to safety.

The farmers of Guajira do not like visits from inquisitive reporters or other strangers. They have good reason. For the grassy harvest ripening in the sun is marijuana, a luxurious marijuana of heady strength known as Santa Marta Gold. Most of it is destined for the U.S., where the 42 million Americans who have tried pot have made smoking it the most widely accepted illegal indulgence since drinking during Prohibition. They now consume about 130,000 lbs. per day, quadruple the 1974 consumption, and they spend $25 billion per year on their pleasure. Mexico provided most of the best marijuana until two years ago, when the government there began cracking down on drug smugglers and spraying marijuana fields with the herbicide paraquat. Colombia moved rapidly to fill the gap. It now provides roughly two-thirds of all the pot smoked in the U.S. "Colombia is the largest supplier of marijuana in the world," says Peter Bensinger, head of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. "It's a trafficker's paradise."

This is the Colombian Connection, a network of farmers, smugglers, brokers and fixers that extends more than 5,000 miles from Bogota to the great markets of New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. It owns an armada of ships and planes, and it has recruited an army of bush pilots, seamen, electronics experts, roustabouts and cutthroats. Though the Mafia is starting to move in on this stream of gold, the connection is still operated mainly by Colombians (some 70,000 families are believed to be involved), most of them novices or small-time entrepreneurs. It is by far the largest business in Colombia, providing more revenue than coffee; it is also, astonishingly enough, the largest retail business in Florida. Those who enjoy smoking the weed may regard the traffic as essentially harmless, but wherever the Colombian Connection extends, it spreads violence and corruption.

Although marijuana is its main product, Colombia is also America's chief cocaine supplier, processing paste from the leaves of the coca plant, grown in the Andes, into the snowy-white chic drug of the 1970s. About 2 million Americans pay $20 billion annually for 66,000 lbs. of the stuff, and Colombia provides about 80% of it. It is the fashionable drug among movie stars, pop singers and jet-setters. As Robert Sabbag wrote in Snow Blind, his hip account of the cocaine trade: "To snort cocaine is to make a statement. It is like flying to Paris for breakfast." Those who have been arrested for possessing it include Rolling Stones Guitarist Keith Richard, New York Rangers Forward Don Murdoch, TV Star Louise Lasser, Conductor Michael Tilson Thomas and one of the owners of Manhattan's top discotheque, Studio 54, where a flashing light tableau shows the man in the moon sniffing coke from a spoon.

Why did Colombia, a relatively backward land, become the world's drug provider? One reason is that climate and soil conditions in the Andes are ideal for growing high-quality marijuana. Another is that Guajira is remote and inaccessible, hard to police from Bogota, with a long and irregular Caribbean shoreline that is ideal for smugglers. Still another reason is that after World War II, Colombia was prey to 15 years of civil strife, generally known simply as "La Violencia." That left 200,000 dead and a society habituated to frontier justice and pervasive corruption. There were widespread rumors that government officials winked at or even sponsored the drug traffic. That changed, however, with the election last June of Julio Cesar Turbay Ayala, 62, former ambassador to Washington, as President.

Until then nobody had any idea of just how big Colombia's marijuana crop was. Former Assistant Attorney General Rodolfo Garcia Ordonez doubted reports that 25,000 acres were being used to grow marijuana. To disprove what he considered wild overestimates, he took a three-day helicopter tour of the northern provinces and made a "strict calculation." His final report: the weed was flourishing on not 25,000 but about 250,000 acres in Guajira. Perhaps 50,000 more acres are cultivated in the southern plains. "I was shocked," he said. "No one thought the problem could be of such dimensions." At a maximum yield, such fields have a potential of producing annually 6 billion lbs. of marijuana, each pound worth $600 on American streets.

A Colombian marijuana grower gets only about 1% of what his harvest will eventually be worth, $6 per lb., but that is five or six times as profitable as growing coffee, corn or cotton. Despite the fact that the government has begun cracking down (it has burned more than 2,000 tons of marijuana since autumn), it is not inclined to be too harsh on the farmers. Says Jose Miguel Garavito, the swashbuckling operations officer of the Attorney General's antidrug unit: "It is hard to blame a farmer who is growing corn and earning a few pesos for switching when he seen his neighbors working no harder to grow marijuana and earning lots of pesos. The traffickers come in, give them the seeds and then collect the crop."

It comes in many varieties. The "catadores, "or crop tasters, report that although Santa Marta Gold is still the most famous of the Colombian line, the Arhuaco Indians in the higher altitudes are growing an even more potent variety of pot: Mona (blond) plants so pale that they look bleached. The Cielo Azul heights produce a pale plant known as Blue Sky Blond, developed as a hybrid two years ago with seeds from Thailand. Even the arid and low-lying fields of the Guajira peninsula, which are irrigated and farmed with tractors, grow a good green grass. The broiling sun forces the plants up to 15 ft. within six months and infuses them with an abundance of powerful resin. The emerging new drug-cultivation area is the Llanos plains, on the edge of the Amazon jungle, where pruning has improved the original coarse green cannabis.

Samples of all these varieties can be found in Bogota's dope marketplace, just behind the Bogota Hilton. One of the traders, known only as Ricardo, touts a red hashish from the Llanos area. He waves a smoldering lump of it on the tip of a needle in front of his clients. As the smoke does its magic, he smiles and exhorts the potential buyers, "Just taste the quality."

Cocaine, which reaches the U.S. through the Colombian network, often does not originate in Colombia. Most coca shrubs grow in neighboring Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador, where the Indians of the Andes have chewed the leaves for more than 2,500 years. According to legend, the founder of the Inca dynasty, Manco Capac, brought coca to earth from his father, the sun. The Indians used it to dull their hunger, cold and weariness. (When Georgia Pharmacist John Styth Pemberton invented Coca-Cola, he included small amounts of cocaine to "cure your headache" and "relieve fatigue," but the drug was eliminated from the syrup shortly after 1900.) Colombia's role in the coke trade is middleman and processor. At kitchen labs dotted around the country, coca leaves brought in from all over the Andes are distilled into a paste and then converted into a base (150 lbs. of leaves make 1 lb. of base, worth more than $2,000). In a final stage, this base is crystallized into 1 lb. of pure cocaine, for which a smuggler will pay $7,000.

On a slightly higher level of technology, Colombia drug traffickers have started to manufacture and smuggle other drugs, most notably a counterfeit line of Quaaludes, a prescription brand of the sedative methaqualone. At least five presses for making the white pills have been smuggled into Colombia recently. For 100 apiece, they churn out tablets of methaqualone that are being popped at 35 times that price in the U.S. Last month, during a raid on a marijuana warehouse on the Guajira peninsula, soldiers found a million fake Quaaludes.

The fortune brought in by drugs has created an underground economy that fuels Colombia's 20% inflation. Prices of land and homes in coastal areas like Santa Marta have rocketed. Rolls-Royces and $30,000 beds with built-in stereos are among the signs of the drug traders' conspicuous consumption. Also being purchased by traffickers: Colombia's judges, customs agents and police. The jail in the capital of the Guajira is so corrupted that the army has quit sending captured smugglers there. They routinely escape.

The big money in the Colombian drug operations goes not to those who grow narcotics or process them, but to those who get them to the American consumer. One way to get the drugs out is to fly them from one of the hundreds of clandestine airstrips that have been bulldozed in Guajira peninsula. The Colombian army's map of the region is speckled with 150 pinpoints, but an officer admits, "There are so many illegal airstrips we don't really count them."

"The Americans stupidly land here, and then they naively make up the same lies to explain their presence," according to General Jose Maria Villarreal Abarca, commander in the northern provinces. "They say they got lost." Shortly after he spoke, one of his deputies came in and reported that three Americans had been caught making an emergency landing. The general went to investigate.

"Gosh," said Donald Davis, 36, a former employee of the Michigan state police who was co-piloting the lumbering old DC-6. "I don't know what all the activity is about. We were headed for Costa Rica from Florida when our navigation went out. We were down to our last drop of fuel when we landed."

In Pilot Riddel Marvin's pocket, however, the authorities found evidence indicating another objective: a smudged note giving the coordinates of a large clandestine airstrip in the area. The army, tipped off by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, had been waiting for the three Americans. According to intelligence, they were supposed to pick up six tons of grass and another American, who had been arrested last November after illegally flying into the country. The three are now being held in Colombia on illegal-entry charges, and DEA officials say they may be prosecuted for conspiracy to smuggle when allowed to return to the U.S.

Getting caught is not the only risk facing drug pilots. The peninsula is littered with planes that were overloaded with tons of marijuana and crashed while trying to take off. General Villarreal says he has found, within four months, eleven downed planes and the bodies of ten smugglers. Local fishermen tell tales of planes crashing into the sea and their crews being devoured by sharks.

Finding a safe landing field in the U.S. on the return run is not easy either, but more and more crude landing strips have appeared in rural areas in the South. One pair of hapless smugglers this month made it all the way into the U.S. only to land in a Florida pasture being used by local politicians for a turkey shoot. The pilot was promptly arrested. But for those who make it in safely, and most do, the payoff is high. A pilot can pocket $50,000 for one trip. Ten tons of marijuana, if landed safely, immediately becomes worth $6 million wholesale, making the trip profitable even if the old plane must be abandoned on its makeshift runway in the woods.

Air transport is only one of marijuana's ways north. Colombia has 1,300 miles of jagged coastline, from which it is easy enough to load 20 tons or more of grass aboard freighters, trawlers or large (often stolen) yachts. These mother ships, as they are called, are monitored by the U.S. Coast Guard at a series of "choke points" as they work their way north through the Caribbean. But American authorities have little power as long as the drug ships hover outside the twelve-mile limit of U.S. territorial waters. Using sophisticated electronic equipment, the smugglers on these mother ships monitor Government surveillance and attempt to rendezvous with souped-up speedboats and pleasure craft that dart out from the U.S. coast at night on duty-free shopping sprees, just as in the old rum-running days of Prohibition.

The Winnebago lurking on the shore of Chesapeake Bay one recent weekend looked like any other mobile camper, but with the radio scanner and communication equipment inside, it resembled a war room in the Pentagon. As a command post for the onshore operations of a marijuana-smuggling confederacy, it had been monitoring the area's police for a week, preparing for a mother ship's arrival in nearby waters. The camper was in contact with small trucks and vans waiting along the coast for the merchandise. As the ship reached the southern tip of Assateague Island, five miles off Virginia, the camper, using code that would bewilder a CB buff, arranged meetings with the contact speedboats and guided them back to rendezvous points on the shore.

When the Coast Guard gets a break, it is often by chance: Coast Guardsmen had boarded one mother ship last July when a smuggler's plane, unaware of the seizure, flew over and dropped a note giving directions for a rendezvous with a cabin cruiser. The officers dressed up as deck hands, kept the appointment with the yacht, sold three 80-lb. bales of grass, and then arrested the American buyers. For each such capture, the Coast Guard cutter gets to display a marijuana leaf on its hull.

Despite the ever larger captures (more than 5 million lbs. of marijuana in the first nine months of last year, compared with 2 million lbs. in all of 1977), Coast Guard Admiral John Hayes admits, "We are at almost a wartime status, but we are interdicting only about 10% of the illegal drugs coming in." Most dealers feel even that is an overestimation. Successful smugglers hardly bother to hide their activities. Two Florida brothers, Tracy and Darrell Boyd, once donated $10,000 to the muscular-dystrophy telethon signing themselves "the blockade runners."

Cocaine too is carried on mother ships and lumbering old planes, but since it is so much more compact than marijuana, and worth almost six times its weight in gold, there are simpler methods of shipment. A commercial air traveler flying from Bogota can make $10,000 tax free by carrying a pound about the size of a paperback book. Many passengers do. They carry the white powder on their bodies, inside candy bars or toothpaste tubes, under slightly askew wigs, sewn into leather saddles.

Major coke dealers have bought furniture factories, which churn out coke-filled lamps and stools for the discerning buyer. Forty pounds of coke was recently seized in a load of South American furniture being trucked from Grand Rapids to Detroit. Compressing machines have allowed exporters to conceal their coke inside products ranging from record jackets to water skis. Cocaine can even be dissolved in liquor or perfume (it is easily recovered after passing customs). Water containing dissolved cocaine can be soaked into cotton clothes and retrieved days later with a loss of only about 10%. Middle-size traders often hire "mules," innocent-looking travelers, to walk their goods through customs; they profess ignorance if caught. A former Los Angeles probation officer and his Colombian wife were arrested with five associates last month; 6 lbs. of coke were concealed in the soles of their wedge shoes.

Braniff Flight 922 from Bogota to Los Angeles is nicknamed "the cocaine special." One scam is for a passenger to hide the powder somewhere on the plane, clear customs in Los Angeles, reboard the plane for the continuation to San Francisco, then collect his hidden coke. Panel bolts in many planes are visibly worn from smugglers' screwdrivers. Four unclaimed kilos were found last month in one jet's nose cone.

Yet another smuggling technique involves an artful use of the mails. Phil is a young entrepreneur from Chicago who went to Colombia last year on vacation. Like many vacationing students, he happened to stumble across someone in the "snow" business. Nervous but eager, he went one night to see his new friend Rafael at a house on a back street of Bogota's barrio. He had to bring $3,000. Rafael was holding a .38-cal. automatic when he opened the door, but he was ready to deal. For two hours they packaged 18-gram portions of cocaine in cellophane, attached them to greeting cards with flypaper and placed the cards in business envelopes. At different intervals and from different places, the cards, 47 in all, were mailed to the business address of one of Phil's friends in Chicago. Phil never opened the envelopes; he merely picked them up and delivered them to a local dealer recommended by Rafael, charging him $1,000 an oz. For his work and $3,000 investment, Phil made $25,000. He repeated the scam for a few more months; then, $100,000 later, he pocketed his winnings and retired.

Despite such examples of outsiders' getting involved, the Colombians have been fairly successful in keeping the traffic to themselves. They can recognize each other by their accents, and their clannishness has made it difficult for the police to infiltrate their operations.

The cocaine distribution capital of America today is probably Jackson Heights, a quiet, middle-class residential section of Queens in New York City, within walking distance of La Guardia Airport. Despite the elevated train tracks over Roosevelt Avenue, the neighborhood is neat and clean and, except for those in the drug trade, safe. At present 200,000 Colombian immigrants live there, most of them working in garment factories or running small legitimate businesses. But in the early '70s, half a dozen Colombian gangs, a network of perhaps 1,000, established the connection there.

"Restrepo" is 22, about average age for that specialist known as a cocaine diver. He is darker skinned than most Colombians and a good swimmer, both characteristics common to people from the Buenaventura coastal area where he was born. His role is to retrieve a 4-lb. waterproof bag of cocaine dumped overboard from a Grancolombiana line freighter docked at the Atlantic Avenue wharf in Brooklyn. He works at night, wearing a black wetsuit, and he is very cautious. A similar diver, Carlos Riascos, had his throat slit and body dumped in the river as he clambered ashore with his catch. Restrepo is also honest, at least to his trade; another diver, Asaiel Alomia, who decided last spring to keep his valuable garbage bag, was shot and killed. Restrepo brings the package to a sparsely furnished $300-a-month apartment his boss has rented in a quiet building just off Roosevelt Avenue. His fee for a night's work: $2,000.

The boss, "Martinez," has five divers working for him. He cuts the coke by 50% with borax, a cheap powder that adds a lot of weight but nothing else to the once pure coke. At each stage of dealing, the coke will be cut with substances such as procaine, lactose or--for an extra buzz --amphetamines. When finally consumed, it may be no more than 10% pure. Martinez deals only with people he knows well. It is up to these additional middlemen, who know the right artists and hairdressers and doormen, to push it further toward the users.

Around midnight, Martinez drops by a club he frequents on Atlantic Avenue carrying a pack of his 50% pure. By day the club is a pleasant bar and restaurant, but when the last diners leave, the door is locked and only the select can enter. The man who answers the door after three quick knocks nods Martinez into the red-draped dark room, with music blaring from a four-piece Latin band. After a round of beer with his friend the middleman, Martinez makes the transaction and goes home.

Although Jackson Heights is a quiet neighborhood, the cocaine dealing is dangerous. At least 14 murders there last year were related to the drug trade. Oscar Toro was part of the coke-smuggling gang of Alberto Bravo, in charge of laundering money and sending it from Jackson Heights to Bogota. One day, perhaps because it was suspected that he had skimmed some of the cash or cooperated with the police, Toro returned home to find his five-year-old daughter hanged from a rafter in the basement. The bodies of his ten-year-old son and the family's babysitter were later found nearby in an abandoned post office. Toro and his wife offered the police no help, and the murders have never been solved.

Violence among traffickers seems to be part of the trade. In the Guajira capital of Riohacha, 92 people were killed in drug wars within a period of two months. In Florida, there have been 27 unsolved drug-related murders in the past year. One case that was solved was the death of Robert Topping, son of former New York Yankee Owner Dan Topping. He was abducted from the Miami airport, robbed of $47,000 he had brought to buy cocaine, stabbed 33 times and dumped on a Miami street. Barry Adler, 19, was sentenced to life in prison plus 99 years for the crime. Said he at his sentencing: "I'm a young boy and not prepared for it."

The Mafia underestimated the American appetite for drugs and has been unable to dominate the lucrative cocaine and marijuana market. This fits the pattern established at the 1957 Apalachin, N.Y., meeting of Mafia dons, where Carlo Gambino counseled that the drug trade was bringing too much heat. A number of old-line families moved out of the business then and have stayed out. But there is so much money involved, police report, that four families -- the old Lucchese, Colombo, Bonanno and Genovese clans -- are starting to move in after all. One group of Italians was discussing the cocaine trade in the back room of a Bronx restaurant not long ago when they were visited by a pair of Colombians, one of whom had a machine gun. The gun jammed, and the Italians and Colombians ran off in different directions. Says New York Narcotics Officer Bob Mogevaro: "When push comes to shove, watch out."

American enforcement, like Colombia's, is hampered by corruption. Says Dade County, Fla., Chief of Narcotics Investigation Jack Rafferty: "The money floating around has the potential to corrupt nearly anyone." Coast Guard officers have reported attempted bribes of as much as $15,000, and one secretary working for the DEA in Florida went to jail for stealing secret intelligence files. In Key West, four city police were charged last September with serving as lookouts while marijuana was unloaded at a city dock by a smuggling ring. In Jamaica Bay, Long Island, a fishing boat named The Darlene C, carrying 30 tons of marijuana, was seized last November, but the customs and Coast Guard officers let the two dozen smugglers escape during the bungled and uncoordinated raid. TIME has learned that the smugglers fled because they were tipped off by a well-placed informant in one of the law enforcement agencies. To top that, 1,300 lbs. of Colombian Gold, most of it from the raided boat, were stolen from a "secret" DEA warehouse just three weeks later, once again on the basis of an inside tip.

At the source, however, a major crackdown has been ordered by Colombian President Turbay Ayala. The various Colombian agencies combatting drugs have been unified as a new group, the Judicial Police. Inefficiency and bureaucratic jealousy got the agency off to a slow start: the military, in fact, refused to supply Judicial Police with weapons. U.S. officials ended up smuggling 100 pistols in to them past Colombian customs. Last fall the Colombian army placed the Guajira peninsula under military restrictions, and within two months, the government claims to have captured 15 planes, including a four-engine DC-6; seized 36 boats; confiscated 259 weapons, including an American M16; and arrested 318 people. More than 3,000 troops are taking part in the effort. Says General Villarreal: "There are so many fields under marijuana cultivation that we couldn't possibly destroy them all. So we are operating against the warehouse and loading areas, the beaches and airstrips. The traffickers have already suffered major injury because they can't move the marijuana out and it's losing its potency." But there is no evidence yet that the crackdown has made a major dent in the flow of grass.

To strengthen customs work in the U.S., the Government is training agents to use the Air Force's new AWAC (airborne warning and control system) planes to track small aircraft from Colombia. Last week, the AWAC plane, at 29,000 ft., spotted a twin-engined D18 moving north along the Florida coast and alerted customs and police. They seized 1,600 lbs. of Colombian pot shortly after the D18 landed near Fort Lauderdale. Says Coast Guard Commandant John Hayes: "For once we have something more sophisticated than smugglers can buy."

DEA Chief Bensinger outlines other measures he hopes will cut down the drug flow: "We are going to catch up by hitting their financial base: seizure of assets, real estate, all of the investments that go into a criminal organization. Then get penalties commensurate with the criminal profits; the returns for a smuggler far exceed the risks. Also, we hope to promote a better understanding of the health hazards. And in Colombia, you need the type of commitment that will stop production at the source."

TIME has learned from Latin American sources that the DEA is readying a blockbuster cocaine conspiracy case, involving indictments in four countries, to be made public within two months. The case, part of which has been presented to a San Diego grand jury, involves dozens of people, including high-ranking diplomats and airline officials in the U.S., Colombia, Peru and Mexico, who are accused of trading cocaine worth almost $500 million wholesale.

Current attempts to stamp out Colombia's drugs still seem to be mere stopgaps, however, ineffectual against the tide of American demand for, and tolerance of, marijuana and cocaine. Says Bensinger: "Our efforts are so uphill that it is more than a challenge. The public attitude must change about drugs so the profitability for traffickers will decrease." On this point, Colombian President Turbay agrees: "Colombians are not corrupting Americans. You are corrupting us. If you abandon illegal drugs, the traffic will disappear."

With reporting by Donald Neff

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