6 September 2017
How a glut of cheap, powerful heroin grown in Mexico is delivered more than 2,000 miles to Lancaster County
By Michael Deibert
LNP
(Read the originals story here)
They stare out silently from the
photographs as they were in life, but they have crossed over to a plain from
which there is no return.
Megan Anna Hummer, of Landisville, smiling and
playing with her dog, died of a heroin overdose at age 31. She was living in a
recovery home at the time.
“Iron Mike” Stauffer, tattooed and
homeless on the streets of Lancaster city, began using heroin as a 16-yearold
in Ephrata and died at 36 this summer.
Elizabeth Loranzo, a Lancaster School of
Cosmetology graduate, had gotten clean, relapsed and died of an overdose at 25,
leaving behind a 9-month-old son and a fiance.
The rolling farmlands of Lancaster
County might seem a world away from the rugged hills of northern Mexico, but
the ravenous appetite for drugs here has made southeastern Pennsylvania a
lucrative market for a product that’s sale continues to fuel violence in
America’s southern neighbor and despair on Pennsylvanian streets.
The surge in demand for heroin has
coincided with shifts in the distribution network that allow for cheaper, more
powerful forms of the drug to be delivered more quickly via brokers working for
cartels to small-town neighborhoods from coast to coast.
In the most noteworthy change in recent
decades, Mexican drug cartels sneaking heroin through legal points of entry
have disrupted and overtaken the traditional supply chain, which once
originated in the poppy fields of Afghanistan.
“Our heroin used to come from
Afghanistan, and it was expensive to get it here,” Lancaster County District
Attorney Craig Stedman said. “Now it comes from Mexico, and it’s a lot cheaper.
The heroin we have is predominantly coming from Mexican cartels.”
Mexico’s Golden Triangle, an imposing,
mountainous region where the states of Sinaloa, Durango and Chihuahua meet,
produces both high-grade poppies, from which heroin is derived, and marijuana.
The influence of the organizations that
benefit from the trade — and two cartels in particular — can be felt even here,
nearly 2,000 miles from the Mexican border.
Meet
the suppliers
Responsible for delivering most of the
heroin and other drugs flowing into Pennsylvania are two Mexican drug cartels:
the Sinaloa Cartel and the Cártel de Jalisco Nueva Generación, or CJNG.
“It’s safe to say the majority of drugs
coming in today are chiefly from the Sinaloa Cartel and the CJNG,” said Gary
Tuggle, the special agent in charge at the Drug Enforcement Agency’s
Philadelphia field division, under whose jurisdiction Lancaster County falls.
The Sinaloa Cartel was founded by the
now imprisoned Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán Loera and Héctor Luis “El Güero” Palma
Salazar after the collapse of the Guadalajara Cartel in the late 1980s.
The cartel operated a cocaine
distribution hub in Lancaster County until the arrest of its county-based drug
runners in 2007. The runners flew drugs into the Smoketown Airport, lived in
homes in Manheim Township and operated a local carpet cleaning business as a
front as they ran drugs up and down the Pennsylvania Turnpike.
When the runners were arrested,
authorities found $1.8 million in cash and $160,000 in drugs in their Manheim
Township homes, as well as $2 million worth of drugs in a car that was stopped
on the turnpike just north of Lancaster County.
The CJNG is Mexico’s fastest-growing
drug trafficking organization, holding sway over a multistate empire that runs
nearly unbroken from the Pacific Coast to the Gulf Coast.
The CJNG was largely formed by the foot
soldiers of Sinaloa Cartel boss Ignacio “Nacho” Coronel Villarreal after he was
killed in a July 2010 drug battle with the Mexican army.
The cartel began as something of a
spinoff of Sinaloa and has since emerged as a force all its own. In its September 2011
coming out, the CJNG dumped 35 corpses, believed to be members of the rival Los
Zetas Cartel, into rush-hour traffic in a suburb of the Gulf Coast city of
Veracruz.
In 2015, the CJNG ambushed and killed 15
police officers. Last year, it shot down a military helicopter with
rocketpropelled grenades, killing five soldiers.
Though many of the group’s chieftains
have been captured in recent years, the CJNG’s cofounder, a former police
officer named Nemesio “El Mencho” Oseguera Cervantes, remains at large.
The CJNG is the dominant criminal
faction in Jalisco, Colima, Michoacán, Nayarit, Guanajuato, Guerrero, Morelos
and Veracruz and is believed to have its eyes on an expansion.
A report earlier this month in the
Mexican newspaper Periódico Noroeste quoted anonymous sources from an
investigative body affiliated with Mexico’s Ministry of Interior who claimed
the CJNG would launch an offensive in coming months to take over vast swaths of
the Sinaloa Cartel’s territory.
Cheaper
and faster delivery
The traditionally dominant drug
trafficking organizations from Mexico have begun to fracture as drug lords are
slain or captured by the government or one another, and the highly linear
system of drug distribution in Pennsylvania and elsewhere has had to adapt.
The characteristic control that Mexican
drug-trafficking organizations had exercised over everything from the
production of marijuana and poppies to the processing, manufacturing,
transportation and distribution of the product down to the retail level has
shifted.
“We believe the Sinaloa Cartel is still
involved in providing cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin, fentanyl and other
drugs to this area, but it’s being shipped directly rather than going to a
distribution hub like Chicago,” said Tuggle, of the Drug Enforcement Agency. “We
strongly believe that pattern is going to increase.”
Law enforcement officials say cartel
brokers will now enter a zone and offer their services to indigenous
drug-trafficking groups.
Those groups themselves, in turn, have
become so atomized and businesslike that some will “rent” territory to other
organizations in which they can sell their product while the local criminal
organizations collect a cut of the profits.
This has proven to be the case in North
Philadelphia, for example, in areas where traditionally Latino gangs have
subleased territory to African-American drug organizations.
These shifting dynamics have produced a
marked change in both the users and the dealers, police say.
“Back in the day, the stereotypical
heroin addict was older,” said Lancaster city police Chief Keith Sadler, who
worked with law enforcement in Philadelphia for 27 years before taking the
reins to head Lancaster’s police force in 2008.
“But it’s no longer just an old junkie
drug. And that heroin was, like, 5 to 10 percent (pure) back then. Now it’s
almost pure. And half of these dealers now are addicts themselves. Further up
the food chain. Now you see a lot of these guys are using their own product.”
And despite the takedown of many major
cartel figures in Mexico, the purity of the drug gets better as the prices go
down.
“You don’t have the corner trafficking and
as many shootouts over the corner,” Stedman said. “But what we’re seeing now
are drug rip-offs and people using violence because they feel people owe them
money for drugs, home invasions and things like that.”
Losing
the war?
The decapitations and capture of so many
cartel leaders has had little impact on the flow of drugs into the United
States. And they have failed to tamp down the violence associated with the drug
trade in Mexico itself.
“The kingpin strategy does not work in
anti-narcotics operations if the aim is to stop drug trafficking and related
activities,” said Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, an associate professor at the Schar
School of Policy and Government at George Mason University. Correa-Cabrera has
studied cartel activity in Mexico for more than a decade.
“When a kingpin is removed, he’s
replaced by someone else, violence increases, and there has not been really any
visible impact in the drug trade,” Correa- Cabrera said.
Once powerful regional cartels such as
Los Zetas and the Gulf Cartel fracture, but others rise to take their place.
And the drugs keep flowing.
In March, authorities dismantled an
Allentown-Reading drug trafficking ring that was smuggling large quantities of
heroin, cocaine and meth into the area from Mexico.
Police seized $2.2 million worth of
heroin and meth when they stopped and searched a tractor-trailer with
California plates in Reading, leading to the arrest of six people, five of whom
are U.S. residents.
In May, five members of the so-called
Aryan Strikeforce, a white-supremacist organization based in Pennsylvania, were
indicted by a Harrisburg grand jury for conspiring to transport
methamphetamines, firearms and machine gun parts.
In June 2015, the U.S. Attorney’s Office
in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania handed down a 108-count indictment
charging 37 people allegedly associated with the Cartel de los Laredo, a kind
of mini-cartel based in the city of Cuernavaca in the state of Morelos, with
money laundering and drug charges stemming from the importation of heroin to
Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Illinois and elsewhere.
One often overlooked aspect of the drug
trade is the role that legitimate financial institutions in the United States
and elsewhere have played in facilitating it.
Entities such as Bank of America,
Wachovia (now part of Wells Fargo) and HSBC were found by U.S. investigators to
have been used to launder billions of dollars of drug profits. The latter was
ordered to pay a record $1.92 billion for laundering Mexican drug money in
2012.
And for every kilo of heroin seized,
many more are making it through the legal points of entry between the two
countries and into communities across Pennsylvania.
Building a wall along the Mexico border,
such as the one proposed by President Donald Trump, likely would have little
impact on the trade in Lancaster County or anywhere else in the United States,
officials said.
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