29 Held in Ring’s Drug Smuggling From Mexico to New York
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For nearly a year, 18-wheel tractor-trailers, driven by seasoned truckers recruited in Michigan, have been rolling northward to New York from the Mexican border, delivering tons of concealed cocaine and marijuana and carrying back millions of dollars in illegal drug profits. Federal officials said the truckers were dispatched by Mexico’s most powerful drug trafficking syndicate, once headed by the late Amado Carrillo Fuentes, which set out to seize a share of the New York market, the country’s most lucrative, even when it meant encroaching on territory that was the domain of the Colombian drug cartel. Yesterday, Federal law enforcement officials put a crimp in the smuggling operation by arresting 29 of the suspected traffickers in sweeps from the New York region to Battle Creek, Mich., to Albuquerque, N.M. In announcing the arrests, the Federal officials provided a clearer picture of the scope and extent of the Mexican push into the New York region and the role of the Carrillo Fuentes syndicate. ”We find them not just in Los Angeles and Houston and Chicago but in the New York City metropolitan area,” said Thomas A. Constantine, the head of the United States Drug Enforcement Administration. Yesterday’s sweeps were not the first involving the Mexican syndicate, and law enforcement officials say that their battle with the Mexican traffickers is not over. Since December at least 61 other suspects have been arrested around the country. In all, Federal agents have seized more than 11 tons of cocaine, almost 7 tons of marijuana and more than $18 million in drug profits that traffickers failed to smuggle back into Mexico. Officials promised yesterday that more arrests would follow. The arrests highlight the latest strategic shift by Mexican drug barons, who have graduated from transporting cocaine and heroin for the Colombians to distributing much of the drugs themselves. By demanding up to half of what they took across the border as payment from the Colombians, the Mexican smugglers carved out their own markets on the West Coast and in the Southwest and parts of the Midwest. They had left the East to the Colombians and their Dominican distributors. More : query.nytimes.com |