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2How Narcos Learn During the 1981 Christmas drug-smuggling season, U.S. law enforcers intercepted a suspicious airplane flying over Florida carrying more than nine hundred pounds of cocaine.1 A smuggling ring led by Max Mermelstein , one of several that provided transportation and distribution services for the Ochoa wheel network, had flown the cocaine from Colombia to the Florida straits, where the pilots engaged in a pursuit chase with dea helicopters, U.S. Customs airplanes, and air force F-16 jets. As the smugglers maneuvered their way through the not-sofriendly Florida skies, they jettisoned their illegal cargo over the Gulf of Mexico before being forced to land at Tampa International Airport. The Tampa incident represented a major setback for Mermelstein’s group. While the smugglers were drug free on landing, the authorities confiscated the plane and arrested one of the pilots, forcing other group members into hiding. Mermelstein’s ring lost an estimated US$12 million dollars’ worth of cocaine that day, some of it found floating in the Gulf by local fishermen. In the frantic days following the bust, Mermelstein and his colleagues held several meetings in which they sought to make sense of the events that led to disaster. As they reflected on their misfortune, the smugglers discussed several ideas for improving their operations, including one that Mermelstein hoped would provide a solution to their problem. ‘‘We knew now that coke floated, and we did a lot of sitting around bullshitting and brainstorming. Mickey told me about all the pot he had brought in from Jamaica in the old days and how a lot of times they’d drop the pot in the water to be picked up by boats below.’’2 Intrigued by Mickey’s experience, Mermelstein considered the possibility of using airdrops for cocaine. After receiving the go-ahead from their Colombian suppliers, Mermelstein and his colleagues began gathering the information necessary to transform idea into innovation. This included studying local maritime conditions, including the tides, currents , and water depths of potential airdrop locations in the Caribbean. Once they had gathered sufficient information, Mermelstein’s ring conducted a series of practice runs in the Bahamas, using flour instead of cocaine as they tinkered with the routine. The practice drops revealed 50 j From Pablo to Osama that the most difficult part of the operation lay in wrapping the cocaine so that it would not rupture upon hitting the water and would float for several minutes, allowing the boaters enough time to retrieve the packages. Mermelstein’s group experimented with different wrapping methods, losing several bales of flour before developing a method that worked well enough to try on the real thing. Having settled on a wrapping method, Mermelstein sent precise instructions to the exportation group in Colombia, along with a sample package as a model. More costly experimentation, including the loss of more than one hundred kilograms of cocaine, and a hands-on demonstration in Colombia were required before workers in the exportation group learned how to wrap the packages properly. But once this information was effectively communicated to the exporters, the airdrop lived up to its initial promise, allowing Mermelstein and his colleagues to eliminate the danger of unloading stationary drug planes. As the smugglers gained experience with their new routine, they improvised further by replacing the plastic bags with more resistant fiberglass boxes, improving the effectiveness of the airdrop. Following his arrest by law enforcers in 1985, Mermelstein’s associates took over the smuggling ring, continuing the airdrop as part of their transportation practices. Other groups began using the airdrop as well. By the early 1990s numerous trafficking enterprises, including those affiliated with rival groups, were air-dropping cocaine in the waters off the Bahamas, Puerto Rico, and other Caribbean islands. Indeed, Freddy, one of the former traffickers I interviewed, claimed that his Cali-affiliated transportation cell air-dropped cocaine during the 1990s.3 Some smuggling rings made additional improvements to the practice, using radio transmitters and global positioning system devices to make it easier to locate the floating drug packages. Today the airdrop remains standard practice for trafficking groups that smuggle illegal drugs along Caribbean routes.4 The airdrop story is significant not so much for what it says about the criminal exploits of a particular smuggling ring but for illustrating how drug traffickers learn, the subject of this chapter. In the course of conducting a risky but routine operation...

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