Drug Smugglers on Drug Smuggling: Lessons from the Inside

Notes

❖ Notes Chapter One 1. The information presented reflects the views of the authors and does not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the federal government . 2. The sampling strategy was focused on institutions rather than on individuals . Four of the five federal correctional facilities selected were classified as level I, the lowest level of security, and the fifth was a level 2 facility. 3. The authors noted that because the sample was limited to lowsecurity institutions, potential bias may have been introduced. 4. This compares to 40 percent of all federal prisoners in security levels 3 and 4. However, this is an advance over the sample obtained by Reuter and Haaga (1989), whose access was restricted to security levels 1 and 2. 5. Interviewers believed that this inhibited the number of inmates who participated in the study. 6. The basis on which this was established is difficult to determine from the study. Chapter Two 1. The following topics were discussed with each agent: movement of drugs into and within the United States, the organizational structure of trafficking groups, methods of conveyance, intelligence activities, motivation, U.S. enforcement activities, and their perceptions of smuggler responses to risk. 2. This included a complete security-level tour of the Port of Miami, the Miami International Airport, Customs airborne operations, Customs operations in the Bay of Miami and the Miami River, and the Fort Lauderdale operation front. In addition, the authors met with DEA, FBI, and U.S. attorney representatives in the Southern District of Florida. 3. This change proved important during the interviews. Smugglers were surprised to learn that they could be convicted even if they never touched the drugs. 4. Women, U.S. citizens with no prior convictions who were not leaders or organizers of more than five people, and cases with offense levels below 32 were consistently identified by reviewers as having supporting roles in the offense and as lacking direct decision making and were, therefore, excluded. 5. The USSC could not access eleven PSRs. 6. The Bureau of Prisons was not able to locate all individuals in the sample for the following reasons: missing information, death, foreign treaty transfer, good conduct release, in-transit, INS detainee removals, prolonged in-transit, federal writs, substance abuse treatment release, involvement in the witness protection program. 7. Selected inmates could not be approached because they had been transferred (four), released (two), and quarantined (one), and refused to be approached by researchers (one), and two prisons were excluded because inmates in the rest of the cluster had refused. However, two selected inmates were added because of transfer to one of the prisons that was visited. 8. This result probably has more to do with the ambiguity of the PSR terms manager and supervisor than with the respondents’ misrepresentation of their roles. Chapter Three 1. All quotations from interviews are indented, and the subject number identifying the smuggler appears in parentheses following the quotation. Following Wright and Decker (1994), quotations are presented in their transcribed form with changes noted in brackets to clarify meaning. 2. Two smugglers accused U.S. law enforcement of stealing part of the load because the full amount of seized drugs was not reported. 3. Math was not the strongest skill of many of our subjects. Chapter Four 1. One latent consequence of post–9-11 security at U.S. airports is an increase in the number of security personnel, further acting as a deterrent to smuggling through airports. 200 b Notes 2. We did not hear much about the use of swallowers as an alternate way to smuggle drugs because the sample generally consisted of cocaine smugglers who did not see the merits in transporting one kilo of coke at a time. Swallowing seems to make more sense with heroin because of the greater value of a unit of heroin. Chapter Six 1. We hesitate to use the word career in this context for a number of reasons. A career implies a sustained commitment to drug smuggling as a form of economic enterprise. Even the high-level smugglers we interviewed were, at most, sporadically involved in smuggling ventures. 2. Dry conspiracies require proof only that defendants were involved in conspiring to smuggle drugs into the United States; i.e., drugs need not be found on that person. 3. It is instructive to recall that most smugglers placed their actual chance of being arrested at much lower than...