Drug Smugglers on Drug Smuggling: Lessons from the Inside

Avoiding Detection

in legal income. As one smuggler put it, if you have a cash business , you just overstate receipts to launder drug money. Other tactics used by smugglers to avoid looking too suspicious include depositing the money in the bank in other people’s names, giving people cash and asking them to write checks, buying real estate , putting money in a bag in a safe deposit box, putting money through money exchange houses in the airport, and using groups that send money to Colombia for a fee. A few also claimed to be generous, buying people cars and houses and basically just throwing money away. Finally, a few mentioned spending the money to make sure their boats were in top shape with the best equipment and technology available. More smugglers appeared to spend at least some of the proceeds this way, since having poor equipment is one the few reasons for getting caught that smugglers can control. I’ll Tell You Only What You Need to Know Another rule is for the smuggler to protect his identity in order to protect himself and his family.To this end, many organizers never let their Colombian connections know where they lived, never made calls on home phones, never used their homes as safe houses or as any other bases of operation. Similarly, information was provided to others in the organization only on a need to know basis, and this information was carefully filtered. Such filters applied to information passed to transportation managers by Colombian contacts as well as to information passed to the crew and the broker in the United States. At all levels of the operation, the cells responsible for different tasks were self-contained, and layers between the head of the cell and the actors below him acted as further protection. If someone got caught, he could not snitch on other components of the operation or on the person managing it. Avoiding Detection In addition to carefully selecting the crew and limiting information flow, smugglers took surveillance and precautionary measures Balancing Risk and Reward b 117 very seriously, since the drugs were fronted to them and they were responsible for any part of the load that was lost.Two rules that all smugglers seemed to live by were to avoid being suspicious and do their research. Avoiding Suspicion Some of the techniques the managers we interviewed used to avoid suspicion included switching boats to prevent any one boat from getting “hot,” maintaining an element of surprise by changing patterns or switching to an alternate method of transport or offload, and blending with other traffic by transporting during the busiest times (holidays and weekends). Other precautions included arriving at the rendezvous point early to supervise the exchange , scouting out a mid-shipment point before selecting it, flying over the pickup point in advance, and having a plan B, whether a second drop point or a return to the mid-shipment point. Managers also broke loads up at mid-shipment points to accommodate certain methods or to minimize loss. Only two smugglers with whom we spoke mentioned taking a weapon with them as protection, and they mentioned that they brought the weapon in reaction to piracy, not because of any law enforcement threat. Eight smugglers specifically stated that they did not carry weapons. Do Your Research Many of the smugglers talked about monitoring the activities of the Coast Guard and Customs and having someone on the inside feeding them information. Only a few smugglers said that they did not use surveillance, tracking, and detection equipment. When you’re in this kind of business, you want to find out your odds, what kind of surveillance the government is using , what interdiction efforts. (1) 118 b Chapter 6 Many of the smugglers described their role as facilitating business. Just as in any other business, members monitored the market and shared information vital to the survival of the business. The drug smuggling business was not organized to effectively promote the sharing of information across groups or entities. Therefore, much information about interdiction activities was passed from group to group by informal means, such as word of mouth. Transporters exchanged information with other transporters and management teams in Colombia and the United States also exchanged information. Information sharing occurred before or after operations, during the planning of operations, and during operations, particularly if the smuggler worked for a group in Colombia. In all cases, however...