Drug Smugglers on Drug Smuggling: Lessons from the Inside

Changes in Smuggling Activities in Response to Risk

in the transport of illegal drugs into the United States.These experiences were vital to their preparations and their considerations of risk. For most, a successful first trip was the catalyst that set off a series of smuggling ventures.1 Their experience helped them quell their fears and anxieties and balance the risks against the likely gain.Their initial experiences confirmed what individuals and conventional wisdom told them about the chances of being caught: that the waters are great, that the U.S. assets are relatively limited, and that boats and other conveyances get through all the time. Armed with these beliefs, they were emotionally free to set out on the drug smuggling enterprise. There is no way the United States can stop it unless they got somebody that tells them. I mean, they have a lot of planes out there.They have a lot of things, but there’s always a way. There’s no way the United States is going to stop it. When you’re making money, your mind sometimes—you think you’re indestructible. (8) I know the water. I know how things work, and it’s just— there’s a lot of water out there and you can’t cover it all. I knew the government and law enforcement worked and how they set their surveillance, how they would do their interdictions and I always—I’d be a step ahead of them, and I knew that. (1) Changes in Smuggling Activities in Response to Risk Many of the smugglers referred to the “early days of smuggling drugs” as the time when the primary drug Colombia exported to the United States was marijuana and smugglers brought in boats with thousands of pounds of marijuana sitting on the deck. Many mentioned that law enforcement just did not care then and that there was no thought of hiding the marijuana in compartments . Balancing Risk and Reward b 123 In 1981 President Ronald Reagan declared a war on drugs, and law enforcement began to crack down on drug smuggling. Smugglers reacted by starting to use compartments, but the compartments were not sophisticated because the loads were too big. Smugglers had already switched to using boats to move the marijuana because the loads needed to make a profit were too big for airplanes. In about 1985 most smugglers began switching from marijuana to cocaine as a result of perceived increases in enforcement and because of economics. Cocaine was easier to bring in, and smaller loads would produce as much, if not more, money than did marijuana. The Colombians and a lot of Cubans won’t mix cocaine and marijuana together. They think it’s bad luck. They won’t bring it in on the same boat. So eventually, some of the guys that I knew that were in the smuggling business were doing marijuana and some were doing cocaine, and they just eventually all changed over because it [marijuana] was so hard to hide. It just eventually all changed over to cocaine. (5) Smugglers now had loads that were more manageable and that generated profits that were worth the risk. As the war on drugs continued, law enforcement pressure escalated, and smugglers continued to respond. I stopped in ’87–88 because it was getting more difficult.You know, the boats—my cigarette boats were like, you know— it’s like law enforcement already knew. I mean, a thirtyseven -foot Midnight Express with four engines in the back, they knew what the boat was for. So, you know, my—my operation was getting obsolete already. So, in the mid-’80s I switched to cocaine. I wanted to work with something that there was plenty of money and something that I could get in and out of and, you know, do my delivering fast, didn’t have to use a lot of people.You know, a lot of people were cooper124 b Chapter 6 ating with the government and you did not know who was who. (1) As noted previously, smugglers began building more sophisticated compartments and using containers in commercial freighters to hide the drugs. The interesting problem posed by both transitions for law enforcement was that the changes removed detection from the open water.This is important because U.S. assets are concentrated on the water. Boarding a boat with a sophisticated compartment or with two hundred containers while the vessel is in the water is not...