Drug runners easily elude police in Florida Keys
In the past three years, the smuggling of drugs from Latin America has become Florida's growth industry, a multibillion-dollar business involving private airlines and speedboats, Mafia connections and high-priced lawyers. Arrayed against them is the collective might of the U.S. Customs Service, the Coast Guard and the Drug Enforcement Administration, as well as local lawmen. The good guys are clearly losing the battle. Last year Feds in the Southeast seized roughly 1.4 million lbs. of marijuana, with a street value of $420 million, and 533 lbs. of cocaine worth $133 million. But perhaps ten times that amount got through. A pound of marijuana costs $40 in Colombia and brings $500 in New York. Says Don Turnbaugh, chief of Customs patrol in Miami: "The situation is out of control. We're fighting at best a holding action. To think of stopping them is absurd."
TIME Correspondent Richard Woodbury reports from the scene:
The game is played out nightly in the inlets and beaches of Florida's 1,200-mile coastline, along back-country roads and at dirt airstrips. Fishermen churning home to Miami through the Cape Florida channel may be startled to find a white Customs launch bearing down on them. Blue-shirted men with bolstered revolvers play a high-intensity beam through cabins and scan decks with night-vision goggles. Near by on the Miami River, other officers crouch in a thicket of weeds, training binoculars on a rusting banana boat, watching for seamen debarking with suspicious packages. To the south at Key Largo, deputy sheriffs with high-powered rifles cruise through mangrove swamps, on the prowl for marijuana runners.
For a time, pot runners virtually owned the place, bringing to real life the
Key Largo of Bogart and Bacall. They hacked their own roads through the mosquito-ridden mangrove, sealed them off with padlocked gates, and even staked out a sheriffs substation with a walkie-talkie lookout to learn of patrols. But lately the police have regained the initiative.
As Sergeant Robert Brack, 29, edged his maroon sedan through the underbrush, his headlights picked out two giant vans. Suddenly there was a roar of boat engines and rifle fire. Pinned down, Brack held off the attackers until help came. Two shrimp boats packed with pot ran aground in the confusion. Surrounded in the thicket, a gang of eleven men was captured, along with $14 million in grass.
The smugglers spend heavily for good equipment, whereas "Customs," as one of them puts it, "have to go to Congress just to get an airplane." Indeed, the Feds' best material comes from what they have confiscated from smugglers. Three of Customs' aging Florida fleet of eight planes are trophies of pot busts.
The Feds boast more than 100 boats, but the fastest Coast Guard launch will travel only 28 m.p.h. The smugglers' sleek ocean racers, stripped of galleys and bunks for greater capacity, can do 50 m.p.h. fully loaded. "We are outmanned and outrun," says Coast Guard Commander John Ikens. "They have more money than we do."