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Government experts say that 40% of U.S. coke comes into the country aboard private planes. "In southeastern Georgia," says Gary Garner, a commander of the state's antismuggling squad, "all you have to do is get the cows out of the way and bring the planes on in. They're in and out in 45 minutes, before we even know they've been there."
Smaller parcels arrive in dozens of ways: in the holds of small boats, in the bags of merchant seamen, taped to tourists' flesh, dissolved and then impregnated in clothing or, as New York customs agents discovered early last year, secreted behind a framed reproduction of Da Vinci's Last Supper.
The smuggler's most foolhardy practice is called body packing: they swallow cocaine-filled rubber packets, usually made of fingers snipped from surgical gloves. The carriers, known as mules, gulp down the packets in Colombia with the intention of excreting them in the U.S. The danger to the mule is that a packet may rupture, causing a massive drug overdose. The technique is becoming either safer or less popular. Since late 1980, the Dade County coroner has not come across any body-packing fatalities, after an earlier spate of such deaths. Yet during the past year at Kennedy International Airport in New York, 51 mules have been arrested on the hoof: suspects are X-rayed and, if they do not confess, put in a hospital with a bedside commode and two patient customs guards. "The packets often come out like machine gun bullets, with a loud report," says Customs Inspector Peter di Rocco. A mule commonly ingests upwards of a pound of coke inside 100 packets or more.
Once in the U.S., cocaine is diluted at each step in the distribution chain, usually with vegetable starches or anesthetics like Novocain. A typical retail gram of "cocaine" is only about 15% pure, although concentrations as high as 40% and as low as zero are not unusual. The price markup from dockside to coffee table is roughly ten times.
Many dealers, selling a few grams or even an ounce or two a week, are in the business to satisfy their cravings. Fred Kamm, 42, for eight years a user-turned-dealer in coke-laden Aspen, Colo., made deliveries on a motorcycle and carried a telephone beeper to take orders; he also injected two grams a day of the merchandise. Says Margaret, the New York sales woman: "My boyfriend and I would get an ounce and sell off some and use some, but we always used more than we sold."
Just as many are simply entrepreneurs. The profits can be staggering. Says one California ex-dealer: "I remember having $800,000 in cash lying around the house. Or I'd be out playing tennis and have my tennis gear in one bag and $200,000 and a kilo of coke in the other." One federal drug official stationed in Miami sounds almost like a franchise promoter. "In two days in Miami," he says, "anyone can score a kilo [for $50,000]. The small dealer is taking no greater risk than running a traffic light. He can afford a fantastic lifestyle, he doesn't have to go to work at 7 a.m., and there are few dissatisfied customers." The agent might have been describing Leonard, a former social worker who sold cocaine for six years until he decided to quit the business in 1981. He bought a pound at a time in