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Not for everyone. An exceptionally violent streak seems to run through the trade. Says the DEA's Bacon about the Colombian gangs: "They're absolutely ruthless, and they've imported their way of doing business to this country." A fellow DEA official, formerly stationed in New York and now in Dade County, is still astounded by the savagery. "Heroin dealers in Harlem didn't wipe out each other's whole families. They did in one guy on a bar stool," he says. "The Colombians wipe out the whole bar." Says U.S. Attorney Walsh: "Behind that social line of cocaine laid out at a party, there might well have been a murder in Miami between rival gangs."
Perhaps worse, there is the inevitable police corruption. Says U.S. Attorney General William French Smith, who is to visit Bolivia and Peru this week to discuss drugs and tour coca fields: "The dollar amounts are so great that bribery threatens the very foundation of law and law enforcement." A blond New York preppie, at 18 a recovering cokehead, was always ready to bribe: "I figured if a cop ever stopped me, I'd just offer him cocaine and buy him off."
One cocaine ring, known as the grandma Mafia because three of its principals were grandmothers, banked more than $2 million a month; in the trial of the head grandma now under way in Los Angeles, there have been at least four plausible allegations of corruption against DEA and IRS agents. Last December a federal indictment in Georgia said that a state police sergeant and a local deputy sheriff were confederates in a 25-person smuggling ring. In one week in February, a Los Angeles deputy sheriff, a California-based DEA agent and a San Jose policeman were charged with selling coke. Says Prosecutor Walsh: "I'm surprised, frankly, that there isn't more of that sort of thing, with the temptations of that kind of money."
Two federal laws, passed in 1970 and aimed at the drug trade, are being used with some success in the law-enforcement campaign against coke. The first requires that banks report all cash transactions of $10,000 or more to the IRS. This makes it a little more difficult for dealers to dispose of the enormous amounts of money that pass through their hands. The grandmas in Los Angeles, for example, came to the authorities' attention when they tried to bribe a bank president not to report their deposits to the IRS. Some South Florida banks, generally small, quiet and unadvertised, are notorious as money "launderers" Local cocaine traders are sometimes brazen, sauntering into Miami banks carrying suitcases or cardboard boxed overflowing currency. Indeed, the city's banks have been embarrassingly awash in cash, much of it cocaine profits. In late 1981, the local Federal Reserve branch had a $5 billion surplus of currency, more excess cash than was in the dozen other Fed branches combined. Suddenly, in early 1982, the cash surplus started to fall, just as smugglers began transferring their operations out of South Florida.
The second important federal law allows the Government to seize property bought