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In Colombia as in the U.S., says John Bacon, head of cocaine-intelligence gathering for the DEA: "There is no Mr. Big." But another U.S. official estimates that there are 100,000 Colombians living in the U.S. who "earn major dollar figures in drugs." According to DEA officials, there are ten principal Colombian cocaine rings with members in Bogota, Miami and the middle-class New York City borough of Queens. Each ring takes in at least $50 million a year. Says Bacon about the Colombian coke gangsters: "They are tremendous organizers. They deal very effectively with Americans." They also operate as a cartel, says Bacon. Although there is now a cocaine glut in South America and production costs have been cut in half, the price of the drug in the U.S. has hardly dropped. Oddly, U.S. authorities and Colombian exporters both have an interest in keeping the price high, the police to discourage use and the crooks to maintain huge profits.
Experts believe that about half of the cocaine entering the U.S. is funneled through Miami. A quarter of all the coke seized by authorities last year came from one bust at Miami International Airport; the shipment would have been worth more than $100 million wholesale. But the business is not strictly urban, and intensified police pressure seems to be pushing big-league traffic north and west from Miami. Last year in New Iberia, La., federal agents found nearly 1,200 lbs. of cocaine in two dozen gunny sacks that were supposed to be filled with cattle feed. Near Santa Rosa, N. Mex., duffel bags packed with 200 lbs. of coke were tossed out of a plane onto the wrong patch of scrubland and found by a state policeman. The same thing happened near Ellijay, Ga., when, police gathered up more than 500 lbs. of coke in duffel bags that had been dropped into the wrong valley. And three weeks ago in Dothan, Ala., after a private plane made an emergency landing, police found 600 lbs. of coke on board.
Low-level distributors get caught more routinely. Last week John Lindsay Jr., 22, the son of the former New York mayor and presidential candidate, was arrested at his father's house and charged with selling three grams of coke to undercover cops for $300. Consider a sampling from the past three months in the Washington, D.C., area: a suburban couple picked up with 8 lbs. of coke, a Virginia accountant arrested when 45 lbs. shipped from Ecuador were intercepted and delivered to his door by DEA agents posing as deliverymen, an Air Force member of the presidential honor guard charged with distribution of cocaine, and in Frederick, Md., a six-person coke ring (including a local lawyer and a banker) busted. "It used to be that a pound of cocaine was a big seizure," says Assistant U.S. Attorney James Walsh, John De Lorean's prosecutor and head of the new federal task force in Los Angeles. "Nowadays, if it's a couple of pounds or a kilo [2.2 lbs.],