Why no big drug bosses this side of border?

Why no big drug bosses this side of border?
By DANE SCHILLER
Houston Chronicle

Latin Americans bristle when Washington points a finger south and lectures about drugs.

They note that when the U.S. government talks about which cocaine cartels operate in Mexico or Colombia, officials tick off foreign drug lords' names, preferred smuggling routes and sometimes even the tattoos they sport.

But when it comes to what is going on in the United States — the world's biggest consumer of illegal drugs — federal agents and police catch a lot of dealers but never snare Mr. Big, or even acknowledge he exists.

Where is a real-life Tony Montana, the Miami drug baron portrayed by Al Pacino in the classic movie Scarface?

What about an American version of Pablo Escobar, the Colombian who was known for his gold-plated bathroom and was the most infamous cartel boss ever?

"I certainly would love to see where is the Pablo Escobar of Texas," Colombian Vice President Francisco Santos, who was once kidnapped by Escobar, said on a recent visit to Houston. "I would love to know."

Former Mexican President Vicente Fox shared Santos' concern.

"That is the question I always ask myself," Fox said recently by phone from California. His speaking tour comes to Houston next week. "Who crosses or permits the drugs to be crossed at the border, and when on the U.S. side of the border, who transports the drugs to the markets of this great nation?"

The sideways glances continue as the nations try working together more closely than ever, and that includes a proposed $1 billion U.S. government aid package to help Mexico fight drug trafficking.

"This is a way for them to turn the situation around on the United States," Bruce Bagley, a University of Miami drug-trafficking expert, said of the concerns shared by Santos and Fox. "They are feeling under siege as the United States is harping against their organizations and their inability to catch them."

No widespread corruption

American drug fighters say that for a variety of reasons, the biggest of bosses stay out of the United States.

"You don't have prominent cartel figures here. Our law enforcement efforts are too good. Our intelligence is too good and we don't have the vast corruption," said Fred Burton, a former federal anti-terrorism agent who is on Gov. Rick Perry's Border Security Council.

James Kuykendall, a retired Drug Enforcement Administration agent, said big-time dealers want to avoid the type of scrutiny they'd draw in the U.S.

"If you get too flashy, there is a red flag," he said. "We do not pursue it as well as we could, but we seem to do better than most Latin American countries."

Kuykendall pointed to how the drug cartels follow the lead of legitimate corporations to stay out of trouble.

"When you get to the supply end, it is one dude in charge of everything," he said.

Even if larger-than-life kingpins aren't in the United States, the Justice Department holds out numerous arrests of mid-level traffickers. And two men charged with running cocaine empires from Mexico have been handed over to the United States for prosecution in Houston's federal courthouse.

Drawing parallels to mafia

Osiel Cardenas is accused of heading the Gulf Cartel and threatening to kill an FBI and DEA agent he and his soldiers caught on the streets of the Texas-Mexico border city of Matamoros.

Cardenas, who was later arrested in Mexico, remains in the U.S. government's custody pending a May trial, but his gold-plated gun, cowboy boots and bulletproof vest will remain south of the border, where they are displayed at Mexico's version of the Pentagon.

Juan Garcia Abrego ran the same cartel years ago, but was caught and handed over to the United States. He is now serving multiple life sentences at the federal "supermax" prison in Colorado.

Eduardo Valle, a Mexican commentator who once led a Mexican-government task force that tried to capture Garcia Abrego, said it is naive to believe there are not at least powerful regional drug bosses that take care of business in the United States.

He pointed to the way the Italian-American mafia used to have a grip on the nation's underworld, and said it is likely that tradition has continued with other groups who maintain well-established distribution networks needed to move billions of dollars worth of drugs.

An indictment against Cardenas doesn't seem to put his feet squarely in the United States, but indicates that over the phone and in other ways, his instructions were followed.

The document traces drugs and money from Mexico through Houston and on to other points in the United States. Authorities charge that over a five-month period in 2001, about $41 million in drug proceeds was counted at a hideout in Georgia.

Peter Moskos, a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York and a former police officer, said it is hard to fathom how perhaps billions of dollars could be handled by the drug cartels without high-level players on U.S. soil.

"There has to be someone on this side making the big bucks off it — it is not the low-level drug dealer on the corner," Moskos said.

Mervyn Mosbacker Jr., a Houston lawyer who has served as the region's top federal prosecutor, said drug bosses realize if they're going to stay free, they've got to avoid the United States.

"They can't bribe enough people, and it is not their environment; they got control of their cartel through a number of different means — that doesn't mean they can control wherever they go," he said. "There is no reason for the cartel guys to come into the United States," he continued. "Even if there was, there is too big of a risk."

Lt. Gray Smith, with the Houston police narcotics division, said the city sits at the heart of a major pipeline for sneaking drugs from Mexico to the East Coast and other areas.

He noted while there are no Pablo Escobar types, about 14,000 people a year are arrested in the Houston area on narcotics charges, ranging from possession of less than a gram of cocaine to several thousand pounds of marijuana.

Among the biggest differences in running a drug syndicate in the United States versus Latin America is that here there are just pockets of corruption, while in Latin America entire systems are dirty enough to let bosses control their local village or even a federal government.

"It is apples and oranges," he said of comparing the environment for crime in Latin America to the United States.

Kingpins 'a dying breed'

Still, Colombia's Santos said, there has to be someone in charge.

"To a certain extent, you never see one of the big drug cartels or drug lords that distribute cocaine on the streets of New York or Houston or Los Angeles being caught," the vice president said.

He said he doubts bosses would be far from the money they are making in the United States. "Where is that money? Who is managing it? I don't know."

Bagley said cartel leaders have learned to diversify and depend on alliances with smaller groups.

"We just don't produce large-scale, larger-than-life capos as they do in Latin America," he said.

"My analysis is there will be fewer of them," Bagley said. "They are a dying breed ... there are too many people willing to squeal on you, and you draw too much attention."

Link!

interesting article!

Surely it's gotta be that the drug bosses on this side are just way, way more careful and quiet. Just think about it, you act differently depending upon your location. I wouldn't have smoked pot the same in the US as I would in montreal. I'd have to imagine most of the big guys in the states are insanely quiet about their stuff, whereas you don't need to be nearly that careful in central america. But, you don't have to be that way in central america because it's easier to control the situations down there, but sometimes the US sets its sights on a cartel, a kingpin, whatever, and when that's the case they're not as ready for the pressure our country brings down

I really don't know what else it could be. There has to be big bosses throughout the country, and the truth is you just don't see stories of big timers in america going down that often. You see the occasional quasi-big bust, but that's about it (wish I wasn't drinking and could recall the last big guy in america to go down..)

You're right.

But, what the article fails to mention is where the majority of the profit comes from. It comes from the actual smuggling. The richest kingpins have all come from manufacturing countries(or regions) and weren't involved in low level sales.

The new drug boss is the CEO of the companies on the labels of medications.

Though, the fact that there's a thriving drug market and no arrests of anyone up the ladder in the US probably indicates widespread corruption.

furthermore (on my original idea of people generally being far, far more secretive in the US), I think just the topic of branding exemplifies that. Think about it, your big time ecstasy dealers will likely have multiple pill brands on hand, your average heroin dealers have multiple stamps on their bags, etc. Now, think of bricks of coke, bricks of heroin. They're typically going to be uniformly stamped with cartel brands. You see guys in central america putting brands on huuuuuge shipments, whereas in the states people will start doing different stamps to be safe once they reach mid-level stuff.

nuke said:

Though, the fact that there's a thriving drug market and no arrests of anyone up the ladder in the US probably indicates widespread corruption.

Click to expand...

It could just as easily indicate the US caring about:
- main sources (ie not on home soil)
- street dealers

If you think about it, based on what I said about the reason why, it's far, far easier for law enforcement to target what's obvious and they can easily go after, and that's the lower level people (bling bling cars, very loose about how they run their shit, etc), and the waaay higher level people (branding, personal armies, etc). If what I said holds water then the big US guys are gonna be some of the hardest to go after, and if they're attacking both the little guys (street dealers) and the big guys (cartel folk), they're in essence getting the big US guys (as both their supplies and their dealers are being touched).

Mexican organisations serve in an economic vacuum. Smuggling is an ages old and time honoured tradtion, respectable in many quarters actually. They grew and continue to thrive on a product not supplied by Mexico, cocaine.

What about Tar, methamp., and cannabis? Those products ARE Mexican usually (as for the products being dealt by Mexican organisations) but are piggybacked commodities on top of the cocaine.

So, these cartels grew out of smuggling gangs that grew in the face of a foreign commodity that was and is illegal (as far as other than user amounts in Mexico and in every amount north of the Mexican border). These gangs offered a highly specialised service and therefore existed in a prime position to take advantage of their time and place.

North of the border there is no such vacuum. While psychoactives including those produced in Mexico are offered to a much wider clientele then wholesale lots of say 500 kilos of cocaine ever could hope to enjoy, they have been marketed in every conceivable manner for just about 160 years including pre-Harrison. So, the market sector is broken up into tiny compartments, it is highly entrenched without any real opportunity to expand above a certain ceiling, and it is very, very difficult to ever overcome this dynamic.

The closest America can come to a "Drug Kingpin" is some enterprising person setting up more than one drug distribution spot in a given place, or marketing his product in more than one town. They will never, ever be able to even approach a 1 billion US dollar market share like those Mexican cartels.

Could it be because the biggest importer of contraband in the U.S is the CIA?