Cannabis Chronicles

The following story isn’t directly cannabis related, but it is a part of the drug war at large, and as such it impacts medical marijuana users. While we likely wouldn’t advocate legalization of harder drugs such as heroin and cocaine which have relatively high toxicity and abuse potential, we certainly would prefer a harm reduction approach to what is a public health problem, rather than a declared war.

Anatomy of a drug bust
Robert Rogers, Staff Writer - San Bernardino County Sun - 12/17/2006

SAN BERNARDINO - The month was April, and new Police Chief Michael Billdt, installed to lead a department groaning beneath a near-record rate of violence, was looking for a way to crack back against crime. Billdt looked specifically for ways to steer other agencies and resources to a method for crime suppression that would become increasingly effective while Mayor Pat Morris used his clout and his city’s high-profile bedlam to get county sheriff’s deputies and California Highway Patrol officers to help patrol San Bernardino’s streets.

The city was mired in a haze of methamphetamine distribution and abuse. Billdt knew that the situation, and San Bernardino’s reputation as a meth capital, made it a strong candidate for federal aid.

“A request was made from the office of the chief for assistance after we became aware of the DEA’s Mobile Enforcement Teams,” said Assistant Chief Frank Mankin. “The request was made based on the unacceptable level of violent crime in our community, which the drug trafficking was a part of.”

The Drug Enforcement Administration’s field office in Riverside took the request and sent a pre-deployment team to San Bernardino to meet with police and assess the problem, said Sarah Pullen, a DEA special agent.

By May, the feds were in San Bernardino - a team of agents and a supervisor in unmarked cars and casual dress, looking to embed themselves in the fabric of the community. They brought sophisticated surveillance technology - hardware that can capture images and sounds from great distances. The mission was to strike at the top of whatever syndicates were moving the most product, Pullen said.

“The DEA’s MET team and our narcotics team did the lion’s share of the work,” said San Bernardino police Lt. Mark Garcia. “Without revealing tactics, I would say that our guys, who are very adept at narcotics investigations, used all the tools in their toolbox.”

Coordinated drug seizures and arrests Tuesday morning involved more than 400 officers and law-enforcement personnel who served 43 search warrants in San Bernardino and Riverside counties, including five on the San Manuel Indian Reservation near San Bernardino.

The investigation unfolded into the longest, most sophisticated and most intensive operation in which the narcotics squad has participated, said police Sgt. Steve Filson, a supervisor in the operation that also included six other officers.

The team worked “thousands of hours, at least 60 every week and on call to respond to anything at a moment’s notice,” Filson said. “It took a toll on the officers.”

Focus narrows

Plot revealed

Same streets?

The investigators began to focus on a high-level member of the Mexican Mafia - 42-year-old Salvador Hernandez, considered a top “shot caller” in the notorious gang - and five homes on the San Manuel reservation.

The connection between the homes and the Mafia is not yet clear, but officials said one suspect, Stacy Nunez-Barajas, has at least one relative on the tribal council. That may entitle her to a portion of the tribe’s profits.

The tribe’s director of communications, Jacob Coin, declined to confirm or deny whether Nunez-Barajas is entitled to share tribal profits. Coin said the approximately 200-member tribe does share revenue with extended family, but would not say how many reap the rewards of the tribe’s commercial ventures.

Filson would not comment on the specifics of the case nor the tactics involved in the investigation, but he did divulge some of what was found.

West Side Verdugo, a Latino street gang with possibly the longest history and deepest roots in the city, is a street-level force for the Mexican Mafia, a notorious prison gang that emerged in the 1960s, Filson said.

The Mexican Mafia’s power behind prison walls enables it to exert force on the outside.

“We found that the Mexican Mafia is the controlling nexus behind a lot of what’s going on out here,” Filson said. “What (the Mexican Mafia) wants done, they (West Side Verdugo) do.”

The Mexican Mafia’s emergence as heavy hitters in the game of crystal methamphetamine distribution is new and is largely the result of victories nationally against meth producers, Pullen said.

“Back in the 1980s when meth first came about, it was rural & especially because of the odor of the precursor chemicals required for its production,” Pullen said. “But now it has spread across the country, touching every sector.”

The nature of the drug’s distribution has changed. The superlabs of 20 years ago - estates on rural fringes that produced millions of dollars worth of product - are largely a thing of the past, rooted out by crackdowns on base material sales and by more sophisticated law enforcement.

But since Congress passed an anti-meth act in 2005 that puts severe federal restrictions on ephedra sales, the base ingredient for meth, production has been mostly pushed south of the border, Pullen said.

The new reality has brought trafficking into play - and the Mexican Mafia.

Though officials have offered few details of the investigation, a felony complaint filed by the San Bernardino County District Attorney’s Office provides some insight:

On Sept. 29, an informant contacted police, saying that Salvador “Toro” Hernandez, 42, and his brother Alfred Hernandez, 38, gave him a photo of a man provided by Nunez-Barajas and proposed that the informant kill the unidentified man.

The next day, Jennifer Murphy, 26, contacted an informant seeking a weapon to kill the man, who made himself a target by refusing extortion attempts designed by Nunez-Barajas, the complaint alleges.

Later, Jesus Leyva, 32, provided a deep-cover informant with a .40 caliber Glock pistol to carry out the assassination of the unidentified man, the complaint says.

Why Nunez-Barajas, with her family ties to the San Manuel tribe, would try to extort money from a man is unclear, but the complaint does contend that she acted with the backing of Salvador Hernandez, the high-ranking Mexican Mafia tough.

The nine-page complaint repeatedly describes alleged commission of crimes that reveal the extent police and the DEA had infiltrated local gang factions and drug distributors.

During the seven-month probe, operatives generated 64 search warrants and 119 people were arrested, including five believed to be top Mexican Mafia operatives in San Bernardino.

The complaint also reveals that the suspects may have been part of a larger syndicate funneling methamphetamine into local detention centers.

Authorities believe that over the seven-month period, Salvador Hernandez, Nunez-Barajas, Janette Amaya, 49, and Anthony “Shorty” Maestas helped to smuggle methamphetamine and heroin into West Valley Detention Center in Rancho Cucamonga, presumably aiding the Mexican Mafia to move product inside correction facility walls.

In the wake of the bust, despite Mayor Morris and Chief Billdt touting the blow to the drug trade, people on the streets don’t see much to hope for.

“It don’t make no difference - the drugs is never going to stop coming into these streets,” said Chris, 23, a self-described “smoker” and dealer of crack cocaine, minutes before lighting up a glass cylinder, putting it to his mouth and inhaling the milky smoke.

Chris, who refused to give his last name, said he has been a drug user since age 15. Now he sells “rocks” to prostitutes and others near a patch of grass just south of H and Fifth streets. On Thursday, Chris, like most everyone walking the drug-infested streets just east of Interstate 215, knew nothing about the drug bust days before.

On the Westside, two women lolled alongside a liquor store on Mount Vernon Avenue, swallowing beer, passing a 24-ounce can between them.

Drugs available
Amanda and Lorrane admitted they are regular smokers of crack cocaine and crystal meth. With matching, nearly toothless smiles, both sang a similar tune: Drugs are available to anyone who wants to buy.

“I like to smoke a little, get nice and high, just to get my blood back pumping again,” said Lorrane, 42, the skin around her mouth cracked into ruby, moist sores. “It ain’t hard to get, and everybody you see out walking around these streets is getting high - you got to.”

Crystal meth and crack cocaine are reliable cohorts to some of the city’s most visible criminal and social challenges. The high-risk commerce often leads to gunfire. Use of the corrosive and highly addictive stimulants often accompanies social and criminal pestilences like homelessness and prostitution.

In the cold night Dec. 6, during a vice sting targeting prostitution in the downtown corridor, officers posing as Johns to solicit sex from local streetwalkers arrested 10 women - six for suspected possession of glass pipes used to smoke crack cocaine or meth.

Vice officer David Baughman, who coordinated the sting, said that six of 10 suspected prostitutes in possession of paraphernalia was a ratio on the “low end of average.” As for the size of the local seizure, about 16 kilograms of meth, it is small when compared to the tide of drugs swamping the western U.S.

According to the DEA’s National Clandestine Laboratory Database at the El Paso Intelligence Center, 1,370 kilograms of meth were seized along the U.S.-Mexico border in 2001. In 1992, when most meth was produced in rural areas in this country, only 6.5 kilograms were seized.

If the announcement of one of the biggest drug sweeps in city history seems to have had little effect on the street, it is because the real impact is minimal - more a matter of public relations than really addressing the city’s drug problem, said Cal State San Bernardino criminology professor Steve Tibbetts.

“I applaud all the good intentions, and they may have removed dangerous people and weapons off the street,” Tibbetts said. “However, it is important to be clear that the end result is that this sort of operation probably has little effect at all in terms of addressing the drug problem. San Bernardino has so many surrounding socioeconomic factors that whenever you take someone out of the drug distribution equation, there are another 10 to take their place.”

Tibbetts used the Prohibition era as an example of the struggle of eradicating illicit substances through law enforcement and said that the manpower and resources deployed against drugs over the past four decades have been largely futile.

“Where there is demand, there will always be a supply,” Tibbetts said. “That’s always been the major problem with eradication strategies in the United States.”

The Police Department’s Filson, meanwhile, who was tight-lipped about details of the investigation because of the pending legal proceedings, said the story may unfold in more shocking detail in coming weeks.

He said his team will continue aiming for the top of the local drug syndicate, which centers around West Side Verdugo and the Mexican Mafia.

“Everything is continuing,” he said.

Cal State San Bernardino criminology professor Steve Tibbetts said it best, “Where there is demand, there will always be a supply. . . . That’s always been the major problem with eradication strategies in the United States.”