Bayou Bypass

The Louisiana connection

Some 150 years ago, Pirate Jean Lafitte found the Cajun country of the Louisiana Gulf Coast, with its network of swamps and its 6,000 miles of inland waterways, a congenial place to evade the law. Today a new group of lawbreakers has discovered its convenience: drug smugglers. Since October, more than 250 tons of marijuana have been confiscated in the New Orleans area, three times the amount taken in the entire previous year. Huge busts of 20, 30, 40 tons or more occur regularly, but authorities estimate they are intercepting only about 10% of the traffic.

Louisiana's gain, so to speak, has been Florida's loss. Since the Cuban refugee crisis, two-thirds of the U.S. Coast Guard fleet has been redeployed to patrol the Florida coast. In addition, smuggling has become more risky in Florida, where antidrug enforcement efforts have been stepped up and tough new laws against marijuana smuggling include minimum mandatory sentences of up to 15 years in jail.

The stepped-up Louisiana connection is similar to operations in Florida and along the Atlantic Coast: a large "mother ship" from Colombia, the source of about three-quarters of the marijuana entering the U.S., unloads its cargo into smaller vessels, which ferry the pot inland. The many unmanned offshore oil and gas wells in the area serve as excellent rendezvous points. Local fishing boats and the supply boats that serve the oil and gas drilling rigs off the coast are usually used for the ferry operation because they attract no undue attention. Pinched by rising fuel prices and foreign competition, and attracted by huge potential profits (top retail value of a ton of pot is $1.6 million), some of the local shrimp fishermen are entering the business, though it remains controlled by Latin Americans and Cuban Americans.

In October, authorities seized 80 tons of pot on a 100-ft. barge equipped with two conveyor belts for fast unloading. Last month the crew of a Coast Guard patrol craft received permission to fire on a fleeing supply boat, only the second time since Prohibition that the Coast Guard has shot at a U.S.-registered vessel in peacetime. Seized were 70 tons of marijuana; 16 Colombians were arrested.

As elsewhere, the smugglers are well organized and lavishly financed. "They are better equipped than we are," says Jack Redford of the federal Drug Enforcement Administration. "It's hard to beat the cash flow they have. When you rip off 75 tons and don't cripple the group financially, you begin to realize how much money there is in it." Redford and other officials expect the pot smuggling activity to continue increasing in the Gulf Coast area. He adds with a grin: "But we hope to pass it on to Texas."

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