Drug Smuggling United States

Before its journey was interrupted by a citizen's tip to federal drug agents, the cocaine cache of historic proportions discovered in a Sylmar warehouse had already traveled about 3,500 miles along a route authorities call "The Trampoline." "The cocaine is moved from Colombia to Mexico and bounced up into the United States," said Mike Holm, assistant special agent in charge of the Drug Enforcement Administration's Los Angeles office.

Federal authorities, making public a 27-count indictment, Wednesday identified Vicente Carrillo-Fuentes, brother of a Ciudad Juarez-area drug lord who died after plastic surgery in 1997, as the bloodily contested cartel's new leader. Although a federal grand jury had returned the sealed indictment in August 1997 and requested the extradition from Mexico in November, authorities only unsealed the documents this week.

U.S. prosecutors Friday unsealed an indictment accusing a former Mexican governor of cocaine smuggling on the same day he was jailed here after two years on the run. The joint moves were an unusual display of emerging U.S.-Mexican cooperation against drug traffickers. Mario Villanueva, at the time governor of Quintana Roo state, vanished in 1999 days before he was to leave office and just when Mexican authorities were about to charge him with trafficking.

U.S. drug agents have arrested six alleged smugglers and confiscated 4 1/2 tons of cocaine, law enforcement officials said Wednesday. Drug Enforcement Administration agents posing as illegal freight haulers took delivery of the cocaine, worth an estimated $80 million, off the coast of Mexico about 1,600 miles south of San Diego, U.S. Atty. William Braniff said.

An alleged Pakistani drug baron, wanted on U.S. smuggling and money laundering charges, is in custody after surrendering to U.S. authorities, officials said Monday. Haji Ayub Afridi flew to the United States Wednesday from Dubai, accompanied by agents of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, said Assistant U.S. Atty. Jodi Avergun. He is accused of smuggling 50 tons of hashish into the United States from Pakistan from 1983 to 1988, Avergun said.

An Orange County lawyer involved in a drug ring that shipped tons of marijuana to the West Coast from Southeast Asia was sentenced Friday to 10 years in federal prison. U.S. District Judge Consuelo Marshall imposed the sentence on Neal Carl Pearson, 52, who, through his Tustin law office, assembled a phony partnership using the names of dead people to launder funds for the narcotics ring, the largest known operation of its sort.

A man prosecutors called the biggest single broker of Southeast Asian marijuana has admitted smuggling nearly 200 tons of the drug into the United States and could be fined more than $6 million. Assistant U.S. Atty. Peter Mueller confirmed Wednesday that Brian Peter Daniels, 43, entered a negotiated guilty plea during a quiet and brief court session Friday before U.S. District Judge John Coughenour.

Seven men arrested in connection with the seizure of 20 tons of cocaine at a Sylmar warehouse were part of an operation that funneled at least 60 tons of the drug into the country during the past two years, Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner said Monday. Reiner told a news conference that his estimate stemmed from a preliminary review of handwritten notes and ledgers confiscated at the Sylmar warehouse along with $12.2 million in cash.

Mexican officials said Saturday that they have arrested a veteran boss of a drug cartel that smuggles Colombian cocaine up Mexico's Pacific Coast into the United States, and thus crippled a major branch of the Juarez cartel. Mariano Herran Salvatti, Mexico's top drug prosecutor, told reporters that agents arrested Juan Jose Quintero Payan, a longtime trafficker, when he arrived at a house in Guadalajara on Friday night for a tryst with his lover.

Eight reputed members of Colombia's Cali cocaine cartel, including two believed to be kingpins, were indicted here Friday on federal drug charges. The eight were charged in connection with a scheme to smuggle tons of cocaine into the United States through Tijuana. Officials identified brothers Jaime Orjuela-Caballero, 50, and Gilberto Orjuela-Caballero, 53, as kingpins. Both live in Colombia but no extradition proceedings are expected.