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    Senior Member JohnDoe2's Avatar
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    Coast Guard nabs mini-'narco sub' with 6 tons of cocaine

    May 09, 2011

    Coast Guard cutter nabs mini-'narco sub' packed with 6 tons of cocaine

    01:23 PM
    Douglas Stanglin, USA TODAY

    The Seattle Times has a fascinating story in this morning's newspaper about a Seattle-based Coast Guard cutter that plows the oceans off Central America to intercept "narco subs," or home-made minisubs packed with illegal drugs for the U.S. markets.

    Times reporter Erik Lacitis writes about the Cutter Midgett with a crew of 160 that nabbed one narco-sub -- known in Coast Guard parlance as an SPSS -- self-propelled semi-submersible -- in January carrying 6.6 tons of cocaine, worth $138 million wholesale on the West Coast.

    Read the full story here and watch raw video of the Coast Guard seizing a cocaine vessel.

    They also found inside four Colombians with no communication gear who used GPS to navigate. They were crammed into tiny quarters for the two-week voyage, subsisting on bottle water, canned goods and noodles.

    Their biggest threat -- aside from vigilant Coast Guard cutters -- was being run over by merchant ships or fishing vessels.

    These four could have faced up to 11 years if convicted of operating a narco-sub, Lacitis reports, but they pleaded guilty to drug trafficking and agreed to testify against others.

    http://content.usatoday.com/communities ... -cocaine/1
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    Senior Member JohnDoe2's Avatar
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    May 8, 2011

    Drug smugglers in minisubs hunted by Seattle Coast Guard crews

    By Erik Lacitis
    Seattle Times staff reporter

    The Coast Guard Cutter Midgett and its crew of 160, based in Seattle, were a long way from home.

    The cutter had traveled some 4,500 miles south in the Pacific Ocean, and on Jan. 20 was 335 miles off Costa Rica.

    In the distance, the crew could see bobbing in the water the kind of quarry that was the Midgett's mission: It was the distinctive outline of a "narco sub," later found to be crammed with 6.6 tons of cocaine. The Drug Enforcement Administration estimates the haul was worth $138 million wholesale on the U.S. West Coast.

    For whatever reason, the sub was dead in the water.

    Earlier, the Midgett — a 378-foot vessel built for long-range missions that last for months — had received a report from a U.S. maritime patrol aircraft that had spotted the narco sub.

    In the cat-and-mouse game between traffickers and law enforcement, the narco sub was the latest innovation.

    It's not a true submarine, as it doesn't submerge completely. A true submersible sub would require considerably more sophistication and skill to build, and most narco subs literally are built by hand in clearings in the Colombian jungle.

    But a semi-submersible still makes for potent cocaine transportation.

    Painted blue to blend in with the ocean, the semi-submersible skims along the water surface, maybe only 1-½ feet of the hull poking up. It's difficult to see them; that's why patrol aircraft are used to spot them.

    The Coast Guard officer given the job of being in charge of boarding the narco sub was Lt. j.g. Lauren Milici, 24. She was packing a SIG .40-caliber service pistol, and her adrenaline was pumping.

    Milici and her crew climbed into a smaller, 38-foot boat, and they soon were pulling up alongside the sub. In Spanish and English, they used a megaphone to order whoever was inside to come out. Receiving no response, they banged on the hull of the sub.

    "It's always potentially dangerous. Essentially, you're the individual who's standing in somebody's way of picking up a paycheck for a successful delivery," said Milici, one of 20 women on the cutter.

    She comes across as self-assured, which would be expected, given Milici has been involved in more than a dozen narcotics seizures. She joined the Coast Guard right after graduating in 2005 from Fairfield High School in the Connecticut town of the same name.

    "I wanted a different experience than just a college experience," Milici said. "Being a public servant was the best option for me. My father was in the Marine Corps during Vietnam. Service for the country — that was a big aspect."

    Milici then spent four years in the Coast Guard Academy, majoring in international affairs, and spent five weeks at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Georgia. She knows her way around not only a pistol but also a rifle and a shotgun.

    How they try to hide

    The Coast Guard prefers to call narco subs with a military-given acronym: SPSS, or self-propelled semi-submersible.

    The subs have a small tower in the middle so the crew — usually four men — can look out over the splashing waves and steer. The vessels are made of fiberglass and wood to make them harder to detect by radar. Piping pushes the exhaust back toward the boat's wake to lessen the heat and lower its infrared signature.

    This particular SPSS was 35 feet long. The 6.6 tons of cocaine were divided into 300 bales wrapped in plastic.

    The Coast Guard issues regular news releases about its international patrols in the drug trade.

    Still, such missions seem to surprise the general public, especially in the Pacific Northwest, says Dan Dewell, spokesman for the 11th Coast Guard District out of Alameda, Calif., in charge of the drug intercepts.

    "Search-and-rescue is the bread-and-butter mission that people are aware of," he said.

    Out of Seattle, it is the Midgett, and another cutter, the Mellon, that go on narcotics missions in addition to their other duties.

    Catching smugglers of illicit substances is nothing new for the Coast Guard.

    Starting in 1870, it was going after opium brought from China in merchant ships. During Prohibition, the Coast Guard even used 20 converted Navy minesweepers and destroyers to chase down rumrunners.

    There is big money involved both in drug trafficking and catching the traffickers.

    In its World Factbook, the CIA plainly states that the United States is the "world's largest consumer of cocaine."

    In a 2008 article in the U.S. Naval Institute's Proceedings Magazine, the late Capt. Wade Wilkinson, then special assistant to the commander of the U.S. Southern Command, explained that, if drug traffickers built five narco subs and loaded each with 10 tons of cocaine, their total investment would be roughly $100 million for the vessels and drugs.

    The traffickers only needed one of the subs to complete its mission, and they would make $200 million, doubling their investment, Wilkinson said. "Having all five successfully reach their destination nets a ninefold return on investment ... astronomical profit ... "

    The U.S. government also spends plenty on the war on various drugs — a total of $48.7 billion a year on government enforcement of prohibition, according to a 2010 report by Harvard economist Jeffrey Miron.

    Included in that $48.7 billion is presumably the $10,000 an hour the Coast Guard says it costs to run the Midgett, including everything from fuel to payroll.

    So, a one-month mission looking for drug traffickers off Central America would rack up more than $7 million in costs just for the Midgett.

    It appears the heyday for the semi-submersibles may have ended.

    "I think we've gotten pretty good at spotting them. We look for anything that looks suspicious," said Jose Ruiz, spokesman for the U.S. Southern Command out of Miami, responsible for all our military activity in Central and South America, about the narco subs.

    Inside the minisub

    But on Jan. 20, a narco sub still had been trying to get through.

    "There was no sign of life," even after banging on the sub got no response, Milici recalled.

    Some three hours went by, and night had fallen. The Midgett's boarding crew decided to try again in the morning.

    Just then, the hatch on the sub opened and a man in a T-shirt and shorts came out with his arms up. Three more men eventually crawled out.

    The four, who said they were Colombians, were taken to the Midgett and given medical screenings.

    The narco subs are not known for comfort. There is bottled water, and food consists of canned goods or noodles.

    Wilkinson wrote about the subs: "Crew habitability is an afterthought ... [with no] sanitary facilities or air conditioning. Fresh air enters through snorkel tubes that inadequately displace suffocating diesel fumes and stench from the bilge.

    "Without navigation lights or surface search radar, the SPSS constantly risks being run over by an unsuspecting merchant or fishing vessel. By the end of a one- to two-week transit, conditions inside must be as unbearable as nerves are frayed."

    They navigate by GPS, without need for external communication, Wilkinson wrote.

    Determined to be in OK physical shape, the men were handcuffed to the Midgett's deck, under a tarp to protect them from the sun and wind.

    The next morning, Milici and her crew took photos and itemized the stacks of cocaine bales in the sub. They found no weapons.

    Then, with most of the cocaine still inside the sub, they sank it.

    "At that point," Milici said, "the vessel was considered a hazard to navigation."

    Days later, the four men were transferred to another ship and eventually ended up in U.S. District Court in Tampa, Fla. All SPSS cases are prosecuted by the U.S. Attorney's Office there, in the Middle District of Florida.

    One of the four men charged with trafficking in the Jan. 20 narco-sub seizure has pleaded guilty and agreed to testify against others in return for "substantial assistance" from the U.S. Attorney's Office in his sentencing, according to court documents.

    As the plea agreement explains, none of the four would admit to being the master or captain of the narco sub. Typical prison sentences for running a narco sub are nine to 11 years.

    In Tampa, someone familiar with the kinds of men who crew the narco subs is Adam Tanenbaum, a former federal public defender now in private practice who still occasionally represents SPSS defendants.

    He says the captain of a narco sub might earn $10,000, "if that," for a successful delivery of cocaine, with the other crew members earning considerably less.

    Considering where they come from, that's good money.

    "They live in places that to even call them villages would be generous," Tanenbaum said. "I've had clients who don't have a post office where they can write to from prison."

    All of that is a long way from the Midgett, now in Seattle and awaiting its next mission, which will be an Alaska fisheries patrol.

    Lt. j.g. Milici is proud of the job the cutter did Jan. 20.

    "We prevented 6 tons of cocaine from reaching the streets," she said. "Potentially, that means that much less offered to school kids."

    But sometime soon, the Midgett might well be back off the coast of Central America.

    And maybe the cutter's crew will face the latest twist from the traffickers.

    In February, Colombian soldiers for the first time seized a sub that is fully submersible.

    Seattle Times researcher David Turim contributed to this report.

    Erik Lacitis: 206-464-2237

    or elacitis@seattletimes.com

    http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/l ... ub09m.html
    NO AMNESTY

    Don't reward the criminal actions of millions of illegal aliens by giving them citizenship.


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