Shadow Wolves hunt border drug 'mules'
The Arizona Republic
May. 4, 2007 12:00 AM

In an age when securing the border increasingly means big-budget, high-tech measures, an elite unit of Native American trackers employs ancient methods to track pot smugglers through the desert.

Called the Shadow Wolves, these Immigration and Customs Enforcement patrol officers painstakingly probe the dust and vegetation for the slightest sign that a "mule" has passed. Inch by inch, they cover the Tohono-O'odham Reservation, a desolate stretch of land the size of Connecticut that straddles the international border.

Miles from the remote night-vision cameras and buried sensors, the Shadow Wolves find traces of smugglers in bent blades of grass or filaments of fiber. They can look at a footprint, barely visible to the untrained eye, and say from the size and condition who left it and when. They call the technique "cutting sign."

Everyone on the 14-member team must be at least one-quarter Native American, according the federal law that created the Shadow Wolves in 1972. Members are as diverse as Sioux and Blackfeet and come from as close as the Navajo, Pima and Tohono O'odham reservations. The current roster has nine people from Arizona.

The Shadow Wolves typically seize about 30 tons of marijuana a year. Since October, they've arrested 40 mules and impounded 16 abandoned smuggling trucks.

During a patrol on a recent weekday, the trackers scoured the expanse of dust and greasewood. What appeared to be aimless meandering was, to Shadow Wolves, a hunting expedition. The slightest scuff on a rock or sheen in the dirt may well be a map created by criminals smuggling marijuana in 50-pound bundles.

This time, the tip-off to one trail came on a dirt road on the way to Cowlic. Six people had crossed, stepping tiptoe in each other's prints. It was unnatural.

In nearby brush, the trail fanned out into six sets of prints, all heading north, all left by men. A few hundred yards on, Shadow Wolves supervisor and Tohono tribal member Kevin Carlos noticed the same shoeprint patterns heading south. The men came and went. Immigrants go north.

Carlos says the evidence is a "nine" on the scale of 10, indicating likely smugglers.


Tracking smugglers


Two hours later, the trail goes cold under the desert sun. The hard-packed clay makes finding footprints difficult. In softer soil nearby, hundreds of trails crisscross the pancake-flat valley, littered by backpacks, jackets and empty plastic water jugs. All signal that numerous immigrant expeditions had reached their pickup point near an asphalt road. There's not a building in sight.

Smugglers innovate tricks for avoiding detection. One involves gluing carpet squares on their shoes to obscure telltale prints. Shadow Wolves can spot the unique sheen the carpet leaves in the soil.

Some smugglers walk on severed cow hooves, but the gait is unnatural.

Shadow Wolves can spot the passage of a smuggler by the way grass is bent. As the daytime temperature rises, the angle of grass changes. Trackers can approximate the age of the tracks. Other signs, including the moisture in the disturbed vegetation or small animal tracks within a print, reveal how close a smuggler might be.

Many of the original Shadow Wolves learned the skills as children, when they were taught to hunt on their reservations. Veteran agents have trained many newer members.

In recent years, Shadow Wolves members have been deployed to Eastern Europe to help Soviet bloc countries to combat nuclear proliferation. They train border agents to track weapons smugglers. In 2004, three Shadow Wolves went to Turkmenistan on a similar mission. That led to a myth, reported in the London Times and numerous places since, that the Arizona unit was enlisted in the hunt for Osama bin Laden, who is believed to be hiding in the remote border of northern Pakistan.


Drug seizures


Back in Arizona, the Shadow Wolves typically find contraband three times a week, Assistant Special Agent-in-Charge Rodney Irby said. Members patrol seven days a week.

This day, the odds favor his teams. The night before was a full moon, known on the border as a smuggler's moon because of higher numbers of smugglers who take advantage of the increased light in the remote desert. Border agents have already discovered one truck full of marijuana, and the Shadow Wolves are tracking tire marks left by two others.

Five days earlier, the group made its largest seizure of the year: over 5,100 pounds of marijuana in two truckloads.

Early this week, Shadow Wolves tracked a smuggling suspect to a house on the reservation, a growing trend. The average household income on the nation of 11,000 people is about $20,000, and a quarter of the families get by on less than half of that. A quarter of the workforce is unemployed. Officials don't like to talk openly about it, but they concede that a substantial number of tribal members are enlisted in smuggling.

Since Jan. 1, the Shadow Wolves have seized over 25,000 pounds of marijuana, enough for one joint for every adult in Maricopa County. It is taken to Tucson and destroyed. That's $30 million in wholesale U.S. street prices that drug kingpins south of the border have lost.

The drug cartels have put a $500,000 bounty on the head of each Shadow Wolves member and offered a $50,000 reward to kill a team member's relative.

"We are encountering more and more armed traffickers. They seem to have more propensity to engage rather than just drop their loads and flee. It's a very dangerous job," said ICE Special Agent-in-Charge Alonzo Peña, who is based in Phoenix.

Trackers carry 9mm handguns and M-4 automatic rifles. They monitor each other's progress on radios and can call in help from the Border Patrol or Customs and Border Protection. But backup is not around the corner in a place with just two people per square mile.


'What it's all about'


Back in Sells, Resident Agent-in-Charge Derrick Williams is eating when the radio crackles to life. One member of his team has found an abandoned vehicle, and it's full.

Within minutes, Williams is speeding northwest on the two-lane tribal highway in a convoy of three government SUVs, lights ablaze, no sirens.

"This is what it's all about," Williams says. "When the guys have got something, you drop everything and go."

Even at 90 mph, it takes 45 minutes to reach the discovery site, a mile off a dirt road in the lee of a volcanic hillsouth of Cucklebur.

The gray Chevrolet Z11 is obscured by a saguaro and a large paloverde tree. A camouflage tarp covers the front end. Nothing conceals the back window or its secret. The SUV is loaded roof to floor, front seat to rear window with bundles of shrink-wrapped marijuana.

It's a big load.

The Shadow Wolves member who tracked it is Sioux. He has been doing this for 12 years, after a career in the narcotics division of a police department. He asks not to be identified because of the threats.

"That's more dope off the streets," he says with a mix of grim determination and satisfaction. He is not discouraged by the endless flow of drugs. He says "the thrill of the hunt" keeps his motivation going.

He followed tire tracks north from Vaya Chin, about 30 miles away. Near the drop site, "I located a brush-out. They use brush to cover over the tracks."

The SUV coughs up other secrets. Next to the steering column, smugglers have installed a switch to kill the taillights. The paint is scratched and dented, and cans of Fix-a-Flat and two tire irons litter the cab. These were experienced smugglers, used to taking long off-road trips through the desert.

The dashboard of the stolen vehicle holds a digital disc for an OnStar navigation system but no console. There is a power supply for a two-way radio but no radio. The other half of the set is in the hands of the spotters, who by now likely know this load won't make it to the distributor.

As agents pick through the truck, taking pictures for evidence, more teams of Shadow Wolves drive up. They've been listening on their radio.

Elsewhere they've been tracking other signs of the same operation in the Santa Rosa Valley, which has been the site of most of the bigger loads recently. One team will pick up a trail, another will drive ahead and try to intercept the smugglers. They hunt in packs, which is how they got the name Shadow Wolves.

The convoy heads the back to Sells to ICE headquarters at the end of an unmarked driveway concealed by bushes. They unload the 58 bundles of contraband, weighing 1,246 pounds. It's the second-largest marijuana seizure of the year.

"This has been a good day," Wolves' chief Williams says.

http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepubli ... s0504.html