How the Dope Traffic Became Airborne
Hopkins, George E.
How the Dope Traffic Became Airborne by George E. Hopkins Ninety per cent of the American marijuana supply now comes in by air from Mexico, and it has spawned a new breed of dealers. Three...
...Their conversation was sprinkled with references to combat...
...Reports began filtering back to them, through their insurance agency, that a crashed and abandoned Cherokee had been located in northern Tamaulipas, Mexico...
...At about the same time...
...Of course they would have to steal another airplane eventually, but they, tried not to think about that...
...Since the wreckage was on private property (a large cattle ranch), it took several weeks before they found out the plane wasn't theirs—it was Dr...
...The Mexicans promised to take Dr...
...Propeller-driven Super Constellations and DC-4s were plentiful and cheap, costing barely more than their value as...
...A "true target" is a radar-detected, unauthorized border crossing...
...It's easy to put scruples out of your mind when you're making $1,500 a night...
...Airline jobs, to which 'all pilots aspire, have nearly always been scarce...
...An educated guess would be that a majority of aircraft stolen are for the purpose of drug trafficking," says John C. Adams, chief of security for the Federal Aviation Administration's Southwest Region...
...Since 1970, planejacking has become epidemic, increasing some 900 per cent...
...The American military has always operated on the principle that it is better to have too many pilots than too few...
...They urged the pilots to fly everything from ancient bombers to recently retired airliners...
...Sure, modern, reliable, light twin-engine planes might cost ten times as much...
...The drug smugglers needed pilots—the pilots needed jobs...
...The pilots wanted to be able to set down on any rough field, particularly in case of engine malfunction...
...Most were at night, and while a few may have been innocent enough, the supposition is that they were all smugglers...
...Lilly's plane was admirably suited to their purpose...
...A veteran official puts it another way: "A good smart pilot who knows his stuff and keeps his rats killed can beat the hell out of this system...
...They just provided the airplanes and flew it...
...Both would much rather have had jobs with an airline...
...The doctor's wrecked Cherokee attracted the attention of passing pilots, who routinely reported it...
...Stealing the planes they used was the biggest risk...
...Together, the services produced a tremendous number of pilots who had excellent training, combat experience, and resentment against the system...
...So they operated only during periods of extremely bad weather, times when ordinary pilots (and most planejackers, for that matter) stayed on the ground...
...Both I illy's Cherokee and the trio of planejackers were part of a much larger matrix...
...Most arrests result from routine police work and the chance suspicion of local lawmen: "Those guys usually get nailed on the ground or not at all...
...From this compromise, the threat to owners of expensive light aircraft was born...
...There was no way the smugglers could match an ex-military flier's experience and skill—though they tried, usually with disastrous results (each spring, the melted snow reveals new proof in mountainside wreckage...
...It was an old pattern...
...Much of the way it is now conducted is the fault of government ineptitude, of course, and that presumably can be reversed...
...They were highly skilled at it, and Bryan was a place where they could blend in with the students, check out the situation, arid deflect suspicion by using military language in the casual conversations they struck up in bars...
...Typical Overreaction The military, which had counted on the small corps of pilots it had trained during the 1950s to serve as the backbone of its career pilot force, suddenly began losing almost all of them to far more lucrative and desirable airline cockpits...
...It was definitely out...
...Somehow, nobody knows exactly why, the Mexican Army got into the act prematurely...
...At this point, a unit of the Mexican National Police, which had been created specifically to humor the Nixon Administration's war on drugs, got into the picture...
...Until recently, local Baptist churches kept a fresh George Hopkins teaches history at Western Illinois University and writes often about aviation...
...The Vietnam war further hastened pilots' flight to civilian life, at just the time when the military's own needs began to grow...
...There are large desert areas where small planes can fly carrying what they please—that is the truth," Mexican President Luis Echeverria declared in 1975, answering criticism of his government's laxity...
...By careful computerized tracking they began to get a good idea of the pattern of the ring's operation, includMg destinations on the American side of the border...
...They tried a deliberate slowdown of border customs checks...
...Last year 135 aircraft valued at $60 million were stolen nationwide...
...Door locks are flimsy, ignitions easily hot-wired, and airport security in most places is practically nonexistent...
...Both men remembered with satisfaction their first job...
...The Army and the Plane But it never happened...
...But even if the government begins to stem the supply of desperate, unemployed pilots it created, it can't do much about the demands for their services...
...What they found looked suspicious...
...Major crimes were rare, people generally unsuspicious and complacent...
...The other pilot and the ground man may have been caught for some later offense, or they may be still flying marijuana today...
...The owner didn't miss his airplane until they returned it (abandoning it at another airport), slightly the worse for wear, six months later...
...The landing area, a deserted blacktop road where the smugglers had snipped off road signs so they wouldn't interfere with the Cherokee's wingtips, was already staked out...
...The U.S...
...Swerving slightly off the runway, bouncing and wobbling, Lilly's airplane struggled off into the low clouds and was gone...
...We've pulled all the strings we could, but it seems to be no use...
...Before tourists could cross, they had to wait interminably in sweltering heat, despite the assignment of nearly 2,000 additional agents to the border checkpoints...
...Registered Aircraft Known To Be In Mexico," and it has some strange entries like: "35590—In possession of Mr...
...They also required well-prepared, fairly large air fields...
...The Cherokee beat Tribby to the runway, turned into the wind, and began rolling without benefit of either engine warm-up or radio clearance, ignoring Tribby's honking and lightflashing...
...The place fairly reeks of football and short hair...
...Between 1964 and 1966, there was such a desperate shortage of airline pilots that some airlines even went so far as to train their own...
...Aside from obliterating the economy of the border towns, Operation Intercept had no impact on the volume of the drug traffic...
...Since the plane was kept in a locked, enclosed private hangar, they simply cut the lock, removed the airplane, and replaced the lock with another...
...It looked very suspicious, but no charges were ever brought against either the general or the owner of the ranch...
...The trio had come to Bryan because it promised to be an easy mark for their particular specialityplanejacking...
...Slipping Past the Border For the garden-variety light-plane smuggler, marijuana is the staple...
...He was paid for watching things around Coulter, but he figured confronting planejackers who might be armed was beyond the normal call of duty...
...Mexicans are currently holding 188 American-owned aircraft, mostly stolen by drug smugglers...
...Everything was set up to catch them red-handed...
...Fortunately these losses never materialized, largely because American airmen have usually flown vastly superior' aircraft...
...Oddly, the Mexican Army had not been involved in the operation in any way until it disrupted the bust...
...At other times (when making deliveries in the metropolitan areas of Texas), they would dump it at low altitude onto deserted farm-to-market blacktops, where ground contacts would recover the heavy canvas bags...
...Mexican police would wait until the plane took off, and then move in on the ground side of the operation in Mexico...
...Bryan's Coulter Airport, on the other hand, was poorly lighted and had only open hangars and a single attendant who lived in a trailer several hundred yards from the hangar line...
...The Navy even began phasing out its longstanding Naval Aviation Cadet program, which had served as an avenue to an officer's commission and gold pilot's wings for thousands of able and ambitious young men who had not finished college, and even for a few who had enlisted directly from high school...
...It was its insurance company, not lawmen, that finally notified Lilly that Mexican authorities had recovered the Cherokee...
...Lilly Ice Cream Company's Cherokee was one of its victims...
...As a result, in the late 1960s Pensacola quadrupled its annual output of Navy pilots...
...embassy keeps a "List of U.S...
...The Cherokees had become part of the staggering toll of light aircraft stolen for use in the Mexican drug traffic...
...And the best antismuggling device around is still those unlighted peaks in northern Mexico...
...All the circumstances looked favorable for a big bust...
...It was a typical overreaction, and the Air Force repeated it on a far larger scale...
...Private planes are a tremendous status symbol in Mexico...
...Planejacking, if you didn't take ' any stupid chances, was a real snap...
...They had been at it regularly for more than a year...
...Fearing that another planejacking might be in progress, Tribby leaped into his pickup, pajamas flapping, to investigate...
...Halbrooks' banged-up airplane to a remote gully and camouflage it so it couldn't be seen from the air—but they didn't do a very good job...
...But the trouble with these large aircraft, from the pilots' point of view, was that they were unsafe and easily tracked on radar...
...The smugglers could hardly have cared less about the airplanes—after one trip they preferred to torch them, since they could buy another large, wheezing relic for about the price of the gasoline it took to fly to Central America...
...Running the border in Texas is safer, since the rugged terrain along much of the Rio Grande defeats radar at low altitudes and heavy legitimate light plane traffic in the lower valley hampers detection...
...The airlines no longer had available the large pool of skilled military-trained pilots from which they had traditionally drawn their new hires...
...The California border is short, and radar surveillance is tight...
...Shortly before dusk a truckload of privates drove onto the field shooting rifles in the air...
...John Halbrooks' brand new Cherokee vanished...
...Neither man intended to get arrested while waiting for the call from an airline personnel office...
...Coulter had escaped loss so far, but Tribby's trailer was too far from the hangar line for him to take real precautions— so mostly he just worried...
...So when Tribby sped after the light plane scudding over the gravel taxiway, the fear of looking foolish was as much on his mind as anything else...
...Naturally everybody on the Mexican side of the connection fled...
...supplied the particulars of the operation, which included cocaine as well as marijuana...
...It was a case of two groups meeting each other's needs...
...Gaston Santos (Occupation Unknown...
...They noticed that a wealthy oilman's Piper Aztec had a thick coat of dust on the wings, indicating that the plane was rarely flown...
...Then Dr...
...While masquerading as students taking brief beer breaks from their books, the trio found out a lot about the area's flying community...
...This made them feel better somehow—an assurance to themselves that, after all, they were really only "borrowing" the airplane...
...But a little later our insurance man called back and told us to forget it—the plane was being flown to Mexico City by the Mexican Air Force...
...Despite a 1936 Diplomatic Convention calling for the return of stolen vehicles, the Mexicans rarely comply...
...Bryan was no exception...
...They found that they could neither stay in the shrunken, professionalized, post-Vietnam military nor find suitable civilian employment...
...If they seemed vague about their studies, nobody remembered...
...While he was peering through the mist, deciding whether to block the runway and trying to make out the faces in the cockpit, the Cherokee got away from him...
...The Mexican Army, however, nabbed Lilly's Cherokee, which was sitting on the airstrip already loaded with narcotics...
...He had been edgy about airport security for a long time, ever since planejacking began to flower along with light plane drug smuggling in the early 1970s...
...Pajamas Flapping Roy Tribby, the caretaker at Coulter field, got Bryan's last look at the airplane thieves...
...He wasn't sure that Wally Anderson or Hawley West, two of Lilly's flying executives, weren't in the plane...
...Two of the planejackers (the third remained on the ground and handled details there) were heading for a privately owned dirt strip 20 miles south of Matamoros, Mexico...
...But people did remember how they talked constantly about flying, how they hung around the Bryan and College Station air fields, watching, listening, occasionally renting a Cessna 150 for a short hop...
...California's markets are the most lucrative, but the Texas border is easier to cross...
...Air Force, which maintains an Air Defense Identification Zone along the border, has belatedly begun to cooperate with the anti-smuggling effort, making things risky in the Far West...
...Everybody regards that as a breakthrough...
...They seemed casually interested in part-time jobs, maybe instructing or ferrying planes...
...It's not the kind of place where drug dealers advertise themselves with long hair and Indian jewelry...
...By the way," they invariably asked, "know anybody who doesn't use his plane much, might want to rent it...
...Halbrooks...
...Although the Drug Enforcement Agency operates its own fleet of anti-smuggling light planes—some of them equipped with such space-age gadgetry as Forward Looking Infrared, designed to track airborne drug runners from the heat of their exhausts—the odds still favor the smugglers...
...The planejackers would ignore routine maintenance, inspections, and tune-ups, running the plane continuously until it was worn out...
...They had helicopters ready for the actual bust, and 'surveillance by aircraft circling out of earshot, monitoring the Mexican airstrip by infrared tracking devices...
...authorities were aware of any recent accidents in that area, so they investigated...
...An undercover agent in the U.S...
...coat of paint on a billboard proclaiming: . "STRONG MEN SAY 'NO' TO STRONG DRINK...
...Only after they—and two superbly equipped Piper Cherokees worth over $ 100,000—disappeared did people suddenly remember that maybe they had seemed suspicious, a little too interested in other peoples' airplanes...
...But the pilots were far more likely to survive ten trips in a $100,000 Aerocommander than one trip in a $10,000 ex-airline transport...
...The flag flying over Kyle field for home football games was once described by the PA announcer as having been carried it . s by an Aggie alumnus in the cockpit of his Phantom during a raid on Communist Hanoi...
...That's why, barely three weeks later, he awoke with a jolt upon hearing, distantly through the thin aluminum walls of his trailer, an airplane tuning up at high power...
...Neither flier was involved in marketing marijuana...
...The Stake-Out The two planejackers had blown a tight night landing shortly before, wrinkling the undercarriage so badly that they had to get a replacement—in a hurry...
...That sat well with folks in Bryan, a middle-American bastion where the counter-culture never gained a foothold...
...Our insurance company sent a man out to the Mexico City airport to verify the presence of our Cherokee there...
...Tribby paralleled the aircraft as it gathered speed, his pickup careening dangerously close to the wingtip...
...Neither Mexican nor U.S...
...the Vietnam war, and then its subsequent phase-down, created a vast pool of skilled fliers for whom there was virtually no civil aviation employment...
...And the narcs are badly outnumbered...
...Wurn out old civil airliners were tricky to operate...
...If they're not, people like them certainly are, and the stolen-plane smuggling traffic seems unlikely to stop...
...Many rural airport operators think nothing of actually leaving the keys in an airplane's ignition, particularly if a student has scheduled an early hop...
...The Border Patrol, with the cooperation of the Air Force and the FAA, began radar monitoring all flights originating from the ranch's private airstrip...
...During a five week period ending in November 1975, the FAA reported 152 "true targets" penetrating the border in the Southwest Region (Texas and New Mexico...
...With its sturdy fixed gear, oversized 300-horsepower engine, and six-passenger capacity, the Cherokee would make a perfect marijuana hauler once its seats were stripped away...
...Light planes are a thief's delight...
...That's exactly what the Lilly people feared had become of their aircraft...
...The easy camaraderie of most small airports, whose operators are accustomed to sightseers poking about and gawking, makes things simple for planejackers...
...Once there they would put Lilly's Cherokee to a new kind of work—the nightly hauling of marijuana across the border...
...But it was too late...
...They guessed him to be a sound sleeper...
...A maximum effort during that period by the DEA, Border Patrol, and Customs Service resulted in only eleven aircraft seizures, 20 arrests, and the confiscation of 8,000 pounds of marijuana...
...Far better, the smugglers concluded, to contract out the flying part of the operation...
...This has meant that each war generated surplus pilots who had to either barnstorm, take up crop dusting, or become corporate pilots, instructors, or small airport operators if they wanted to stay in aviation...
...The two yanquis were under contract, so to speak, and the hard eyes of their Mexican friends made them decidedly nervous...
...Then in the early 1960s, the arrival of commercial jets revolutionized air travel, creating a quantum jump in the need for pilots...
...The A & M student body probably has the country's largest ROTC enrollment...
...College Station had lighted hangars and a 24-hour guard...
...The smugglers thought in terms of infrequent large operations (thus reducing the opportunities for a bust), while the pilots thought in terms of their lives...
...For example, the owner of the cattle ranch denied knowledge of the wreck, and seemed reluctant to permit a ground search...
...If it weren't for the lousy economy and the job crunch, they wouldn't have to do this...
...Things went sour in Mexico...
...I started scrambling to find some way to get to Matamoros to fly it home," Lilly's Wally Anderson explains...
...Okay," the smugglers finally agreed, "but you guys supply the airplane...
...Their expensive clothes— rugby shirts, tailored denims, digital watches—obviously didn't come from the PX, but after all they were exofficers...
...Tribby pondered cutting across the concrete apron in order to block the runway with his pickup...
...One night it was there—the next morning it wasn't...
...One of the two who flew the Lilly plane was later arrested on an unrelated charge and confessed his role in the Bryan thefts...
...At this point, Lilly nearly got its airplane, back...
...The solution was simple—take to the air...
...During the 1950s the Navy trained only a thousand or so pilots per year, just enough to meet losses due to retirement and attrition (about 300 pilots died on duty annually, mostly in crashes...
...The lawmen knew the time of takeoff, the amount and kind of drugs on board that night, and where they planned to land in Texas...
...During our wars it has trained pilots in sufficient numbers to meet the maximum estimates of combat losses...
...The Vigilant Government Large affairs, whether of war, politics, diplomacy, or America's contemporary drug culture, have a way of getting down to the grass roots eventually...
...Then they carefully cased the airports...
...Once airborne, the smugglers were far too professional to run afoul of the Federal Aviation Administration...
...How the Dope Traffic Became Airborne by George E. Hopkins Ninety per cent of the American marijuana supply now comes in by air from Mexico, and it has spawned a new breed of dealers...
...A normal question, perhaps, from exmilitary fliers trying to stay current while waiting for an airline job to open up...
...The pilots saw it another way...
...Sometimes they would deposit their cargo on remote airstrips...
...Under "keeping rats killed," he says, the absence of previous criminal connections is most important...
...scrap...
...Three of them surfaced recently in Bryan, Texas, home of Texas A & M. They were young—Vietnam veterans—the kind nobody pays much attention to...
...They found a high incidence of low-level contacts...
...The Mexican side of their operation was furious...
...The only break in this historic pattern of pilot surplus came in the early 1960s...
...On the American side of this operation, Border Patrol agents, along with their undercover man (who had infiltrated the ring), would nab Lilly's Cherokee and its pilots as soon as they landed...
...It did, however, force the border's normal heavy surface traffic in drugs to seek alternative means of delivery...
...In a coordinated effort between the Border Patrol and this Mexican Police unit, a careful trap was set...
...They said they had just gotten out of the Air Force, and there was no reason to doubt it...
...Most aviation experts date the beginning of large-scale aerial drug smuggling from "Operation Intercept," the Nixon Administration's 1969 attempt to curb Mexican drug smuggling by policing the border...
...There were undoubtedly many more crossings that went undetected by radar...
...The Navy's experience was typical...
...In his report, our Mexican insurance agent said that a lot of high people wanted to keep all confiscated planes...
...The U.S...
...That's why, against their better judgment, they returned to Bryan to get another quick airplane...
...But jobs were scarce and Vietnam-trained pilots like themselves were a dime a dozen...
...The fate of the three planejackers is not entirely clear...
...At first the smugglers thought of using surplus military aircraft...
...Heading for the hangar line across the field, he saw Lilly Ice Cream's company plane taxiing through the fog toward Coulter field's single paved runway...
...The Navy could afford to be very selective during these stable, peacetime Eisenhower years, requiring service commitments of more than five years from pilot trainees (thus discouraging non-career men), perfect eyesight and physical condition, and college degrees...
...And no case could be made against the American side of the connection, although they were all arrested...
...Lilly's Cherokee now serves the bureaucrats of the Mexican Secretariat of Health, Education, and Welfare...
...The planejacking not only made Tribby angry, it cost him a lot of sleep...
...Then they would abandon it back in the United States, where its owners might recover it...
...It's not easy to sleep while wondering when the next plane will vanish...
Vol. 8 • January 1977 • No. 11
