Pubdate: Tue, 07 Mar 2000 Source: Tampa Tribune (FL) Copyright: 2000, The Tribune Co. Contact: http://www.tampatrib.com/ Forum: http://tampabayonline.net/interact/welcome.htm Section: Nation/World Page: 4 Author: Ace Atkins, staff writer Bookmark: MAP's link to Florida articles is: http://www.mapinc.org/states/fl SEVERAL LEVELS IN COCAINE TRADE TAMPA - From the jungles of South America to U.S. city streets, the cocaine business has many profiteers. For a street drug dealer, a kilogram of cocaine is a big investment. It might cost as much as $17,000 and be broken down into hundreds of hits of crack. So how does a cocaine shipment of almost five tons, like the one hauled into St. Petersburg on Monday, make its way to the street? And what kind of impact would that shipment have had on the drug trade in the Bay area? "It would have a huge impact," said Capt. Ken Dodge of the Tampa Police Department s narcotics bureau, "but I doubt very much [all of it] was set to pour into Tampa and St. Pete." Even if the shipment had been destined for Florida's west coast - and investigators declined to say Monday whether it was - Dodge said it was more likely the cocaine would have been sent on to Orlando, Miami and Ft. Lauderdale. Tampa Bay would have been an unusual destination for the shipment, Dodge said. Shipments that big usually come in through ports like Miami and New York. The anatomy of a shipment that large, Dodge said, usually goes something like this: The cocaine is processed in laboratories in the jungles of South America and stored in shacks by the ton. When high-level dealers get ready to make a purchase, they go in on it together and put up a down payment, along with a transaction fee, a boat fee, and a fee to the pickup person. "The shipment should be all ready to cut," Dodge said. Once it gets to the U.S. mainland, he added, "The trick is to unload it as quickly as you can." Once it's in a U.S. distribution pipeline, Dodge said, the cocaine will be cut at least three or four more times before it gets to a street crack dealer. At every step, even as the cocaine is diluted, its price goes up - rising from $9,000 a kilo at its source in South America to about $17,000 a kilogram by the time it gets to the street. But the street price isn't fixed; it can be influenced by things like supply and demand, and quality. The assistant special agent in charge of the Drug Enforcement Administration office in Tampa, Bob Michelotti, said Monday that the cocaine seized from the Rebelde hasn't been analyzed yet, so its purity is unknown. Even so, Michelotti said, he'd estimate the shipment to have been worth a fortune, even wholesale - probably exceeding $73 million. - --- MAP posted-by: Eric Ernst