Pubdate: 21 Feb 1999 Source: New York Times (NY) Copyright: 1999 The New York Times Company Contact: http://www.nytimes.com/ Forum: http://forums.nytimes.com/comment/ Author: Christopher S. Wren DRUG AGENTS' CHALLENGE: HEROIN 'SWALLOWERS' NEW YORK -- To a Colombian woman just 21 years old and dirt-poor, the chance to earn $10,000 was too enticing to turn down. So she swallowed one tiny balloon after another packed with heroin -- nearly a pound in all -- and boarded a flight to New York. Sent by traffickers back home to deliver the heroin to wholesalers in New York, she began a race against time to clear customs at Newark International Airport before the dozens of thumb-size pellets passed through her intestines or disintegrated in her stomach, triggering a potentially fatal overdose. "I needed the money," she said. "They always look for young people who need money." Known on the streets and by federal agents as swallowers, the young woman and scores of others like her have become an important link in a heroin trafficking chain that extends from Colombia to New York. The trade is not new: New York has long been a prime destination for smuggled heroin, not only as a bustling international transport hub but also as a market in its own right, where as much as half of the heroin in the United States is consumed. But the flow of the drug -- which has declined in price as it has risen in purity -- is escalating. At Newark and Kennedy International Airport, 75 percent of drug investigations now involve heroin, according to U.S. Customs Service officials. Federal agents have expanded their operations at the airports in their ever-evolving cat-and-mouse game with traffickers -- one that now largely pivots on catching the couriers who smuggle heroin in their luggage, under their clothing and, increasingly, inside their stomachs. "There's no question there are more internal carries," said John C. Varrone, the special agent in charge of Customs Service investigations in New York and New Jersey. "The most preferred method now used by drug couriers is to smuggle internally, primarily by swallowing." Customs inspectors said they have found drugs on airline passengers as old as 84 and as young as 13. Traffickers are using more and more women to swallow the heroin, often more than 100 pellet-like little balloons at a time, in the hopes they will arouse less suspicion at checks. For the swallowers, being paid thousands of dollars per trip is hardly easy money. Ruptured balloons, a consequent massive drug overdose and possibly fatal coma are not uncommon. Neither is getting caught: the number of swallowers stopped by the authorities in New York increased last year to 319, from 273 in 1997 and 233 in 1996, according to Customs officials. Couriers have also turned up dead near Newark and Kennedy, the authorities said, their stomachs ripped open to salvage the heroin inside. "I don't think the public is aware how vicious these organizations are," said Lewis Rice Jr., the special agent in charge of the Drug Enforcement Administration's operations in New York. "The people who use heroin at a party don't think about what it took to get there." Last year, Customs agents and inspectors in New York and New Jersey intercepted 1,066 pounds of heroin, about one-third of federal seizures of heroin in the United States. Colombian traffickers, who the authorities say are responsible for 70 percent of the heroin sold on the East Coast, have blitzed New York so relentlessly that heroin has declined in price while its street purity has soared. An analysis of drugs bought by undercover agents in 1997 and 1998 found the purity of heroin sold in parts of Brooklyn and the Bronx above 90 percent, compared with barely 5 percent in the early 1980's. "It takes an organization less effort to fill up a courier with heroin than to package and ship a larger amount of cocaine with the same value," said Varrone, explaining why heroin is now the product of choice for smugglers. The Colombian woman said she underwent a 15-day procedure to prepare her body for ingesting the heroin, including prepping her throat by swallowing grapes and then carrots shaped like pellets. The day before the trip, she said, the courier is taken to a pharmacy and injected with a relaxant to facilitate swallowing. "They don't tell you the size of the pellets," she said in a recent interview. "They say it's very easy." Before the flight, she said, a swallower is given a pill to control the bowels, and a tranquilizer and a liquid anesthetic to numb the pain. "The pellets usually scratch your throat and it starts to bleed." To catch smugglers, Customs officials scrutinize passenger manifests of flights before arrival. In the terminals, they employ drug-sniffing dogs and the intuition of roving inspectors. Kennedy has installed a $100,000 body scanner that detects drugs concealed inside clothing. But with more heroin carried on or inside the body, the inspectors have had to resort to more invasive X-rays, pat-downs or strip searches of suspects, who may be detained and given a laxative on the suspicion they have swallowed drugs. The growing use of heroin swallowers has coincided with a boom in air travel, engendering a new strategy in which customs inspectors stop far fewer travelers, but grill those more thoroughly. "If we stopped everybody coming in would we get more?" asked John J. Martuge, the customs area director at Kennedy. "Yes. But would Congress stand for that kind of scrutiny? It would bring air traffic to a screeching halt." In turn, Colombian traffickers routinely dispatch a handful of couriers unknown to each other on the same flight, counting on one arrest to distract inspectors while the others slip unnoticed into the United States. "If you can get five swallowers on a plane and one gets caught and four get through, you've had a good day," Rice said of the traffickers. Last year, 50,892 airline passengers were searched nationwide, of whom 709 underwent X-rays. Heroin and other contraband were found on 2,116 passengers, or 4 percent of those searched, but in 28 percent of those subjected to X-rays, according to customs statistics. At Kennedy and Newark Airports, 61 percent of the passengers stopped and X-rayed were found smuggling drugs; in Miami, the figure approached 70 percent. But the searches have not come without controversy. Travelers have sued the Customs Service, alleging that they were stopped and searched because of their race or ethnicity. Some of the cases have been dismissed; others are pending. "Court decisions support the right of governments to search people coming into the country," said Raymond W. Kelly, the customs commissioner and former New York City police commissioner. He denied that inspectors profiled potential couriers by race or ethnic group, adding that, "What we do is focus on high-risk flights from high-risk countries." Of the 50,892 passengers searched nationwide last year, according to Customs statistics, 15,379 were Hispanic, 13,183 were white, 6,641 were black and 3,841 were Asian. The rest (11,857) were not identified by race. Heroin trafficking is driven not merely by demand but also by breathtakingly lucrative profits. A kilogram, or 2.2 pounds, of heroin refined in Colombia from $4,000 worth of opium gum can fetch from $75,000 to $100,000 on arrival in New York. The kilo delivered by the courier is immediately taken to a drug "mill," where it is cut with a diluent and repackaged in about 35,000 glassine envelopes for sale at $10 -- a "dime bag" -- netting a total of $350,000 on the street. For the 21-year-old Colombian woman and other swallowers, their mission is to get rid of the ingested heroin before it gets absorbed into the bloodstream from the stomach, with possibly fatal consequences. When a pellet wedges in the intestine, death is slower but more agonizing, said Dr. Sally L. Satel, an addiction psychiatrist. The Colombian courier, who spoke on condition that her name not be used for fear that traffickers would harm her family, said her first trip left her hospitalized. "On my first trip, the pellets were not properly wrapped, and when I swallowed them, I became dizzy, very tired and nauseous," she said. After delivering the heroin, she said, she went into a coma for five days. Yet she made two more trips. She said swallowers usually make 10 trips before the organization lets them quit. "Because when you get involved, they always need you," she said. "They look for you. And when you say no, they say they know where your family is and where your kids are, and please to do them this favor." Kelly of customs described the traffickers as predatory in their recruitment. "They use women," he said in a telephone interview from Washington. "They use pregnant women. They use children. They use any means." During the last half of 1998, customs officials counted six travelers nationwide who subsequently turned up dead with heroin in their stomachs. Five of the bodies were found within a short drive of Newark Airport. The sixth, in Chicago, involved someone who traveled through Kennedy Airport. There have been other such fatalities. Between May 1995 and last October, four bodies, some of them gutted, were crammed into suitcases or bags and dumped in western Queens. The Queens County District Attorney Richard A. Brown concluded that the victims were swallowers who failed to excrete their drug loads. "What happens is the individual sitting in a room with the drug dealers starts to get sick, the condoms burst," he said. "They let that individual die and once he's dead, they cut him open and get the drugs and dump him in a desolate area." The flow of Colombian heroin also is increasingly routed through Nigeria, drug agents said. But because the trip is considerably longer, the couriers often hide the drugs under their clothes or in luggage or packages they carry aboard airplanes. One such courier, a 30-year-old Nigerian woman who was traveling with her infant son, was arrested in September at Newark Airport after being found carrying a box containing four pounds of heroin hidden under smoked fish. The inspector, she said, "felt that the box was funny." She added: "He just pinched it with his knife and he saw the drugs." She said the traffickers never told her how much heroin she was carrying. "I just knew it was drugs in the bag," she said. The woman, who is serving 38 months in a federal prison, admitted having made two earlier drug-runs because she and her husband, who, she said, earned $35 a month back home between them, needed the money. "I decided I should do what I had to do," she said. Federal agents try to use arrested couriers to trace the drugs back to the trafficking rings. But Lloyd Epstein, a New York lawyer who has defended heroin swallowers, said most couriers do not know anyone substantially higher in the trafficking ring and have nothing to offer beyond a telephone number. "These people are paid for their stomachs, not their minds," he said. The Colombian courier's smuggling days are over. She was arrested at Newark airport last fall after making her third trip; another courier identified her to drug agents. She faces a minimum of 20 years in a federal prison. - --- MAP posted-by: Mike Gogulski