Mexico's drug wars spread violence to U.S.

SAN DIEGO — The drug violence that has left about 4,000 people dead in Mexico this year also is leaving a trail of slayings, kidnappings and other crimes in at least 195 U.S. cities, including Seattle, according to federal authorities.

The involvement of the top four Mexican drug-trafficking organizations in distribution and money-laundering on U.S. soil has brought a war once dismissed as a foreign affair to the doorstep of local communities.

Residents in Lilburn, Ga., an Atlanta suburb, awoke to the trans-border crime wave in July, when federal and state police officers surrounded a two-story colonial home, ordered neighbors to lock their doors and flushed out three men described as members of a Mexican drug cartel. One was captured after he tried to slip down a storm drain. Another was caught in the ivy in Pete Bogerd's backyard, two doors away.

"It blew us away," Bogerd said. "I didn't know we had that many cops."

Police later hauled out a 31-year-old Dominican who for nearly a week had been chained and tortured inside the basement, allegedly for not paying a $300,000 drug debt.

Several dozen suspects since have been charged with moving drugs and money for Mexican traffickers through Atlanta, which has emerged as an important hub for narcotics markets in the East.

Few regions of the nation have been immune — even Anchorage reported activity by the Tijuana drug cartel led by the Arellano Felix family, according to federal law-enforcement agencies.

In suburban San Diego, six men believed to be part of a rogue faction of the Arellano Felix organization have been accused in connection with as many as a dozen murders and 20 kidnappings over a three-year span.

In October, three armed men disguised as police officers broke into a Las Vegas home, tied up a woman and her boyfriend and abducted her 6-year-old boy.

Authorities said the men were tied to a Mexican drug-smuggling operation and were trying to recoup proceeds allegedly stolen by the child's grandfather. The boy, Cole Puffinburger, was found unharmed three days later.

Federal authorities have charged his grandfather, Clemons Fred Tinnemeyer, with racketeering, after he allegedly mailed $60,000, believed to be drug proceeds, from Mississippi to Nevada. Police continue to search for the kidnappers.

In September, authorities announced that 175 alleged members of Mexico's Gulf cartel had been rounded up across the country and abroad. Of those, 43 had been active in the Atlanta area, they said.

All told, authorities in that 18-month investigation have arrested 507 people and seized more than $60 million in cash, 16,000 kilograms of cocaine, half a ton of methamphetamine, 19 pounds of heroin and 51 pounds of marijuana.

In a separate operation, federal authorities in Atlanta last month announced indictments against 41 people they said were trafficking drugs and laundering money for Mexican cartels. Among those were a former deputy sheriff from Texas who was stopped on a Georgia highway with nearly $1 million in cash in his pickup.

The footprints of Mexican smuggling operations are on all but two states, Vermont and West Virginia, according to federal reports. Mexican organizations affiliated with the so-called Federation were identified in 82 cities, mostly in the Southwest, according to an April report by the National Drug Intelligence Center (NDIC), an arm of the Justice Department.

Elements of the Juárez cartel were identified in at least 44 cities, from West Texas to Minneapolis. Gulf cartel affiliates were operating in at least 43 cities from South Texas to Buffalo, N.Y. And the Tijuana cartel, active in at least 20 U.S. cities, is extending its network from San Diego to Seattle and Anchorage.

Many cities, including Seattle, showed evidence of multiple cartels, according to federal, state and local law enforcement.

Already this year, federal agents in Western Washington have taken down two drug-distribution rings with ties to cartels in Mexico, according to court records.

In May, Drug Enforcement Administration agents arrested 17 people connected to a cocaine-distribution ring in Burien. The ring was based out of a Mexican restaurant and was moving as much as 36 pounds of cocaine a month, said Arnold Moorin, the special agent in charge of the DEA's Seattle field office. Agents also seized more than $200,000 cash and guns in the raid.

In September, Moorin's agents "dismantled" a large-scale drug operation tied to the Sinaloa cartel, seizing $1 million in cash, more than 150 pounds of cocaine and 30 pounds of methamphetamine. The ring had been distributing drugs in Idaho and Washington for years, according to agents.

Chuck Miller, an NDIC spokesman, said it remained difficult to determine why and how the cartels chose specific urban regions.

"It could be one of them may know someone in one part of the country and have established routes for up there," Miller said. "It could be geographic locations that are operating in Mexico or adjacent to other areas. Or there could be affiliations with individuals residing in specific locations."

In one case in San Diego, a rogue faction of the Arellano Felix operation moved into Southern California in 2002 and began kidnapping and shaking down people believed to be working as smugglers and launderers for Mexican traffickers.

Officers believe the group, known as Los Palillos, or the Toothpicks, killed a dozen people, committed as many as 20 kidnappings and trafficked methamphetamine to Kansas City, Mo., to finance its war with the cartel in Tijuana — all from a base in San Diego County.

The group was shut down by authorities last year.

Cartel members also have pleaded guilty in federal court this year as part of a murder-for-hire and kidnapping ring that stretched from the Rio Grande to North Texas.

Several men and two teenage boys on this side of the border were killed as part of a war that pitted the Gulf cartel against the Sinaloa cartel over the lucrative drug trafficking to North Texas and beyond. Hit men were paid in drugs and cash to help carry out the slayings, according to documents.

Seattle Times staff reporter Mike Carter contributed to this report.