Isle ‘ice’ flows
from CaliforniaMexican cartels operate
super-labs that supply about
80% of crystal meth
When Drug Enforcement Agency officers stopped Dominador Paguirigan and two other Mexican nationals in the Los Angeles International Airport last October, it was the eighth time he allegedly had carried methamphetamine from the West Coast to Hawaii, according to federal court papers.
When DEA agents searched the three, they found a total of 12.4 pounds of the drug strapped to their bodies. In California that much would fetch a wholesale price of about $86,800, but in Hawaii it would easily get more than $300,000, according to DEA agents. The same amount taken to Guam or Saipan would get more than $860,000.
Paguirigan and his partners are foot soldiers in the "army of ants" that keeps Hawaii supplied with meth, said Briane Grey, DEA special agent in charge of Hawaii.
"For a $7,000 investment, these ant armies can easily quadruple their money," said Grey.
"Nobody has control of the whole market here, and no one is trying to take anyone's corner away," said Grey, explaining the decentralized distribution in Hawaii which, so far, has not seen the bloody turf wars of other cities with meth and other drugs.
Grey said: "It's the laid-back culture here. It's dopers with aloha spirit."
Federal and local investigators estimate that more than 80 percent of the methamphetamine consumed in Hawaii is brought in from the West Coast. The drug, which is mostly controlled by family-run Mexican cartels, has been manufactured either in "super-labs" hidden in the rich, agricultural Central Valley of California or across the border in Mexico, said Grey.
Some meth also still comes from Asia, which was Hawaii's major source for about a decade beginning in the mid-1980s. In 1985, when police officers first started detecting meth, it came from Korea and the Philippines, and Asian gangs controlled its distribution locally.
During the early 1980s, Chinese drug lords began synthesizing methamphetamine as a way to diversify their drug business away from its dependence on heroin, which was facing harsh government crackdowns. The principal ingredient in meth, ephedrine, is derived from ephedra, a shrub that grows wildly across China and parts of Southeast Asia.
The Chinese drug lords test-marketed meth in the Philippines, say DEA agents. When meth in a smokable form, "ice" or "batu," became popular there, it was easy to move east to Hawaii.
"Smoking was culturally acceptable here," said Grey. "It was smokable, and the culture already accepted smoking with pakalolo. It wasn't like picking up a needle and shooting. So it was an easy step to go from pakalolo to ice."
While some meth produced in the Golden Triangle -- an area covering Myanmar (formerly Burma), Thailand and Laos -- still makes its way to Hawaii, much of it remains in the region.
In 1995, Hawaii's main source for meth shifted from Asia to the West Coast and Mexico. At the time, Hawaii law enforcement cracked down on Asian gangs, dismantling many and destroying distribution channels.
Meanwhile on the mainland, Mexican gangs began to move in on the outlaw biker gangs that traditionally controlled the meth trade. The bikers needed the help of the Mexican gangs when the U.S. government tried to stop meth production by placing tough restrictions on necessary precursor chemicals such as ephedrine. The Mexican gangs had access to cheap, plentiful and often illegal supplies.
By the mid-1990s law enforcement had broken the Hell's Angels and other biker gangs by sending their leaders to prison. It was the opportunity for the Mexican gangs. They seized control and the meth trade has thrived.
Today, Hawaii, the nation's largest consumer of meth, lies only an airplane flight or a Federal Express envelope away from the nation's largest producer, California.
"The Central Valley is such a large manufacturer that if it were a foreign country, the United States would put economic sanctions on it," said Larry Burnett, executive director of the Hawaii High Intensity Drug Trafficking Agency, a federal program that fights drug trafficking in cooperation with other federal, state and local agencies.
Last year, agents seized 1,121 labs in the Central Valley, of which 124 were super-labs capable of producing huge quantities of crystal meth. No super-labs have been raided in Hawaii.
Investigators estimate the Central Valley produces more than 100,000 pounds a year, making it at least a $7 billion-a-year business, a conservative estimate based on sales of $7,000 a pound. In Hawaii, meth in powder form would bring about $14,000 a pound, said the DEA's Grey.
"It's simple economics," said Burnett, explaining why Hawaii imports more meth than it manufactures. "It's cheaper and easier to bring it into Hawaii in its finished form than to bring in all the chemicals to produce it here. It's cheaper to produce it in Mexico than Hawaii because it's easier to gather the precursor chemicals there, and there is less scrutiny."
In recent busts, meth has been found stashed in cars and televisions shipped to Hawaii. With the increase of direct flights between the West Coast and neighbor island airports where there is less monitoring of drug traffic than at Honolulu Airport, investigators say that pounds of meth are brazenly shipped in ice coolers.
Burnett and others say that aside from some "mom and pop" labs, relatively little meth is produced here. Most of the labs here are small "conversion" operations where powdered meth from the West Coast is mixed with a solvent such as acetone or isopropanol and allowed to recrystallize. But with a pound of ice going for more than $25,000, the California super-labs are switching their production to pump out more ice, making conversion labs less necessary.
Investigators say the super-labs, which are small armed camps, have cropped up in the Central Valley in part because of their proximity to precursor chemical supply companies, easy access to interstate highways with direct routes to Mexico and the U.S. market. The rural remoteness helps hide an operation that produces noxious fumes and byproducts.
DEA's Grey said of Hawaii: "We don't have those kinds of labs here because we all live so close together, anyone could smell it. And in the rural areas, there may be labs, but those areas are patrolled from the air" by the federally funded marijuana eradication programs.
Unlike the smaller labs, the super-labs use 22-liter flasks that each produce about 10 to 15 pounds per cooking cycle, depending upon the technical abilities of the cook and the recipe, say DEA agents. Investigators say the super-labs can produce 20 to 200 pounds per cook cycle. They also can pick up and move easily from place to place to evade law enforcement.
They are hidden in shacks, mobile homes and tractor-trailers.
"They're a moving target and hard to catch," said Burnett, acknowledging the labs can leave before agents get a search warrant.
Super-labs are sometimes found only when they blow up. In May one exploded on a former turkey ranch in Madera, near Fresno, leaving evidence of a lab with eight flasks and the means to make 120 pounds per cook, said Bill Ruzzamenti, director of the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Agency for the Central Valley.
Ruzzamenti said the fire in Madera, like ones at other super-lab sites, burned for a long time because the ground was so saturated with toxic waste products that fires kept flaring.
For each pound of meth produced, there are at least five or six pounds of toxic, flammable waste that is hastily and secretly discarded on farmland, in irrigation ditches or on public land.
Ruzzamenti said cleanup of super-labs and dump sites is dangerous and expensive. He said he has seen areas where the ground is red with one precursor chemical, red phosphorous. He has also seen irrigation ditches stained the same red.
Ruzzamenti said that today super-labs pick up and move freely. Often they will go into a new area, offering the foreman of a farm or ranch several thousand dollars to allow them to set up a super-lab for a cook. Sometimes they say they will only stay for a few days and end up camping for months.
They quickly assemble the labs and use "slave labor" to cook the drug, said Ruzzamenti. The gangs pick up poor workers -- and often their families -- in Mexico, he said, luring them with promises of green cards, money and a better life. Then they enslave them as cooks, which exacts a heavy toll on their health.
"They set them up in the labs with toxic gases that are just as bad as what's used in gas chambers to kill convicted murderers," said Ruzzamenti. "They drop over dead on a regular basis. They only last about a year or two before they get very sick. Then the gangs take them back to Mexico, dump them and grab a new group."
Ruzzamenti said the Mexican gangs running California super-labs are tied to the family-run cartels in Mexico that learned the drug business distributing cocaine for the Colombian drug lords. The job of the Mexican cartels was to establish networks to move cocaine, weapons and any other drugs or illegal contraband across the 2,000-mile border to market in the United States.
"But the Mexican cartels became somewhat disenchanted with the Colombians, who treated them like second-class citizens," said Ruzzamenti.
Meth was the opportunity for Mexican drug-trafficking gangs to diversify their business so that they could produce and run their own drugs, free from the Colombian's control or profit-taking.
In the mid-1990s the Mexican Federation, a powerful association of four family-run cartels, added meth to its illegal drug inventory and cross-border smuggling.
Law enforcement has long considered the Mexican Federation one of the largest and most sophisticated crime organizations in the world, with an estimated 200,000 members who smuggle a wide range of illegal drugs and weapons to target markets within the United States.
The Mexican Federation, which law enforcement estimates makes between $17 billion and $30 billion in profits from all of its illegal activities, has the means, according to some investigators, to bribe Mexican officials and American ones across the border so that they look the other way when illegal drugs or precursor chemicals are trafficked.
Fighting the Mexican cartels has been long and hard. Every time top leaders are caught or killed, others readily fill their shoes. And as law enforcement concentrates on cracking down on the Mexican gangs, other groups are angling to take their place in such a profitable trade.
"We're starting to see a resurgence of Asian meth, but most still comes from Mexico and the West Coast," said Burnett. "When we cracked down on Asian organized crime, the meth trade moved south of the border. Now we're cracking down on the Mexican gangs, and that creates an opportunity for Asian organized crime to fill the gap."
Tomorrow: Using Hawaiian culture to help addicts recover.
