Drug Cartels Raise the Game for the Mule Trackers

by Alain Pilon Alain Pilon

Special agent Chris Trojan pulls into the parking lot of a convenience store in Ozone Park, Queens, and spots a half dozen colleagues lingering out front, exchanging morning banter and finishing second cups and cigarettes. The previous afternoon, at the Drug Enforcement Administration's New York offices in Manhattan, Trojan's unit had looked at the week's open schedule and decided to start this day trolling the neighborhoods around John F. Kennedy International Airport for a particular class of arriving travelers.



Trojan--his short hair wet and spiky, his ruddy face freshly shaved--falls in with the crowd long enough to trade the expected verbal abuse and extract his partner for the day. In such a cluster, the officers' street clothes present a rather homogeneous look of faded blue jeans topped by dark Windbreakers or leather jackets. When they have dispersed across the local neighborhoods, these undercover uniforms will blend in with the sidewalk traffic to all but the keenest drug dealers and street runners. Today, Trojan's unit is looking for less experienced quarry.



They are hunting for "swallowers," drug couriers who rent out their bodies as cargo containers, each carrying upwards of a kilo, or 2.2 pounds, of packaged narcotics. It's an old trick, body packing, but on the rise, and getting more sophisticated. Increased airport security has caused some drug cartels to shift a majority of their small shipments out of carry-on baggage and into the less easily searched internal compartments of the "mule."



Trojan and his partner walk toward Rockaway Boulevard, where they begin conducting the kind of ad hoc street interviews--"Excuse me, sir, may we talk with you for a minute?"--that occasionally lead to the arrest of heroin smugglers arriving from Central or South America, on their way to make connections in the neighborhoods that surround the airport.



Search and seizure laws say that suspects don't have to let agents look in their bags. "But," says Trojan, "believe it or not, they usually do. I think they're afraid they'll look guilty if they don't."



In the drug-refining centers of Central and South America, the cartels target the nondescript--middle-class workers, women, even children--and groom them for the task of swallowing as many as 100 packages the thickness and shape of fat breakfast sausages. Some swallowers are naturals, while others build up to the task with a succession of gradually larger objects such as grapes and baby carrots. "It has more to do with psychology than the size of the person," says Trojan, who has arrested small-framed women carrying far more cargo than that found inside men twice their size.



Once packed, the courier must slip unsuspected through airport customs and try to rendezvous with his or her connection before the cargo starts passing of its own accord. Nature determines the timetable here. Occasionally agents end up making their arrests as suspects leave bathrooms. Sometimes they locate already-passed packets in pockets, suitcases or shopping bags.



Drug swallowing came to light in the mid-'70s, when the first known swallower showed up in a Toronto emergency room with an intestinal blockage. During the 1990s, the typical packaging--double-bagged but leak-prone condoms--gave way to sturdy, machine-pressed pellets. Each pellet is fashioned from the sealed finger of a latex glove that has been packed with 8 to 12 grams of narcotics--most often heroin, sometimes cocaine or amphetamines--and coated with hard wax. The DEA recently got a look at one of the production machines, rigged from a hydraulic jack. There's a growing consensus that at least some cartels are now using machines professionally engineered for the task, says Trojan.