Anonymous
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Russian Mob takes advantage of arrests, deaths to take bigger role in smuggling
http://www.charlotte.com/mld/observer/news/6447374.htm
Aug. 03, 2003
SUSANA HAYWARD
Knight Ridder
MEXICO CITY - The Russian mafia, including former KGB agents, has infiltrated Mexico's weakened drug cartels and is helping them smuggle illegal
narcotics into the United States, according to U.S. and Mexican officials and drug-trade experts.
Russian mobsters have been most effective in penetrating drug gangs in the region encompassing Tijuana, Baja California and San Diego, Calif., said
Luis Santiago Vasconcelos, head of the Mexican Attorney General's Special Unit for Organized Crime. He described the Russians as highly skilled and
dangerous.
Some of them are advising Mexico's drug cartels and laundering money in exchange for being allowed to operate, Steven Casteel, assistant administrator
for intelligence at the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, told a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in Washington in May. Their fee for laundering
drug money is 30 percent and up.
Casteel told lawmakers the Russian mafia's Mexican infiltration was consistent with the globalization of organized crime in recent years. Russians
first showed up in Colombian cocaine cartels a decade ago. They've been spotted in Mexico since the late 1990s.
Extensive penetration in the Tijuana-San Diego area follows the 2002 arrests of Benjamin Arellano-Felix, the alleged patriarch of the region's drug
cartel, and a dozen of its other alleged leaders. Russians took up some of the slack when the weakened cartel broke into cartelitos, or little
cartels, said Bruce Bagley, a University of Miami professor of international studies who has written extensively about drugs and the Russian mafia.
Another leading Mexican trafficker, the late Amado Carrillo Fuentes, head of the Juarez cartel, pioneered the use of surplus Soviet military aircraft
as smuggling planes. He is said to have visited Moscow in the late 1990s to confer with leaders of Russian drug gangs. Carrillo Fuentes, known as
"Lord of the Skies," died in 1997 while undergoing surgery. His cartel has decentralized, according to drug analysts, giving Russians new
opportunities.
"Russian drug thugs are leaner and meaner," Bagley said. "They operate on a low profile, don't wear gold chains and don't cut people up with power
saws or dump them in rivers."
Bagley, who recently finished a year's sabbatical at the Center for Research and Economic Education in Mexico City, is the author of "Drug Trafficking
in the Americas: Aggressive Russian Groups Have Flourished."
In the biggest seizure implicating the Russian mob, the U.S. Coast Guard in April 2001 seized the 152-foot Svesda Maru in international waters off
Acapulco and arrested its crew of 10 Russians and Ukrainians. More than 13 tons of cocaine were found beneath its rotting squid bait, according to the
Coast Guard. U.S. prosecutors said the shipment originated in Colombia. One crew member received a 20-year jail term last November; the others will be
tried later this year, the DEA said.
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Stephanie Jackter
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Posts: 566
Registered: 11-3-2002
Location: Arizona
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Interesting article
Just goes to show that wherever there is money to be made by our government's head in the sand drug policy, there will always be some group there to
take advantage.-Stephanie
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