By: George Michael Newman, CFE,
CCDI, CII
(An earlier reviewer of this article
thought it seemed to be an editorial espousing legalization or
decriminalization of drugs. In fact, this is not its intent, as
attention to the detail of the words chosen in various portions of
the piece should reveal. Greater mind’s than that of the author must
create any realized solution. However, certain undeniable realities
weave themselves amongst the panorama/constellation of ‘the drug
world’ in blunt format, and denial or ignorance on the part of an
investigator invites assessment errors. In abstract form, in context
with any set of circumstances, what is revealed here is applicable
in any country or segment of society.)
“Gangs have been a major contributor to the growth of violent
crime in the past decade. Heavily armed with sophisticated weapons,
gangs are involved in drug trafficking, murder, witness
intimidation, robbery, extortion, and turf battles. Gangs now
operate in cities of all sizes, as well as suburban communities
throughout the United States; gang violence is no longer limited to
major cities.”(1)
Most law enforcement entities relate
that the significant spread of methamphetamines as a popular street
drug initiated in the mid-1960s, and was a primary source of
subsistence income for then-burgeoning ‘outlaw’ motorcycle clubs.
Most will also relate that, in time, certain of these fraternities
became ever more sophisticated, to the point where they became
legitimately incorporated entities; some of which spread across the
nation. A few have taken root in several foreign countries,
resulting in an ever-increasing profitability; a growth at least
initially enabled by drug profits.
As the variety of drugs which could be
sold as contraband which garnered underground profits multiplied,
from such as marijuana and heroin through such as Ecstasy and muscle
enhancing steroids, greater criminal ventures became accessible by
virtue of expanding profits, and the same entrepreneurial spirit
merged with the ‘electronic age’, to coalesce into the near-pandemic
realm of fraud. The heretofore pricey equipment necessary for
counterfeiting currency and goods, ‘hacking’ account numbers and
codes, identity theft and related activities deemed as significantly
more sophisticated than ‘street corner’ or ‘hand-to-hand’ drug sales
has become within reach of criminal organizations via drug sales
profits.
Any accurate assessment by an investigator toward discerning fact
within the constellation of an event is bolstered by an
understanding of perspective; an inclusion of comprehension that is
synergistic. That is to say, an understanding of greater breadth
than simply documenting static facts which, by the time they are
accumulated, have distracted a focus from a conceptual understanding
to no more than an already out of date footnote in relation to
halting crime, or resolving an incident involving crime.
A little known fact relating to the founding of the nation that was
to become the U.S. is that Columbus’ exploratory voyage to attempt
to locate a trade route to India, owing to the Crusades having
interdicted Arab trade caravans, was in part to identify a source of
a commodity craved by Europeans; the intoxicating sap from
Papaver somniferum, the opium poppy.
Since January, 2007, more murders were committed in Mexico than the
total number of casualties suffered by U.S. forces in the Iraqi war.
The deaths were attributed primarily to turf wars, as former
competitors and upstarts in the lucrative trans-border drug trade
strove to gain control over the remnants of the now-fractured
Arellano Felix Organization’s (AFO) rich drug smuggling empire,
wrought by the killing and arrest of many of the cartel’s dominant
family members and minions.
In the latter portion of the 1970s, an ‘arms race’ and virtual
all-out war erupted amongst South Central Los Angeles gang sets,
which heretofore had fought one another with fists, knives and
usually poor quality firearms. With South Central as its
epicenter, within a decade the eruption, fueled by the volcanic
merchandising of Crack cocaine and buoyed by the arms which
drug fortunes enabled, had spread through cities across the nation
to Florida, merging into the equally violent cocaine wars that had
been fought between the established Cuban crime/drug lords resisting
incursion by South American entrepreneurial drug smugglers and
Jamaican Posses.
The eastward expansion would boomerang back to the west coast in the
late 1980s, as the U.S. government initiated a crackdown in the
southeast. Lucrative routes via airplane, intermediate islands and
sea lanes were shifted to the land bridge represented by Mexico; in
reality, simply a revival of smuggling routes of sixty years
earlier, during the era of alcohol Prohibition circa the
1920s. Midway between the two eras, heroin laboratories had begun to
flourish in Mexico subsequent to the French chemists who had
perfected the art of creating the drug being driven from their bases
in Southeast Asia and the Middle East as the French colonial empires
crumbled. As the chemists established their somewhat
less-sophisticated laboratories in Mexico, their refining
capabilities decreased, causing a shift from China White heroin to
Mexican Brown heroin filtering along generally the same
routes into the streets of the U.S.
By the 1980s, the tidal wave of drugs surging through the nation and
the carnage wrought within the competition also mirrored, on a macro
scale, those then-more-isolated gangster wars fueled by the enormous
profits enabled by the 18th Amendment’s, and Volsted
Act’s, 1919 Prohibition enacted across the U.S.
(effectively, 1920-33). In spite of the numerous incarnations meant
to stem this flow, seen in one perspective as initiating circa 1972
with the Controlled Substance Act (CSA) and in the morphing
of the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs into the
Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) in 1973 representing the
War on Drugs, the tsunami-like cycle was to become a stationary
hurricane, wreaking torment without abatement; fueled by the profits
illicit enterprises engender.
Yet another unintended consequence of both Prohibition and the CSA
involved methamphetamine. First developed from its precursor,
amphetamine*, in Japan in 1919, it and amphetamine were utilized as
intoxicants during Prohibition. Commercially available until the
time of the CSA, “meth” then became the stock of trade for
independent groups; it entered ‘popular culture’ in the 1960s as
Crank, reputedly owing to it being ferried by outlaw motorcycle
cliques in the crankcases of their motorcycles. Purportedly, around
1966 a chemist associated with outlaw biker organizations taught the
methods to manufacture the chemical, and it rode into history akin
to the thunder of a Harley.
(* Amphetamines were reportedly issued to U.S. troops during World
War II and Vietnam and became a weight-loss staple in the 1950s/60s,
until outlawed in the CSA schedule.)
Ever-tightening regulations of the chief ingredients ephedrine and
pseudoephedrine, while perhaps minimally causing a reduction in the
ability to manufacture the drug in the U.S., simply pushed the
profit potential into Mexico, where the laboratories capable of mass
quantities could manufacture the drug and the supplies needed to do
so were readily available, after which it was simply ferried along
with other contraband into the U.S.
The specter of drug abuse in the U.S. generally was first addressed
in 1876, when opium was outlawed in San Francisco, California and
Virginia City, Nevada; however, the thrust was largely meant to
impact the growing population of Chinese laborers emigrating to the
U.S. and providing cheap labor in industries such as railroads and
mining. In spite of the fact that more than fifty percent of the
opium addicts were White women who bought the then-legal drug, not
unlike the cloistered middle class abuses of prescription drugs in
the 1950s/60s, the laws were enabled by sensationalized stories of
“horrifying opium dens where yellow fiends forced unsuspecting white
women to become enslaved to the mischievous drug.” (2) In
truth, it is estimated that by the late 1800s, eighty-five percent
of the nation was addicted to one form or another of opiate
derivatives.
Generally, the first recognized drug epidemic occurred in the U.S.
subsequent to the Civil War (1861-65), known as the Army Disease.
Owing to the horrific carnage of that conflict, within which medical
remedies largely relied upon a knife and saw, the recently
synthesized morphine combined with the also recently invented
syringe seemingly offered a miracle relief to pain and suffering.
Ironically, morphine was ‘discovered’ during attempts to find a cure
for alcoholism which was a national concern at the time. Heroin
would later be embraced as a ‘cure’ for morphine addiction.
During the last half of the 1800s, heroin and cocaine were legal;
heroin was advertised through venues such as Sears/Roebuck as a
cough suppressant, ideal for minimizing the effects of then-rampant
tuberculosis and influenza, and even as a sedative for colicky
children; cocaine was initially deemed a bountiful means of
interdicting alcohol and morphine addiction.
By the 1900s, addiction had become such a social blight that in 1914
the federal Harrison Act established that such substances
were to be dispensed only by a physician. It was a law based upon
taxation, a premise which would exist in one incarnation or another
until the ’70s. An interesting aside to the law, and a harbinger of
the future, is seen in the fact that the federal penitentiary at
Leavenworth, Kansas which was implemented in 1906 was, by 1923,
populated more than fifty percent by those incarcerated for drug
related crimes.
Marijuana, interestingly, had been touted at the 1876 New York
World’s Fair, along with its derivative hashish. Available to the
less affluent, particularly during Prohibition, and used universally
in poor people’s medical remedies, it was to run afoul of some of
history’s great moguls, newspaperman William Randolph Hearst and
chemical giant Lamont DuPont. Hearst reputedly developed an enmity
toward Mexicans owing to Doroteo Arango (Poncho Villa)
purportedly having at one time usurped thousands of acres of his
timber land as Villa’s armies gained control of Northern Mexico
where Hearst had such holdings. Additionally, Hearst and Dupont had
reportedly entered into a lucrative product merger which might have
been threatened by the farming of the hemp plant, a
once-heavily-subsidized commodity. Hemp had actually been a
mandatory product for farmers in early colonial times.
Here again, buoyed by the threat to small farmers by the use of
cheap Mexican immigrant labor by farming conglomerates, insecurities
were enflamed by pronunciations akin to: "There are 100,000 total
marijuana smokers in the US, and most are Negroes, Hispanics,
Filipinos, and entertainers. Their Satanic music, jazz, and swing,
result from marijuana use. This marijuana causes white women to seek
sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers, and any others.”
(3)
In 1930 Harry J. Ainslinger, nephew-in-law to Lammont DuPont’s
banker, Andrew Mellon, was given control of the newly formed
Federal Bureau of Narcotics, precursor to the Bureau of
Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. He would help shepherd in the
1937 Marijuana Tax Act, segueing upon 1936’s infamous film, Refer
Madness. The film, however, targeted largely middle-class White
youth, who, in the halcyon euphoria of the 1950s would form the
generation which embraced the genre depicted in the ’50s movie
Rebel Without a Cause, and setting the stage for the era of
license which became “the ’60s”.
Radio, movies and even drive-in theaters largely became part of the
American fabric in the 1920s, just in time to glamorize the excesses
of the infamous gangsters of Prohibition, and the indulgences and
opulence of the heretofore marginalized immigrant communities, as
embodied by the likes of Lucky Luciano and Al Capone. Thet,
as did many others, recognized the need for a profit substitute as
the end of Prohibition loomed. The obvious substitute became drugs;
Luciano was among the early pioneers of the establishment of a
French heroin connection. As it had been with the fact of alcohol’s
prohibition enabling stratospheric profiteering, over time the
substitute became equally lucrative as successive governments
enabled profiteering by effectively and more stringently prohibiting
the intoxicating, seemingly liberating, substances without otherwise
addressing root issues.
“Although the subculture of the professional thief depicted in
Dickens, Melville and Victor Hugo was first eroded by Prohibition’s
organized crime and their turf wars, it was destroyed by drugs and
the drug underworld.” (4)
And while politicians utilized enflamed rhetoric to further
political and power positioning agendas, the lessons of the ’20s
seemingly went unheeded; particularly the fact that upon
Prohibition’s repeal the national crime rate dropped by roughly
two-thirds. In fact, Prohibition was repealed by the 21st
Amendment owing directly to the fact that criminal enterprises
were growing more powerful than the federal government, in both arms
and the buying-off of politicians. Society, too, lost the lesson of
the past, in the form of ‘entertainment’ media’s continuing
glamorization of crime’s excesses.
Marginalized populations heeded the mantra, “Respect is something
your dad can’t buy for you” (5), and the most available
route to glamour and respect was the lucre of modern prohibition’s
commodities.
Gestating in the backwater that South Central had become, the
hurricane found fuel within the umbrella of politics, when in the
late 1970s as a result of the civil war in Nicaragua, tons of
cocaine were routed into the U.S.; evidence exists demonstrating
that those who delved in such shipments were doing so with U.S. law
enforcement sanction; at a minimum owing to a ‘blind eye’.
By fate’s happenstance a young entrepreneur encountered a major
conduit for the massive, west coast cocaine infusion. Ricky Donnell
Ross, AKA Freeway, became an early community distribution
point for the cocaine of Nicaraguan drug lords Norwin Meneses
Cantarero and Danilo Blandon, and had roots in the then-burgeoning
7/4 Crips; and Ross had learned of the then-rare cocaine
derivative, Crack.
Within three years, staggering amounts of Crack inundated first
South Central, then greater L.A.; then, skipped across the U.S.
landing in metropolitan areas in its traverse. With it went the
empowerment huge amounts of cash endowed, and the lust for
demonstrated excesses. No longer were knives and trash guns needed;
sophisticated weaponry in the form of automatic rifles, even
explosives, were just a handful of cash away.
Throughout the 1980s the significant amounts of street corner cash
was not missed by the dominant cliques associated with Southern
California gangs; by 1993 one among them had begun to secure
dominance in the drug dealing arena. After all, unlike Blacks and
Whites and even Asians in the U.S., generally, Latinos, especially
those of Mexican heritage owing to the proximity of Mexico, had a
virtual umbilical-cord-like supply connection.
This connection notwithstanding, all segments of those seeking the
impressive wealth proffered by the illicit drug trade strive for
dominance, synergistically buoyed by the enormous
profiteering-enabled by the current state of governmental and
societal approach to ‘recreational’ drugs.
An interesting and equally relevant aside related to the Mexico-to-U.S.
drug commerce is the fact that while drugs flow from south-to-north,
the firearms used to bolster the strong arm of the drug runners flow
from north-to-south. Unscrupulous firearms dealers reap their own
fortunes from the illegal sales of guns into Mexico. As it has been
with drugs, the growing reaction is to inflict restrictive, generic
laws upon gun ownership. The ‘downstream’ effect of this
reaction, as opposed to an appropriate response, has been
to empower the criminal element by denuding the right of the
innocent, law-abiding citizen of his/her right to own arms and
defend themselves, and a deflation of the Constitution’s
2nd Amendment.
With respect to both ingredients of this criminal constellation,
drugs and guns/violence, the standard reaction, which flies in the
face of the reality that “Those who do not remember the past are
doomed to repeat it”, continues to be to chase the tail of the viper
while failing to address the venomous head. Then, feigning
wonderment at the serpent’s ability to turn back on itself with
venomous strikes.
The War on Drugs as it has been fought, rather than impacting the
scourge with abatement, has instead fueled the holocaust, and will
continue to do so. In spite of often exemplary actions, and even
heroism, on the part of agents; rendered fruitless on a predictable
and cyclical schedule.
In tandem, the outlawing of gun ownership has begun to involve
criminalization of otherwise ‘ordinary’ citizens, and increased
crime by impeding a law abiding citizen’s ability to own a gun for
defense; a fact which criminals capitalize upon. And, publicity
afforded the few mentally infirm individuals who run amuck with a
firearm ensures that others afflicted with such maladies will follow
along the same path to infamy, while once again affording
politicians a knee-jerk podium from which to postulate in a bid for
attention, and power.
Mexican cities, especially along the border, have been breached by
the drug violence, and the seeds for replication are already in
place in the U.S.; recently Mexico’s courageous reporter Vicente
Calderon revealed that many of the Mexican ‘puppet masters’
controlling the Mexican drug cartels actually do so from within
enclaves in the U.S. Amongst the somewhat cloistered communities of
wealthy Mexican nationals who have fled the violence of their
homeland, the reality that Mexican crime syndicates are already
kidnapping Mexican citizens from within the U.S. is common
knowledge.
As in the ’20s Prohibition, wherein the gangland leadership needed
logistical/support minions and found them in street gangs, cadres
from among street gangs have again begun to form the nucleus of
narco armies within the U.S.
This, ironically, includes literally thousands of combat-wise
veterans of wars in El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua and
Costa Rica who were actually taught urban guerilla warfare tactics
by U.S. forces; which at the time were attempting to bolster
anti-communist governments or battle rapacious cartels in those
nations. ‘Veterans’, often from all sides of a foreign conflict, now
populate, often as second class citizens, barrios (ethnic
Latin American communities) in the U.S. Distinct examples include
members of the now-infamous Mara Salvatrucha, and Mara-13*.
(*Often thought to be one-in-the same, this is generally inaccurate;
and, those investigators with acute insight recognize that in spite
of the salacious sound-bites favored by camera-lens-seeking
politicians and ‘drive-by media’ reporters, these structures pay
homage to an even more dominant, home-grown U.S. street gang.
Undeniably, no simple solution presents itself in the constellation
of indulgence-inflamed drug consumption and hedonistic profiteering.
Equally as undeniable, the huge profits assured the purveyors of
illicit, illegal contraband guarantees that the current escalation
of crime and violence will accelerate unabated, until such time as
individual responsibility is embraced in a venue other than simply
punitive castigation.
The astute investigator must meanwhile recognize that in the
netherworld fueled by power and profit, nothing is as it seems, and
must forego an assumption of the obvious at all times, toward
negotiating a path divining truth in any venue. To do less is to
simply perpetuate the escalation imbued by the ‘slippery slope’;
“good” and “bad”, “right” and “wrong” as one may have been taught,
in this world, matter little in the end.
-
Urban Street Gang Enforcement.;
Series: Monograph; Author: Bureau of Justice Assistance;
Published: August 1999
-
Heroin: Humberto Fernandez
-
The 1st Drug Czar:
http://www.heartbone.com/no_thugs/hja.htm
-
Education of a Felon: Edward Bunker
-
Professor James Hernandez, D.P.A.,
Prof. of Criminal Justice, CSU-Sacramento
(Board Certified Criminal Defense
Investigator George Michael Newman, CFE, CCDI, CII has excerpted
edited limited portions of his presentation Ganging Up: Roots &
Routes: A Current of Colossal Synthesis for this piece. The
presentation’s focus is neither to demonize nor glamorize the
realities of gang or culture, but rather to address factually and
pragmatically those factors which have brought this phenomenon into
existence in order to enhance the field investigator’s ability to
extract objective fact when researching an event.)
