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Afghan heroin comes to Oklahoma City up interstate, onto turnpike
On July 3, an Oklahoma County deputy watched a gray Chevrolet Impala with California tags sweep across several lanes of traffic in a way that signaled something amiss.
“It was traveling at less than a car length from the vehicle in front of it at 70 mph,” the deputy later wrote in a report. “I observed it to straddle the right lane line of the #1 lane for approximately 100 feet, then abruptly overcorrect and straddle the left lane line to the #1 lane. I stopped the Chevrolet on I-40 eastbound just west of Meridian.”
MICK SMELLS HEROIN
MAPQUEST ROUTE
A ‘CROSS’ TO BEAR
TRANSCENDING TERROR
Upon pulling the car over, the deputy asked the driver — a woman — to step from the car, and explained to her why he pulled her over. She responded that the car in front of her had slowed down, which was why she was so close, and that she had swerved as she reached for a drink.
However, something was wrong. The deputy’s instincts ticked. In what intelligence specialists consider to be the first line of intelligence gathering at the law enforcement level, somehow the woman hit a tripwire in the deputy’s thinking.
“It should be noted during this conversation she stared at the ground, then at the Chevrolet, and then back at the ground. She would not make eye contact and appeared very nervous,” the deputy wrote in his report.
What would this lead to? A bust worth $5 million in street value: pure, uncut heroin from Afghanistan. Somehow, it made its way from the fields of war, out of the Pacific Rim, into Mexico and then to Oklahoma, on its way to New York, authorities say.
“We’ve seen Mexican brown heroin. It’s brown,” said Oklahoma County District Attorney David Prater. “China white heroin is pure white. This was grayish, which is consistent with Afghan gray.”
For a few Oklahomans, it’s not the first time they’ve see Afghan heroin. And at this rate, it likely won’t be the last.
MICK SMELLS HEROIN
There were two women in the front of the car that had been pulled over and a 9-year-old girl in the back seat. The deputy asked the driver where they were going.
New York City, the driver said, to watch the fireworks. She said they’d be at Macy’s watching them.
The woman on the passenger side identified herself as the driver’s sister. Where were they going? She said Newark, N.J.
Not an exact match. After having the driver sit in the car with him while he wrote up a warning citation for her infractions, the deputy called for Oklahoma City’s Central Oklahoma Metro Interdiction Team’s, or COMIT’s, K-9 unit to drop by and screen the car for drugs. As the unit arrived, the deputy watched the driver’s reaction.
“I observed (her) lip began to quiver. She then stared at my car, back at her car and then back at my car. She was extremely nervous at this point and began to tremble slightly,” the deputy wrote.
The K-9 officer walked his partner, a dog named Mick, around the car. He also noticed the woman’s demeanor.
“I could see her body language change from what appeared to be happy-go-lucky to a nervous concerned body language. The smile left her face and she appeared to be noticeably nervous,” the Oklahoma City Police Department officer wrote. As he walked Mick around the car, the dog sniffed and scratched at the panel between the back door and the rear wheel well. “From my training and experience, I believed Mick to be alerting to the odor of narcotics coming from the vehicle.”
The deputy asked the driver if there was anything illegal in her car. She said no, and consented to a search, according to the report.
The first few pieces of luggage yielded nothing important — but then the OCPD officer picked up pay dirt.
“I then removed a large red cloth suitcase that was extremely heavy,” he wrote. “As I placed the suitcase on the ground, behind the vehicle it felt like there were packages in the bottom of the suitcase. I opened the suitcase and pulled back the clothing in which I could feel packages of what is consistent with contraband in the bottom of the suitcase.”
The deputy joined him and they pulled back the clothing to a zip-out interior cloth of the suitcase.
“I opened the liner cover on the suitcase and observed a piece of cardboard under it,” the deputy wrote. “I pulled back the cardboard and observed several compressed bundles wrapped in tape and food saver bags underneath. I pulled one of the bundles out and saw it was the shape of a shoe insole. I recognized this as being a current trend in the trafficking of heroin.”
For much of the time, a cell phone in the seat next to the driver was ringing. And ringing. And ringing.
“The thing was blowing up the whole time,” Prater said.
That phone later turned out to be a prepaid phone, which are capable of what is known as “AccuTracking.” The company’s Web site states the device is a low-cost prepaid phone capable of allowing someone to track, via the Internet, a car carrying it. The phones were seized. Authorities now wonder if they were being tracked.
MAPQUEST ROUTE
Also found was a MapQuest route around Oklahoma City. Oklahoma’s COMIT team cooperates with Oklahoma County deputies and OCPD under the umbrella of the Oklahoma County District Attorney’s office. Prater, himself a former officer, said the team is well-known in trafficking circles.
“These guys are good and they win awards. The bad guys know it,” Prater said. “They have their people try to go around Oklahoma City.”
According to a deputy in on the bust, the map the driver had indicated they were to turn onto the Kilpatrick Turnpike at Yukon, and continue up Interstate 44. The deputy said state law prohibits local law enforcement from entering state turnpikes, and apparently this is widely known among drug traffickers. The woman had been attempting to get to the turnpike, he said.
“If she’d have made it, we might have missed them,” the deputy said.
Instead, they placed the women under arrest. An officer took custody of the young girl. The car and contents were towed back to the police impound lot downtown.
As they walked to the squad car to take the women away, the officer noticed the driver appeared to be taking it hard.
“I asked her if she was OK, and she appeared to be visibly upset and just kept saying ‘I’m so stupid. I’m so stupid,’” the officer wrote. “I asked her if she wanted to talk to me.”
The woman then repeated to the officer that she was stupid.
“It wasn’t like I needed the money,” the driver said. “I just graduated from (a university) and have a good job. As a matter of fact, two jobs. I’m a single mother. I’ve been a single mother for eight years and I have a $20,000 student loan … I borrowed that suitcase from a friend and he said just take my luggage … (I) knew better. That was stupid.”
At police headquarters in downtown Oklahoma City, officers and deputies with the COMIT team tallied the score. The red suitcase contained 13 bundles with 16 shoe-shaped packages inside.
“I cut open three bundles to compare the contents,” the deputy said. “They maintained the same off-white powdery substance. I field-tested the substance and it tested positive for heroin. The combined field weight was 25.5 pounds.”
Prater said the heroin was compressed into shoe insoles, then put in the bottom of a hollowed-out boot and walked across the border.
The heroin was completely pure, such that injecting a gram would cause death.
A ‘CROSS’ TO BEAR
Lt. Greg Taylor, with the Oklahoma City Criminal Intelligence unit, said the bust confirmed stories that he and others in the field have been hearing for bit: that heroin from Afghanistan is reaching the shores of the United States.
“Traditionally, most of the heroin we saw was the brown stuff coming up through Mexico. Afghanistan has been a (past) source, but now it seems the sources have changed again,” Taylor said. “Certainly, 25 pounds of heroin anywhere is going to set off an alarm. That is a large amount in most circles. The source is alarming and does pose a question: Why has it moved from there? Why is it not a different one? Is it something on the local level? We have our limits to what we can do. I can’t send one of my guys to Afghanistan.”
Taylor said Oklahoma City’s location makes it not just the crossroads of the nation, but the crossroads of trafficking as well. He said this factor underscores the need for the COMIT teams and interagency cooperation, and that intelligence gathering by officers allows them to work from the same playbook.
“We are always going to be vulnerable. We are noted for being the crossroads of the country. That’s a cross we have to bear,” Taylor said. “The (intelligence) unit is charged with making sure that information is turned into intelligence and distributed. We want that guy who is out on the street at 2 a.m. to have the tools he needs to do the job.”
Meanwhile, the revelations continued at the interrogation of the driver back at the holding area. An investigator advised her of her Miranda rights. The woman stated, according to the report, that she understood them and agreed to speak without an attorney present. She said she was a U.S. citizen.
She told the officer that an acquaintance, an old boyfriend residing in Mexico, had offered her the suitcase to use. Had she packed it, the investigator asked?
“I asked her if she had packed the suitcase, and she initially stated that she had. She then changed her story, and said that (her acquaintance) had,” the investigator wrote.
After a few interviews with the women, the investigator said he believed the driver was not being truthful, and that certain “tells” kept coming up.
“She kept trying to tell me that she was not being paid to make the trip and she did not know the drugs were in her suitcase. This was after I had seen her tell her sister she was getting $5,000 for making the trip.”
According to Prater, the woman and a male accomplice face federal felony counts of possession with the intent to distribute heroin. The federal indictment against the two remains sealed, but such a charge carries a sentence of 10 years to life in prison, with fines up to $4 million.
The woman agreed to cooperate through a federal process under what is known as “Rule 11,” which dictates that once a subject is facing trial, that person may agree in an interview to tell all — that once — under the condition that no charges will come from such admission. The information, however, can be used to charge someone else.
In that interview, the woman stated it was her second trip through Oklahoma carrying heroin. The first time, only a few weeks before, she had carried the first 25 pounds.
“So, we got half of it,” Prater said. “The total deal was worth $10 million.”
TRANSCENDING TERROR
This isn’t the first time Oklahoma City’s highway crossroads attracted dangerous activity.
For one, Timothy McVeigh picked Oklahoma City partly because of the ease of its location and easy accessibility by highway. He was, after all, driving a truck bomb.
It’s also documented that one of the Sept. 11 hijackers visited Oklahoma via its road system.
For these reasons, such a large quantity of Afghan heroin moving through Oklahoma is worthy of note, said David Cid, the deputy director of the Oklahoma City’s Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism. Cid recently ran a workshop for Oklahoma City police on aspects of police intelligence.
Trafficking has traits in common with terror enterprises, he said. For one, traffickers “transcend jurisdictional boundaries” to their advantage, such as taking the turnpike to avoid Oklahoma City’s drug interdiction teams.
“The broader issue I suppose, what does this say about the nexus between drug trafficking and terrorism? Are we seeing an increase in both? I think the answer is yes,” Cid said.
“Since we have denied the Taliban and al-Qaida and other groups like them the access to money they had before through Islamic charity organizations … they are depending more and more on traditional criminal activity to fund terrorism. The trafficking of heroin and opium is probably some of the most lucrative activity they can engage in.”
State Sen. Kenneth Corn, D-Howe, an opponent of local drug interdiction being allowed on Oklahoma’s turnpikes, said most local authorities are not trained or equipped as well as Oklahoma City’s. He also stressed the importance of metro authorities sharing intelligence.
“The turnpike is a quasi-state and private entity, and the only force out there that has any authority is the Oklahoma Highway Patrol,” Corn said.
“You are going to getting into the same problem we are having with smaller communities setting up speed traps. A lot of communities have created drug interdiction forces who don’t have the proper training to do it. They take people’s cars and tear them apart, then leave them on the side of the road. We can’t be having that.”
The ODPS did not return calls to Oklahoma Gazette. —Ben Fenwick
