Suspects Are Proceeding Down Spruce Street, Headed for Gold
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over their short-wave radios: "Suspects are proceeding down Spruce Street, headed for Gold." In the third-floor ob- servation post, one agent cracked to TIME Correspondent James Willwerth, "The Chinese are very punctual." So UNDERCOVER AGENTS SHOW HUIE ti LOK $200,000 IN TRUNK they were—right on time for 1.ie most In hollowed-out heels, false-bottomed suitcases, cars, girdles and boa constrictors. important narcotics bust this summer. At 9 p.m., two wary men walked Then the General led one of the agents back and dropped the heroin in a va- up to the green Cadillac: Kenneth Kan- off on a meandering excursion that end- cant lot, arriving empty-handed. He kit Huie, 60, self-styled "unofficial ed up in a Chinatown sportswear shop. seemed worried about police. The agent mayor of Chinatown," and Tim Lok, There it was the agent's turn to inspect and Guan argued in the street in front 35, known to federal agents as "the the wares: a cardboard box packed with of Beekman Hospital for several min- General" for his ramrod-stiff posture. 14 plastic bags containing 20 lbs. of utes, and finally the hesitant Chinese The four men—two undercover narcot- pure No. 4 white heroin from South- agreed to make the deal. The four men ics agents, and the two "connections" east Asia. Street value: $10 million. piled into the green Cadillac and fol- whom they had been trying to nail for The agent and the General then lowed the gray Dodge station wagon to four months—wasted no time. The went back toward Gold Street in a taxi, a dark, deserted street, under the shad- agents opened the trunk of the Cadil- followed in a gray Dodge station wag- ow of the Brooklyn Bridge. Following lac and showed the Chinese the con- on by a third Chinese. Guan Chow- he General's directions, one undercov- tents of an olive-drab attaché case in- tok, bringing the heroin. But Guan, .tr agent walked through waist-high side: $200,000 in $50 and $100 bills. owner of the sportswear shop, doubled grass into the vacant lot. Suddenly, he knelt down and said loudly: "This is the package; this is the package." On that signal, the night fairly ex- ploded with armed men and flashing lights. Two unmarked cars squealed to a stop at opposite ends of the street, blocking the escape routes. Agents wav- ing pistols and shotguns sprinted out of the shadows from all directions. Huie. the General and a fourth Chinese accom- plice surrendered immediately. Guan jumped into his gray Dodge—and found himself staring into the muzzle of a .45 automatic in the hands of an agent who was leaning through an open window. Though last week's Chinatown bust was motion-picture perfect, to U.S. nar- cotics experts it was another bittersweet element in an increasingly frustrating, not to say disastrous situation. True, the raid was the latest in a number of suc- cessful skirmishes in what President Nixon describes, more and more plau- sibly, as a global "war on drugs." In Montreal and Saigon, narcotics officers have recently nabbed some of the big- ger wholesalers. Washington, mean- TIME, SEPTEMBER 4, 1972 while, is awaiting the imminent extra- dition by Paraguay of Auguste Joseph Ricord, French-born boss of a Latin American connection that is alleged to have piped heroin worth $1.2 billion into the U.S. over a five-year period (TIME, Aug. 28). But the bad news about narcotics far overshadows such success. The "skag" seized at the Brooklyn Bridge last week was the second large shipment of Asian heroin to be intercepted in New York. The first seizure came last November when a Philippine diplomat and his Chinese partner were arrested at Manhattan's Lexington Hotel with 38 lbs. of heroin in their luggage. The two busts tend to confirm the gloomy THAILAND DRUG TRADERS DELIVERING OPIUM IN OPEN TRUCK forecasts of U.S. narcotics experts that as some of the old drug trade routes South Vietnamese, who have from Europe become more dangerous, picked up a taste for hard new ones will open up from Asia. The drugs from the departing emergence of Asia, with its immense American soldiers. All over opium production, as a major exporter Western Europe. which once of narcotics, promises to make the drug idly dismissed hard drugs as trade a truly global problem. "an American problem." of- New Routes. Through most of the ficials now reckon that they postwar years, drugs had flowed from have a growing addict pop- the poppy fields of Turkey and the labs ulation of about 100,000. of Marseille direct to the U.S. via the Says a U.S. State Department famed "French connection." In the past official: "They're real scared two or three years, more and more her- about what the late 1970s oin has been routed through Latin will bring." America and the Caribbean, where law So is Washington. One enforcement is spotty and protection day last January, John E. In- cheap. But as the Latin connection be- gersoll, blunt-spoken chief of gins to feel more and more heat, and if the Justice Department's Bu- Turkey phases out remaining opium reau of Narcotics and Dan- production under pressure from Wash- gerous Drugs, went to the ington, the drug trade is expected to White House to report per- swing increasingly to Asia, drawing on sonally that an "astonishing MULE TRAIN HAULING OPIUM DOWN FROM THAI MOUNTAINS the vast surpluses of opium grown in variety" of drugs—heroin, the remote, misty hills of Burma, Thai- cocaine, amphetamines, hashish, mar- land and Laos, source of 58% of the ijuana—was continuing to pour into the 1,200 tons of illicit opium the world pro- U.S. Nixon, by all accounts, was in a duced last year. State Department nar- rage. "But dammit," he said at one cotics experts already see several routes point, "there must be something we can developing, including one to the U.S. do to stop this." via Hong Kong and Britain. The result has been a dramatic The present flow of narcotics to the change in the U.S. approach to drugs. West is capable of supporting a savage Only two years ago, U.S. narcotics agen- rise in consumption—and with it, sav- cies operated on a miserly $78 million 0 age rises in crime, in crippled lives and budget. Now the White House is ask- in deaths. Hard statistics are hard to ing Congress for $729 million nest year come by, but the best Government es- for a flock of new agencies. timates put the U.S. heroin-addict pop- The agencies are charged with what ulation at 560,000—ten times the level is essentially a broad-gauged search- of 1960 and almost double what it was and-destroy mission. In the U.S. the Jus- MARIJUANA PICKUP IN JAMAICA only two years ago. On the average. a tice Department's eight-month-old Of- And couriers. U.S. addict spends $8,000 a year to sup- fice for Drug Abuse Law Enforcement diplomatic port his habit; in New York City, with has 300 investigators tracking down Force and Air Guard squadrons have an addict population of more than 300,- street pushers. while the Internal Rev- been ordered to maintain their F-102 000, as much as 50% of all crime is re- enue Service has 410 special agents and supersonic F-106 interceptors on lated to addiction. The U.S. has become checking distributors' tax records. alert status, ready to scramble in five a heroin market worth $5 billion a year The Bureau of Customs, charged minutes. Besides the heroin smugglers, to the international drug trade. with policing thousands of miles of their targets will also include the light As other countries are discovering wide-open frontier, is due to add 330 planes that deliver something like a ton to their horror, it is an expanding mar- new men to its hard-pressed 532-man of Jamaican marijuana daily, mostly at ket. In Canada, recent estimates place border patrol force. Last month Nixon airfields in Florida. the addict population at 14,000 and ris- ordered the Air Force to help out by in- The heart of the strategy is a U.S. ef- ing. Turkey now has a small heroin-ad- stalling new extra-low-level radar at fort, one with no precedent in history. dict population—a development that sites in Texas and New Mexico, where to tear up the major international drug defies Moslem strictures against drugs it will be used to track the airborne routes. On one wall of the Washington and the powerful conviction among smugglers who scoot across the Mexi- "war room" of the Bureau of Narcot- Turks that narcotics reduce sexual po- can border in light planes. avoiding de- ics and Dangerous Drugs, magnetic tency. Heroin is spreading among young tection by flying at cactus level. Air chips on a huge map of the world in- TIME, SEPTEMBER 4, 1972 23 THE WORLD dictate the location of the bureau's 1,610 Evidently because of recent busts in agents—up from 884 two years ago. In Canada. France and New York, addicts each of the key drug-traffic countries, are shuddering through the third month such as France, Mexico, Turkey and of a major heroin drought. In Montre- Thailand. eight to 15 HNDD men act as al, a major port of entry for French her- advisers to their local counterparts, oin, one dealer complained last week gather intelligence on their own, and, that "the stuff is scarce as hell.