#14 - JRL 7285
Miami Herald
August 11, 2003
Russian mafia worms way into Mexican drug cartels
BY SUSANA HAYWARD
Knight Ridder News Service
MEXICO CITY - The Russian mafia, including former KGB agents, has infiltrated
Mexico's weakened drug cartels and is helping them smuggle illegal narcotics
to the United States, according to U.S. and Mexican officials and independent
drug experts.
Russian mobsters have been most effective in penetrating drug gangs in the
Tijuana-Baja California-San Diego region, Luis Santiago Vasconcelos, the head of
the Mexican attorney general's Special Unit for Organized Crime, told Knight
Ridder. He described the Russians as highly skilled and ``extremely
dangerous.''
TRADING FAVORS
Some of them are advising Mexico's drug cartels and laundering their money in
exchange for being allowed to operate, Steven W. Casteel, assistant
administrator for intelligence at the Drug Enforcement Administration, told a
Senate
Judiciary Committee hearing in Washington in May. The fee for laundering drug
proceeds typically is 30 percent or more.
Casteel, whose agency declined to make him available for an interview, told
lawmakers that 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 have
been spotted in Mexico since the late 1990s.
Their extensive penetration in the Tijuana-San Diego area follows the 2002
arrests of Benjamín Arellano-Félix, the alleged patriarch of the region's drug
cartel, and a dozen more of its alleged leaders.
Russians took up some of the slack when the weakened cartel broke into
''cartelitos,'' said Bruce Bagley, a University of Miami professor of
international
studies who has written extensively about drugs, organized crime and the
Russian mafia.
Another leading Mexican trafficker, the late Amado Carrillo Fuentes, the head
of the Juárez cartel, pioneered the use of surplus Soviet military aircraft
as smuggling planes. He's 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 also
decentralized, according to drug analysts, giving Russians new opportunities in
Mexico.
''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.''
Still, ''these guys are the bloodiest human beings you can imagine,'' he
said. Bagley, who recently finished a year's sabbatical at a prestigious Mexico
City research center, the Center for Research and Economic Education, is the
author of a bibliographic survey titled Drug Trafficking in the Americas:
Aggressive Russian Groups Have Flourished.
The decapitation of Mexico's biggest drug cartels, for which U.S. authorities
credit President Vicente Fox, is giving the Russians what Bagley called ``a
golden opportunity in Mexico.''
SMALLER GANGS
The cartels have fractured into smaller gangs operating at city and state
levels, where they're harder to detect and officials are easier to bribe. The
smaller groups are more open to the Russians, Bagley said, because they need
help
with protection, transportation and money laundering.
Much Russian money laundering is done offshore, he said, in Haiti, the
Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico and Cuba, as well as in Russia.
In the biggest seizure ever to implicate the Russian mob, the U.S. Coast
Guard in April 2001 seized the 152-foot-long fishing vessel Svesda Maru in
international waters off Acapulco and arrested its crew of 10 Russians and
Ukrainians. More than 13 tons of cocaine was buried beneath its rotting squid
bait,
according to the Coast Guard.
U.S. prosecutors said the shipment originated in Colombia and was to be
smuggled into the United States via Mexico. At the time, Errol Chavez, the head
of
the DEA's San Diego office, said the crew must have had permission from the
Arellano-Félix drug cartel.
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