Posts Tagged ‘cocaine’
Cutter returns to Key West with more than 5,000 pounds of Cocaine
KEY WEST, Fla. - The Coast Guard Cutter Thetis returned home Monday after a 36-day law enforcement patrol in the Eastern Pacific highlighted with a 5,511-pound cocaine seizure.
A Look Inside a Self-Propelled Semi-Submersible Vessel - Video
This video provides a look inside a self-propelled semi-submersible vessel carrying 15,000 lbs. of cocaine.
The semi-submersible was apprehended near Guatemala on Wednesday by the Coast Guard Cutter Midgett. After the 4 man crew and cocaine were transferred to the Midgett, it was determined that the vessel could not be towed back to port. It was declared a hazard to navigation and sunk by the Midgett.
U.S. Coast Guard video by Petty Officer Second Class Prentice Danner
Coast Guard seizes $196 million of cocaine in second bust this week - with Video
SEATTLE - The crew of the Coast Guard Cutter Midgett, homeported here, and a Navy maritime patrol aircraft crew teamed up to interdict a stateless (unflagged,) self-propelled, semi-submersible vessel Wednesday with seven tons of cocaine aboard approximately 400 miles south of the Mexico-Guatemala border.
The 60-foot, self-propelled, semi-submersible (SPSS) craft was detected by the crew of the Navy aircraft which vectored the crew of the Midgett to the location of the SPSS. The Coast Guard quickly commenced a boarding of the stateless SPSS. The Coast Guard boarding team located 295 bales of cocaine, valued at more than $196 million, in a huge forward compartment. The SPSS became unstable and began to sink during the transfer of the bales of cocaine from the SPSS to Midgett. The condition of the vessel made it unsafe to tow and Midgett’s crew sank the vessel as a hazard to navigation.
Wednesday’s interdiction follows a daring nighttime boarding and seizure of another SPSS on Saturday in which the Coast Guard boarding team, embarked aboard the USS McInerney, surprised an SPSS with four suspected smugglers using the cover of darkness to take positive control of the SPSS. The smugglers attempted to throw the boarding team into the sea by reversing the SPSS engines suddenly, and attempted to scuttle the vessel, but the boarding team compelled the smugglers to comply with orders to close the scuttling valves. Seven tons of cocaine were seized from the SPSS and the USS McInerney took the SPSS in tow.
“I’m proud to tell you that over the past five days, Pacific Area Coast Guard units, with the help of our U.S. Navy and interagency partners, seized more than 14 tons of cocaine with a street value of more than $383 million from two self-propelled, semi-submersible vessels in the Eastern Pacific Ocean,” said Adm. Thad Allen, Commandant of the U.S. Coast Guard. “The interoperability between Coast Guard and Navy assets has never bee more effective. Our Department of Defense and interagency partners are a critical force multiplier making such interdictions possible.”
Venezuela Growing as a Cocain Exporter
The Associated Press is reporting that Venezuela has become a major factor in the worldwide cocaine problem.
White House drug czar John Walters told The Associated Press that Venezuela has shown no willingness to cooperate with U.S. officials against drugs.
The flow of Colombian cocaine through Venezuela has quadrupled since 2004, reaching an estimated 282 tons (256 metric tons) last year, he said.
“The flow is increasing as dramatically as it is because it is operating in a condition of impunity,” Walters told the AP in a phone interview from Washington. “The failure of the Venezuelan government to go after this is a failure to be serious.”
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U.S. law enforcement officials have detected repeated flights by planes that leave Venezuela, drop off large loads of cocaine off the island of Hispaniola and return to Venezuela, Walters said. Others multi-ton loads are moving, largely by ship by also by flights, from Venezuela to west Africa — a way station for shipments to Europe.
Coast Guard LEDET Assists Dutch Navy in Record Drug Bust
More details on the 9200 pound cocaine bust off Puerto Rico that we reported yesterday.
An informant tipped of the government that a freighter was travelling from Venuzuela to Europe with a large shipment of drugs. The Netherlands Navy’s HNLMS Van Speijk monitored the Panamanian flagged freighter for two days near Puerto Rico.
“At first daylight, the Van Speijk and her helicopter approached the target ship at high speed and positioned alongside the merchant ship,” a press statement from the Coast Guard said. “A US Coast Guard Law Enforcement Team LEDET especially embarked onboard the Dutch West Indies guard ship to conduct counter-drug operations was transferred to the Panamanian freighter.”
The LEDET spent a day and half going over the ship before they found a suspicious hatch in the engine room revealing an entrance to an area hold the 25kg bales of cocaine were stored.
Naval officers confiscated the drugs and arrested the 12 crewmen aboard the freighter.
Editors Note: BZ to the LEDET for hanging in there for a day and half in order to find the drugs.
9200 Pounds of Cocaine Seized Off Puerto Rico
Caribbean World News reports that one of the largest drug busts ever was made on Tuesday in international waters south of Puerto Rico.
The 4,200 kilos (9,240 pounds) of cocaine, worth $310 million, was found aboard a freight ship whose crew has since been detained for questioning.
The Dutch Navy executed the bust in collaboration with the US Coast Guard.
HITRON Snipers Taking On Smugglers
Mens Vogue has a very interesting story about the HITRON snipers. Here’s an excerpt
On a sunny fall day 300 miles off the west coast of Guatemala, Coast Guard pilot Dan Roberts readied for combat from the front seat of his MH-68A Stingray helicopter. In the back of the chopper, gunner Andrew Kramer — 30 years old and tightly wound — loaded his .50-caliber rifle, each bullet as thick and long as a hot dog and strong enough to rip through two inches of steel. Somewhere in the vast Pacific Ocean below, a band of armed smugglers in a camouflaged speedboat was barreling north with 4,000 pounds — $80 million — of cocaine onboard. They were aimed for the coast of Mexico, probably Acapulco, where a brutal and entrepreneurial Mexican cartel would ship the product north to the target market: the nostrils of America.
Roberts — who sports a shaved head and the swagger that comes with 17 years in the military — was on patrol for the Coast Guard’s Helicopter Interdiction Tactical Squadron (HITRON), an elite team tasked with tracking down and attacking cocaine shipments from South America. Since the Navy cannot legally open fire on civilian boats that refuse to stop, they call in HITRON, the only U.S. military unit authorized to shoot out the boats’ motors — a tactic that spares a bloody mess to explain to the press or foreign governments. Based in Jacksonville, Florida, the helicopters are the military’s safest and most successful tool for stopping the drug boats known as “go-fasts,” and have a territorial range that includes the entire Caribbean Sea and the eastern Pacific Ocean.
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Roberts called for a weapons check, then gave the order: “Commence fire.” Kramer slung his other weapon, an M240 machine gun, into position and unleashed a series of 30 shots, each hitting just in front of the bow — no small feat of accuracy given the bouncing target and the high winds swaying the chopper. When the go-fast ignored them, Kramer trained his rifle’s laser-guided sights on the Yamaha engines — the bull’s-eye no bigger than a shoebox. With painstaking care to avoid the fuel tanks, he fired a single shot, burning through the metal housings and killing the first motor. Two shots later and the third and final motor was dead. “The driver just threw his hands up,” said Roberts. “Mission complete, no one was hurt, and the cavalry is on the horizon to take the bad guys into custody. This is a gentleman’s war.”
You should read the full story at Mens Vogue
Coast Guard Confiscates 1,511 Pounds of Cocain, 17 Pounds of Heroin
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico - U.S. Coast Guard personnel, working with their partners in the Caribbean Border Interagency Group (CBIG), Puerto Rico made a drug interdiction in the Mona Passage Friday, May 23, 2008, detaining two drug smugglers and seizing approximately 1,511 pounds of cocaine and 17 pounds of heroin (approximately 600 kilos of drugs).
The cases of the two drug smugglers, Josué Alberto Dávila Padró and Jonathan Fonseca Torres, were accepted for prosecution by the United States Attorney’s Office in Puerto Rico.
The crew of a U.S. Customs and Border Protection fixed-wing aircraft located a suspect vessel Friday morning near Mona Island, Puerto Rico, as the vessel was transiting to the west coast of Puerto Rico from the Dominican Republic. Coast Guard Cutter Tornado arrived on scene and interdicted the 35-foot fiberglass vessel, about seven miles southeast of Mona Island. The crew of the Tornado took custody of two Puerto Ricans and initially located and recovered approximately 15 bricks of cocaine hidden within the vessel. They towed the vessel to Mayagüez, Puerto Rico where they turned over the custody of the drugs, the vessel and the smugglers to Immigration and Customs Enforcement ICE.
After ICE agents and U.S. Customs and Border Protection Officers conducted a further inventory search of the interdicted vessel, they located an additional 445 bricks of cocaine and seven bricks of heroin.
The concept of CBIG resulted from a March 2006 collaboration of local Homeland Security components that effectively stemmed the increased flow of traffic across the Mona Passage between the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico. In July 2006, CBIG was formally created to unify efforts of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s Office of Air & Marine (A&M), Office of Field Operations (OFO), and Office of Border Patrol (OBP), the U.S. Coast Guard (USCG), Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the United States Attorney ‘ s Office, District of Puerto Rico, in their common goal of securing Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands against illegal maritime traffic and gaining control of our nation’s Caribbean borders.
Coast Guard Cutter Tornado is 179-foot patrol craft home ported in Pascagoula, Miss.