Word: deas
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Earlier this month, at greater length, the Drug Enforcement Administration began providing Vermont realtors with a so-called drug-trafficker profile. New England DEA Chief Robert Stutman mailed two-page, single-spaced letters asking the state's realtors to "help locate properties that are being utilized to conceal illicit drugs" by flagging the agency when dealing with customers who fit that general description. Stutman said the pusher profile was based on DEA experience. Vermont is located in the middle of the heavily traveled Montreal-Boston smuggling corridor. Says Stutman: "We need all the help...
...time, Stutman regarded his letter as a routine move, but some Vermonters thought otherwise. Said White River Junction Realtor Chas Baker: "Just about anybody who walks through my doors fits at least one of the profile's criteria." An editorial in the Rutland, Vt, Herald sharply criticized the DEA request, using the headline REALTORS AS NARCS. Some residents even complained to the Vermont chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, whose executive director, Scott Skinner, found that the DEA profile "smacks of Big Brotherism...
...cocaine trail to the U.S. begins 2,500 miles southwest of Florida, on the eastern slopes of the Andes Mountains. The cash-crop cultivation of coca is divided primarily between Bolivia (86,000 acres) and Peru (123,000 acres). The DEA, which has five agents in each country, estimates that 23,000 Bolivian peasant families depend on coca for their livelihoods, and that the crop generates nearly $1 billion a year for Peru, where the entire national budget is just over $5 billion. But the business is controlled by Colombians. All but a small fraction of cocaine headed...
...Colombia as in the U.S., says John Bacon, head of cocaine-intelligence gathering for the DEA: "There is no Mr. Big." But another U.S. official estimates that there are 100,000 Colombians living in the U.S. who "earn major dollar figures in drugs." According to DEA officials, there are ten principal Colombian cocaine rings with members in Bogota, Miami and the middle-class New York City borough of Queens. Each ring takes in at least $50 million a year. Says Bacon about the Colombian coke gangsters: "They are tremendous organizers. They deal very effectively with Americans." They also operate...
...grams of coke to undercover cops for $300. Consider a sampling from the past three months in the Washington, D.C., area: a suburban couple picked up with 8 lbs. of coke, a Virginia accountant arrested when 45 lbs. shipped from Ecuador were intercepted and delivered to his door by DEA agents posing as deliverymen, an Air Force member of the presidential honor guard charged with distribution of cocaine, and in Frederick, Md., a six-person coke ring (including a local lawyer and a banker) busted. "It used to be that a pound of cocaine was a big seizure," says Assistant...