Ten
FACT
Smuggling concerns more than “people and things.” We’ve seen how individuals are willing to risk imprisonment or even death to move contraband. The list of smuggled goods is almost endless, and even the government doesn’t have a tally of how many things are forbidden. As one old customs department hand explained it, “We enforce 600 laws for 60 different Federal agencies.”
The CITES list alone holds more than 33,000 species. Counterfeit goods—bogus NFL T-shirts to Gucci suitcases—add thousands more items. Pirated software and music is another “bottomless” category. You can be sure the uniformed customs and border protection official you won’t make eye contact with when you pass through the international airport doesn’t know the total number either. Contraband is like love or porno—you know it when you see it.
But there is contraband beyond “people and things.” It is the most powerful contraband of all: ideas. Florida played a role there too, a role it continues to play. We need only to look at—once again—our neighbor to the south.
The fiery poetry of José Martí raised considerable sums in Florida through the cigar-rollers’ self-imposed 10 percent tax on wages. It bought the arms Napoleon Broward smuggled south. The continued resistance of the insurrectos would have collapsed without either the arms or the money. The stirring words of Martí were the most potent export of all. When the Spanish-American War started in 1898, support for the Spanish colonial government was vanishingly small in both Cuba and the United States.
A similar, although less well-documented, effort began in the late 1950s in support of another revolutionary firebrand against outside oppression on the island. Cuba had become a colony again, this time ruled by American organized crime and multinational corporations.
The government of Fidel Castro today does not recognize the clandestine support it enjoyed as rebels in the hills from a new generation of filibusters in the United States. In neither case can the smugglers claim to be the deciding factor. But in both cases, radical changes in the Cuban political system were presaged by smugglers moving guns, cash and ideas across the Florida straits.
The saga goes on. Anti-Castro Cubans are now engaged in the same exercise. Guns, money and ideas were smuggled south in the last third of the twentieth century to try and break Castro’s Marxist-Leninist grip on the country. Anti-Castro Cubans hope “the third time is the charm.”
Arms smuggling from Florida remains robust. Guerilla groups from all over the hemisphere (and beyond) are happy to buy Florida’s guns and smuggle them home. Filibustering is alive and well.
Of all the impacts of smuggling on Florida, none is more important than the economic influence. Big-money smuggling came to Florida three times in the twentieth century—rum, marijuana and cocaine. In all three, the prosperity was shared. First and foremost, the banks benefited.
Banks work a bit like the Black Market Peso Exchange but in reverse. You deposit money in the bank and receive a small amount of interest. Banks lend “your” money to homebuyers, expanding businesses and other worthies at a higher rate of interest. Banking profits largely come from the difference between the two positive interest rates. The peso exchange works like this but in the opposite direction, with negative interest. An economist will argue the BMPE is a deflationary mechanism, while banks are regulated by the prime rate to control their inevitable inflationary mechanism.
Big-time smugglers often come from unsophisticated backgrounds. Banks are an obvious place to put their profits. This allows Florida banks to lend more money. And that is good for Florida’s primary industry: selling swampland to Yankees. Florida’s land booms coincide with Florida’s smuggling booms. Even when the rest of the country was in a recession during the early 1980s, pot haulers and their friends kept Florida afloat in cash. Which was good for the banks, good for real estate, good for car dealers, grocers, just about anybody in business—especially for anybody wanting a loan to buy a home.
Until 1985, Miami’s banks still weren’t checking identification and billions more moved into the banks. The dramatic—some say overreaching—architecture of Miami was one consequence.
Another was the contamination of the U.S. money supply with cocaine. In 1996 three men gathered batches of one-dollar bills in several cities across the country. They reported in the Journal of Toxicology that “Cocaine was present in 79% of the currency samples analyzed.”
As the Miami money-counting machines sorted the smugglers’ gains, the powder-fine grains of cocaine contaminated the machines, which spread it everywhere. Imagine putting money in a counter and seeing a puff of cocaine dust appear.
One consequence was political embarrassment when reporters swapped out bills with major political figures on Capitol Hill and had the cash checked. Yup, most of the senators and reps were holding cocaine-tainted money. The more serious question went unasked: how tainted were the congressmen?
It is difficult to believe a $10 billion-plus per year industry didn’t try to exert political leverage with campaign contributions in the United States. The cartels certainly were funneling money into Colombian politics. But no major scandal erupted in the United States. So the impact of cocaine money on U.S. politics remains conjectural.
It is interesting to note a bulk cash transportation bill was introduced several years before 9/11/01 but didn’t pass until the Patriot Act was approved. A bill on the Black Market Peso Exchange—used by smugglers and many major U.S. multinational corporations—remains stalled in Congress.
The future of smuggling, as always, is in a state of flux. As we move into an electronic future, with microchips embedded in cargo containers and even individual goods, it might appear the days of load-up-and-go smuggling are finished. As we saw in Florida, it was possible to defeat two richly funded, ruthlessly staffed and highly disciplined smuggling cartels. Their hierarchical structure actually contributed to their downfall, and today’s smugglers—always adaptable—have learned an important lesson.
The “key man” is no longer necessary. Today’s smugglers enjoy all the tools of globalization: outsourcing, networking, teamwork and flexibility. While supply and demand remain the two extremes of any contraband endeavor, the smugglers in the middle are diversifying in both products and tactics. The men who smuggled Cubans in the late 1990s also had smuggled cocaine; ditto for the gangs who used cruise ships. Brokers and agents are replacing kingpins. Cooperation for mutual profit is now the password to success.
That cooperation is not limited to fellow smugglers. Terrorists and other political entities are showing up in the smuggling story with increasing frequency. In a world with an apparently limitless appetite for contraband, smugglers and their allies are growing in number and power. With its long and colorful history, Florida will not be exempt from the licit and illicit influences of smuggling. Miami has joined Shanghai and Tangiers in the pantheon of smuggler havens.
Will the nature of contraband change? In Florida we began with smuggling humans, and it is still going on. Thanks to America’s gun lobby, assault weapons are available to anyone. Armaments are easy to purchase and dispatch to other countries, so arms smuggling will continue to be a secure niche. Anything legal in one place and illegal in another is an open invitation to smuggling.
While the end of Prohibition terminated big-time liquor smuggling, it will remain a hobbyist’s pastime. There’s a bottle of Havana Club rum in my kitchen, courtesy of my last visit abroad (and my impulsive desire to evade authority). Rare and expensive stuff will still be smuggled but primarily for individual cachet.
The customs and border protection staff will continue to enforce the constantly changing “600 laws for 60 agencies”—that endless list including human heads, bird eggs, Saudi coins, Incan textiles, weird reptiles, banned carpets and caviar. Miami doesn’t need a zoo. It has an airport.
As long as there is a demand for contraband, it will be supplied. If prices are high enough, supplies of illicit goods will continue to attract organizations willing to invest in the means of production and transportation, plus the necessary “plata o plomo.”
The illegal drug smuggling industry is in transition, because an increasing number of drugs are illegal. Heroin, cocaine, methamphetamines and marijuana are already billion-dollar businesses. Each new generation seizes on a new illegal drug of choice. Medicinal drugs are starting to enter the smuggling market, thanks to recent changes in the American Medicare program. Florida’s drug smugglers are not going away.
One constant remains—cash. Smuggling is a business. No matter what the cargo, the end result is cash. It is the Achilles heel of all smugglers. As money laundering laws tightened, the smugglers adapted with increasing sophistication. Banks opened for business on islands nobody could find on a map. And when they were closed, an even slicker method was used that didn’t move cash beyond national borders.
Kenneth Rijock, the convicted money launderer, is correct: very talented and sophisticated people are working on money laundering. The stakes are billions of dollars. The globalization of international finance has created innumerable loopholes and havens for hot money. And as the American war on terrorism shows, the old tactic of “follow the money” doesn’t work anymore because the trail is impenetrable.
Smugglers realize cash is their weakness. They must sell in cash, but what to do with it? The future of big-time smuggling lies with those anonymous, talented and sophisticated people in the towers of the world’s money centers who are working ingeniously to keep the illicit proceeds flowing.
The future of individual smuggling will remain rosy, subject only to the occasional arrest by sharp-eyed CBP officials. Smuggling by organizations is increasingly vulnerable to penetration and interception by many different intelligence agencies.
The link between terrorism and smuggling involves the full national intelligence apparatus—human spies, electronic eavesdropping, mail opening, traffic analysis, cryptography, etc. All smuggling organizations are now in an “intelligence battle” with the authorities, similar in many respects to the cold war. But it is a battle between entrenched bureaucracies and agile, increasingly decentralized smugglers using a host of modern electronic and cybernetic tools. With the current American focus on terrorism and immigration, fewer resources are available to attack smuggling.
The increasing wisdom of machines will be the cutting edge of interdiction, the ultimate snitch that breaks codes, discerns communication patterns, traces cash flows and perhaps even produces an analysis of individual human behavioral patterns.
In South America today, potential kidnap victims are implanting themselves with Global Positioning System chips readable by satellite. The increasing “microchipping” of passports, cargoes and individuals will be coupled with the inevitable introduction of a universal national identification card to create an electronic mesh readable by networked machines. But smugglers will adapt. Especially if they can get inside information from headquarters.
Years ago I took a reporter’s sabbatical to pursue a graduate degree in Washington, D.C. I’d stayed too long at the library and the buses had stopped running. I walked over to Massachusetts Avenue on a bitter January night and stuck out my thumb, hoping for a ride downtown. After a while, a battered pickup truck stopped and a young man gestured me inside. We rode in silence for a while. He asked if I was a student, where, for what degree. We chatted. He was from Texas, single.
I popped the usual D.C. question: “What do you do?” He took a drag on his Marlboro and said, “I’m in the coast guard.”
“Good for you,” I said. “I’m a sailor. I like you guys. You working in some headquarters?”
“Yeah, I’m in the drug interdiction center.”
“Wow. You know, I’m from Florida, and there’s a lot of people who’d like to know what you know.”
“Yeah.” He smiled.
“I mean, if you were careful, you could make a lot of money.”
“Yeah, if I was careful.” Then it was my stop, Dupont Circle.
“Thanks for the lift, coasty,” I said as I opened the door. Then he gestured at me.
“If I was careful, I’d drive a ratty old truck like this, wouldn’t I?” I smiled and saluted. He drove off into the night.
FICTION
With weak knees, Juan Ortiz stepped off the suborbital liner into the transport tube. All the passengers were weak-kneed. The high-G, zero-G, high-G flight from Hong Kong to Miami was fast but physically punishing. And it produced a lot of stress pheromones. He was relying on that to pass the first bank of sniffers.
At the end of the tube, he waited for an arrow to indicate which entrance to the maze he would use. The maze shifted daily, so left-or-right indicated nothing. Everybody on the flight was under scrutiny, and some search was inevitable. Left, the arrow indicated.
The plain hallway concealed any number of scanners, sniffers and other remote-sensing devices. His strength was coming back and he picked up his pace. The first desk was always the same.
“Passport, please,” said the official. Ortiz handed it over. Passports were tattletales now. The GPS recorder tracked its movements. An active micromemory chip remembered its communication with other devices. The ancient barcode still communicated its unique persona. This was the first test. “Thank you, Mr. Ortiz,” the official said. “Have a pleasant stay in Miami. Please take the left-hand hallway.”
Left, then another desk but the official waved him on, left again. Ortiz realized he was being shunted to the periphery of the maze, into the grey zone, where national laws didn’t apply and international law didn’t exist. He’d prefer to be in the middle of the maze, but had no choice. A short walk led to another official, who glanced up from his terminal.
“Mr. Ortiz,” he said. “Could I ask a few questions?” So far, this was normal for the suborbital routine. This was to be expected. “Anything to declare?”
Juan produced his declaration form, listing a bottle of excellent Japanese whisky, two non-pornographic carvings and a new silk suit. All totaled, just under the dollar limit for customs duties.
The official looked at his screen. Seconds ticked by. Juan defocused. The official could take as long as he liked.
“Mr. Ortiz, you declared two carvings. May I see them?” Juan looked up, and behold! His single piece of luggage was in a corner of the maze, just ahead. “May I?” “Please.”
Juan kneeled down and flipped the latch. The black nylon lid rose. The official knelt down to rummage through the bag. Juan felt a wave of caution. This kneeling uniform was not good news. The official produced a wand and touched the carvings.
Juan rose, and after a moment, the official rose too. “Everything seems to be in order, sir. I’m a whisky fan too, especially Suntory Islay. Mazeltov.”
He repacked Juan’s bag and sent him right. A very good omen. After a long walk with his bag, Juan emerged into a brightly lit and open area. He stopped for a moment to orient himself, saw “Ortiz” on a hand-held sign, and walked through a turnstile to emerge into “the public.”
In his testicle was an illegal implant. Six fertilized DNA capsules, cooking and expanding clones. He had two hours at most to appear at the appointed clinic only a cab ride away.