Series: Stash City

STASH CITY / CHAPTER ONE: TUCSON'S POT ECONOMY

Today, the Arizona Daily Star looks at how much money Tucson makes by receiving, repackaging and distributing loads of pot to the rest of North America. On Monday, the Star shows how a local marijuana ring was unraveled by a single informant. Tuesday, local leaders discuss how the trade affects us and whether to consider stricter drug enforcement, more emphasis on treatment, or legalization.

You may not smoke pot, but in Tucson you can't avoid the marijuana trade.

After three decades in the industry, Tucson now provides a vital link in the wholesale chain - receiving large loads from Mexico, storing them and distributing them to customers across the United States and Canada.

Marijuana also helps explain the growing presence of federal police here, from U.S. Border Patrol SUVs driving down Ajo Way to surveillance planes flying high in the desert sky.

A four-month Arizona Daily Star investigation found that Tucson's international marijuana trade enters the lives of people in every corner of the metropolitan area, through our neighbors, our businesses and our pocketbooks. Interviews with traffickers, investigators and economists, along with reviews of court documents and law-enforcement reports, show:

Tucson made an estimated $350 million from the distribution of marijuana in 2000, plus another $75 million from federal attempts to stop it here, boosting the trade to an economic force rivaling the region's promising optics industry.

Tucson and El Paso appear to be the country's top cities for "stash houses," usually rental homes in residential areas where traffickers store, repackage and send out marijuana loads.

Every five days this year, authorities in another state have seized a marijuana load sent from Tucson, establishing the area as a home base for marijuana conspiracies nationwide.

While every major city has a retail drug trade directed at consumers, Tucson supplies all of them.

Take, for example, David Harvan's case. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Harvan came to Tucson about 25 times to buy and send loads to Virginia.

"In Tucson, there was tons of marijuana sitting here on any given day," said Harvan, of Bisbee. "Sometimes we'd go see four or five loads in an afternoon. It was just like shopping."

Harvan pleaded guilty to marijuana trafficking and spent more than two years in state prison. The former electrician returned to Bisbee to re-launch his brewery, Electric Brewing.

Investigators say there has been even more marijuana passing through the city in recent years.

"Historically, there have been connections between people in Southern Arizona and people in Mexico in the marijuana distribution network. Over time that's just grown," said Raymond L. Vinsik, director of the Arizona High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area, a federal intelligence and anti-drug coordinating center known as HIDTA.

Traffickers working here spend money like anyone else - on business and personal costs such as housing, vehicles and food. They earn that money by marking up the price of each marijuana load to cover expenses and make a profit.

Take the case of William S. Fusci, a Tucson man who has acknowledged being a link in the chain of the local marijuana economy and is scheduled for sentencing Dec. 21.

Drug Enforcement Administration agents investigating Fusci last year found that for one 400-pound load he paid $550 a pound to a Tucson supplier, according to federal court documents. When Fusci sold marijuana to Robert R. Boswell in Florida, he usually charged about $1,000 per pound, Boswell said in a plea agreement this year. The difference, in this case $450, is the Tucson distributor's markup.

In his plea agreement, Boswell, who is scheduled to be sentenced Monday for conspiring to distribute marijuana, acknowledged buying around 5,000 pounds of marijuana per year from Fusci in recent years. Fusci, 41, distributed pot loads for nine years, according to the indictment against him.

"While we're pending sentencing, there's nothing we can say," said Fusci's attorney, Mike Bloom.

Law-enforcement records show that in 2000, officers seized 291,994 pounds of marijuana in Tucson and Southern Arizona areas that feed into the city, from Douglas to the Tohono O'odham Reservation.

Drug investigators don't know what percentage of total traffic they seize, but they estimate the top possibility at 20 percent. Using this estimate, 1.17 million pounds of marijuana made it to the Old Pueblo in 2000.

At a markup of $300 per pound, an amount suggested by interviews with five traffickers, investigators and court records, Tucson made $350 million on wholesale marijuana sales last year.

Changing the percentage seized or average markup yields a broad range of marijuana-related revenues, from as little as $88 million to as much as $1.3 billion.

Add to that the approximately $75 million the federal government spent locally in 2000 on agencies partially or wholly dedicated to fighting drugs, and marijuana distribution rivaled the optics industry. Optics firms, working to earn Tucson the title "Optics Valley" with products from headlights to telescopes, made about $650 million last year.

"Brand-new, fresh dollars"

At around $350 million in revenues and $75 million in federal expenditures, marijuana added 2 percent to the area's total personal income of $20.7 billion in 2000.

"That's pretty large," said UA economist Marshall Vest. Since most of the marijuana that moves through Tucson is distributed to the rest of North America, Vest said, "It represents a flow of brand-new, fresh dollars into the community."

Economists calculate the spinoff effects of legitimate industries by looking at the jobs and wages created when employees spend money in the community. This "multiplier effect" would be impossible to determine with marijuana distribution, said Vera Pavlakovich-Kochi, program director at the University of Arizona's Office of Economic Development. The reason: No one can track how much marijuana money stays in the area.

A study Pavlakovich-Kochi conducted in 1997 provides a clue. She looked at the economic impact of the fresh-produce industry on Nogales and Rio Rico. The marketing services segment of the produce industry - the sector that mirrors the role Tucson plays in the marijuana industry - generated $376.4 million, which created a multiplier effect of 6,052 jobs and $159 million in wages.

No direct comparison can be made between Nogales-Rio Rico produce marketing and marijuana distribution in Tucson, she cautioned. Still, she said, "definitely there is an impact on the economy. There is no doubt about it."

The beneficiaries of the marijuana trade, most of them unknowing, range from "real estate agents to car dealerships to titling companies," said Pennie Gillette, an Arizona Department of Public Safety lieutenant who directs the Arizona High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area intelligence center here.

Those in the hospitality industry also get an added boost from traffickers' frequent meetings.

"When they meet," said Vinsik, Gillette's supervisor at Arizona HIDTA, "they want to meet at fancy hotels and have fancy dinners and negotiate their deals."

Capitalizing on Mexico ties

To understand why the money flows to Tucson, look south.

Mexico is the United States' top supplier of marijuana, probably accounting for more than half of what Americans consume, said Matt Maggio, chief of the national drug threat assessment unit at the National Drug Intelligence Center in Pennsylvania.

Mexico's top marijuana-growing states are primarily in the west, including Sinaloa and Jalisco. From those states, the most direct land route north to the United States is Mexican Highway 15, which ends in Nogales. The Arizona border town of 21,000 residents could function as a marijuana distribution center, but Tucson, just 60 miles away, serves the traffickers' purposes much better.

Tucson is big enough and diverse enough that traffickers fit in without drawing notice. It's north of the U.S. Border Patrol's checkpoints and offers access to roads, rail lines and airlines.

Marijuana owners in Mexico take advantage of Tucson's location, as well as family and business connections to Southern Arizona, said Ron Benson, a Pima County Sheriff's Department lieutenant who until Oct. 21 was deputy commander of the Metropolitan Area Narcotics Trafficking Interdiction Squads, or MANTIS.

"It's not unusual to have the kingpins in Mexico, and their managers be up here in Tucson," Benson said. "It's the job of the managers to bring the stuff together and parcel it out to their buyers."

Traffickers deliberately break the journeys of their marijuana loads into separate legs to conceal the identities of the participants from each other, drug investigators and traffickers said.

This "compartmentalization" offers security and creates more links in the economic chain, offering more people opportunities to profit.

In Mexico, drivers or pilots take the harvest to a staging area near the U.S. border. Several organizations are dedicated to taking the loads from Sonora into Arizona.

One method of choice is by car or truck, through official ports of entry, where their purpose is masked by the volume of traffic or facilitated by corrupt officials. Another favored method is to cross at out-of-way points between the ports of entry, on the backs of human "mules" or in four-wheel-drive vehicles.

Federal drug-fighting efforts at the border make the trip more dangerous for the haulers, but it's a short trip. The loads are dropped on the Arizona side, where a new driver will bring the pot to Tucson.

71 stash houses

Daniel L. Otero of Tucson used to make those drives, he acknowledged in a federal presentence report. From December 1998 through April 1999, Otero picked up three loads of marijuana at a spot near Parker Canyon Lake, about 14 miles southwest of Sierra Vista.

He drove the loads, which totaled 1,878 pounds, to stash houses in Tucson, the report says. He also drove a load to Phoenix. For his efforts, Otero was paid about $35,000.

Otero, 49, admitted conspiring to traffic marijuana and was sentenced to 6 years, 3 months in prison.

He said his boss was Tucson businessman Guillermo M. Lechuga, the report says. It's an accusation Lechuga is still fighting 21/2 years after marijuana trafficking charges were filed against him.

From January last year through October this year, drug-trade investigators found 71 stash houses in the metro area, each containing 100 to 7,000 pounds of marijuana, according to data compiled by Arizona HIDTA.

Tucson's rival as a stash-house center, drug investigators said, is El Paso, where agencies have a task force dedicated to finding the houses, said Robert Almonte, deputy chief of the El Paso Police Department. Investigators there found 89 stash houses during a period when 66 were discovered in Tucson, which has no task force.

The people guarding stash-house loads are another link in the chain of Tucson's marijuana economy.

In Otero's case, the stash-house sitter was his son, Daniel A. Otero. The younger Otero said he was not paid directly for living at his stash house, in the 1300 block of North Apache Drive, behind the Arizona Schools for the Deaf and the Blind, according to a presentence report. But his father paid the younger Otero's rent and living expenses.

The Otero family declined to comment for this story.

Another Tucson couple accused in the Lechuga indictment told investigators they stored four loads of marijuana in their garage, in the 2900 block of West Camino Camelia. Bernice and Valentin Villa said they were paid $10 per pound for allowing a total of 2,100 pounds of marijuana to be kept there for a few days each, between 1997 and 1999, according to a federal presentence report.

Valentin Villa "stated he became involved with storing the marijuana purely out of greed as he and his wife did not need the extra money," the report said. Both pleaded guilty to possessing 150 pounds of marijuana with intent to distribute and were sentenced to five years probation.

"They're interested that other people don't make the same mistake," said the couple's attorney, Robert Nelson. "The legal costs and the ramifications of the criminal conviction were far more costly than any monies obtained by their poor judgment."

Stashed in your neighborhood

There was a time when people living in the more affluent sections of Tucson could consider marijuana the problem of other neighborhoods. That time has long since passed, said Francis Karn, who spent 20 years working drug enforcement in the Tucson area before retiring in 1998.

"When we first started, most of the stash houses were down on the Southwest Side, and when I left, they were all over the city," said Karn, who was president of the Arizona Narcotics Officers Association in 2000. "We took several houses out up in the Foothills."

In the last two years, most of the stash houses that drug investigators have found were in neighborhoods alongside Interstates 10 and 19. But eight were also on the far East Side and in the Foothills. On Saturday afternoon, MANTIS officers went to a house near the corner of East Orange Grove Road and North First Avenue and discovered more than a ton of marijuana.

Last year, they found a big load in the 6700 block of North Nanini Road, the only rental home on a street just east of North Oracle Road, where the average home value is about $260,000. On Nov. 9 last year, drug investigators were watching from a neighboring yard when a volunteer ambulance from Alaska pulled up to the house.

MANTIS officers served a search warrant and found 2,790 pounds of marijuana in the master bedroom closet. Neighbors said they noticed almost nothing unusual from the house until the day of the raid.

"It was just a little excitement is all," said neighbor Russ Tarvin, who allowed investigators to hide in his yard. "We had no clue."

That's the idea of a stash house, traffickers and investigators said.

"If it's a sophisticated organization, they might have a ground team that comes in and sets up all the stash houses," said DEA spokesman Jim Molesa. "They're responsible for the legitimization of these houses within the community, then they're gone."

Harvan, the former trafficker from Bisbee, said Tucson stash houses he visited all looked, from the outside, like any other house in the neighborhood. Inside, however, they were different.

"There wouldn't be any furniture or anything. There would be a bunch of guys hanging out, and then in the bedroom there would be a ton of marijuana or something," Harvan said.

Traffickers prefer rentals, so if an operation is busted, the government can't seize the homes and sell them, traffickers and investigators said. And for the same reason they're popular with families carting armloads of groceries, attached garages are preferred by traffickers.

Neighbors may notice the drapes are pulled all the time and foil may cover the windows. Sometimes, the only vehicles that stop at a stash house are pickups and sport utility vehicles with either Mexican, East Coast or Midwest license plates. The house may seem abandoned or very lightly lived-in, with occasional high traffic.

Traffic gave away a stash house in the 6200 block of East 26th Street, where investigators found 472 pounds of marijuana June 20.

"We knew there was something going on," said neighbor Roy Jackson. "In the last few days it was one car after another."

Final link in marijuana chain

Usually, the landlord has no knowledge of the illegal purposes of tenants who are stash-house operators, drug investigators said. But in one recent case, authorities accused the landlords of being active participants.

In January 2000, MANTIS officers were investigating a ring of Jamaican marijuana traffickers operating here when they seized 1,500 pounds from townhouses in the Belle Vista development near East Speedway and North Camino Seco. That led to an undercover operation against the owners of several rental townhouses, according to an affidavit filed by Tucson police Officer Roger Nusbaum.

Late last year, owner Gregory T. Shepis began renting to undercover MANTIS agents who said they discussed with him their need to store loads of marijuana, according to an indictment issued by a Pima County grand jury.

The agents said they showed Shepis, 64, a load of 214 pounds of marijuana stored in one of his units and gave him a pound of pot in place of a security deposit, the indictment says.

Shepis and his wife, Michelle, are facing trial Feb. 12 on felony charges, including marijuana conspiracy and money laundering. Both deny the charges.

Gregory Shepis' attorney said the undercover officers, who wore recording devices during their conversations with Shepis, entrapped him. The attorney, Stanton Bloom, said Shepis charged the usual rent to the undercover officers and made no additional money from their supposed marijuana trafficking.

Added Michelle Shepis: "I certainly would never have rented to anybody if they were in any way bad. If they're going to set you up, they're going to set you up, and they're not going to tell you till it's too late."

When the marijuana arrives at Tucson stash houses, the suppliers either send it directly to a regular customer or must find a buyer. That's where another link in the economic chain steps in - deal- makers who know the haunts and personalities of the local drug trade

DEA agents arrested one such deal-maker, Jorge Zuniga, last year in their investigation of the ring led by Tucson distributor Fusci. Zuniga arranged a 230-pound marijuana sale to Fusci, DEA agent Timothy Bartels said in a criminal complaint. For connecting the supplier and buyer, Zuniga received $25 per pound, or $5,750, Bartels said.

Zuniga pleaded guilty Nov. 6 to conspiring to possess marijuana with intent to distribute.

The final link in the Tucson chain is the distributor, who may be connected to a Mexican organization or may have a separate group. The Tucson distributor usually makes in the range of $100 to $500 per pound, investigators and traffickers said, but takes whatever price the market will bear.

"It's just like dealing with any kind of commodity in private industry," said James A. Woolley, the assistant special agent in charge of the DEA's Tucson office. "You come here and you're going to get a better price. That's worth the risk of transporting it back to wherever and selling at a markup."

Business of drug interdiction

During the 25 or so years since Tucson became an important player in the international marijuana trade, the city has also become a drug-war nerve center. A Star analysis of federal agencies involved in drug enforcement found they spent about $75 million in Tucson during the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30.

About three-quarters of the convictions they produced were marijuana cases, according to Arizona federal court figures. Tucson's federal court saw 976 drug cases in the year ending Sept. 30, 2000.

Anti-drug agencies such as the U.S. Customs Service and the DEA have large offices here, focused primarily on drug investigations. A typical special agent makes at least $60,000 a year.

But the federal agency here that makes the most marijuana seizures is the Border Patrol, which has a station on East Golf Links Road near Davis-monthan Air Force Base and a sector headquarters on West Ajo Way near Mission Road. The patrol's primary duty is to enforce immigration laws, but agents work between ports of entry where marijuana loads often cross the border.

The Border Patrol spent more than $23 million on its Tucson offices and employees last year.

Federal tax dollars also flow here to lesser known anti-drug agencies.

There's the Arizona High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area, a secretive body with a $12.4 million budget. HIDTA has a large, unmarked building near Tucson International Airport, where 240 people work.

Many of them are intelligence analysts, some with CIA-level security clearance. Others are officers from agencies as diverse as the Tucson Police Department, the Arizona National Guard and the FBI, working together in a variety of task forces. That blending is meant to break down the traditional rivalries between agencies.

"Our job is to make people want to work together, and the carrot, of course, is the money," Vinsik said.

Another little-known agency is the U.S. Customs Service Air Branch, the largest operation of its kind in the country and based at D-M. It helps track smugglers on the ground along the border, conducts surveillance above Tucson and pursues suspicious cross-border flights, even across state lines.

Customs has 80 employees at the Tucson air branch, 60 of them pilots. Another 70 aircraft mechanics, employees of private contractors such as Raytheon, work at the air branch repairing Blackhawk helicopters and other aircraft.

The 60 pilots make about $75,000 a year, said Dennis Lindsay, chief of the Tucson air branch.

"Tucson is a major player in drug interdiction," Lindsay said.

It's all business

When drug investigators seek out local links in the marijuana chain, they often find business owners.

Take Guillermo M. Lechuga. Accused of running a major marijuana network, Lechuga is also the owner of a Tucson business approaching its third decade - Superior Natural Oils International. SNOI, in operation since 1983, produces jojoba oil and other products and sells them to cosmetic companies around the world.

DEA agents arrested Lechuga on April 13, 1999, and he was indicted along with 42 others on charges he operated a continuing criminal enterprise and committed five related crimes. He has pleaded innocent and is fighting to suppress evidence that investigators obtained through wiretaps of various phones, including one at SNOI.

After his arrest, Georg Hieber and Edgar Zastrow, German customers of SNOI, wrote a character reference for Lechuga, calling him a "serious, reliable businessman" who "kept his promises."

At the time of his arrest, Lechuga employed about 10 people at the company's office, 2555 N. Coyote Trail, just off West Grant Road, according to court documents filed by his attorney, Alfred "Skip" Donau. Lechuga employed others at fields near Guaymas, Sonora, and at a processing center in Nogales, Sonora.

Lechuga paid his Tucson employees close to $400,000 a year in salaries, Donau wrote, and the company grossed up to $6 million. Now out on bond, Lechuga continues to run the company.

According to an affidavit, DEA agents suspect Lechuga was in the marijuana business even before he got into natural oils and that he used SNOI as a front. The DEA's first record of Lechuga is from 1975, when he was arrested in Phoenix in possession of 400 pounds of marijuana, but the charges were dropped, DEA agent Tracy Donahue said in an affidavit.

"I don't think there's any credible evidence it was used as a front," Donau said of the company. "I know that's not the case, or they (federal prosecutors) would be seeking forfeiture."

Whatever the source, Lechuga amassed enough money to own a house on North Casas Adobes Road worth around $500,000, according to the Pima County Assessor's Office. The federal government is seeking to make Lechuga forfeit that house, as well as about $400,000 in bank accounts and two Land Rover SUVs that the goverment claims were bought with the proceeds of marijuana sales.

Some traffickers, like Tucsonan Jose Luis Arevalo, own companies that exist only on paper. Arevalo was convicted in Tampa, Fla., last year of conspiring to traffic marijuana and launder money.

During the trial, prosecutors presented a flow chart of the companies he ran. It included three companies dedicated to real estate, as well as a storefront business, Burrito Bandit, that operated at 8320 E. Broadway in 1990 and 1991.

How much money went through Arevalo's companies is unknown. But a DEA analyst explained six months worth of drug ledgers at Arevalo's trial, federal prosecutor LaTour Lafferty said, and the jury reached its own conclusion: $17.25 million in half a year.

Arevalo's attorney, Frank Rubino, disputed that figure.

"That was what the government believed was the gross amount of the (marijuana) value in the indictment. Nobody got that money, because it didn't exist,," Rubino said.

Despite the huge sums, most of the money made on the marijuana that moves through Tucson does not stay here, drug investigators said. A Tucson distributor who sells marijuana for $1,000 a pound in Michigan may have to pay $600 a pound of those proceeds to his supplier in Mexico.

"The bulk of it is going back across the border," said Bill Dickinson, chief of the Pima County Attorney's Office narcotics division.

Plus, offshore banks provide an anonymous and attractive shelter for illicit earnings.

Money laundering within Tucson is on a small scale, usually through businesses even smaller than Lechuga's, Dickinson said. Laundering can keep small businesses afloat and add to corporate income taxes.

Trafficking suspect Mark E. Steele owned Alejandro's, a popular Downtown restaurant, from December 1994 until May 2000, according to city records.

After five years as a fugitive, Steele was arrested in June on a charge of possessing marijuana with intent to distribute. After his arrest, the only income Steele listed on a financial affidavit was $30,000 from the sale of the restaurant.

Steele's attorney, Sean Bruner, said Steele pleaded innocent. He is asking that the case be combined with a related case filed against Steele in Cleveland.

"Often what they do is have a business that is probably marginal," Dickinson said. If the traffickers own a pizzeria, they'll put the drug proceeds into the business "so that the pizza place looks like it sells a hundred pizzas a night when it only sells 10."

BIG BUSINESS (this is the amount of revenue from each of these local industries for 2000)

MARIJUANA $425 million

OPTICS $650 million

AEROSPACE $1.1 billion

(The following are comparisons of marijuana’s range of possible economic impacts on Tucson. We estimated the impact at between $88 million and $1.3 billion)

$163 MILLION

If Tucson's marijuana take is just $88 million, then combined with law enforcement, revenues total $163 million. By comparison, the new Mars Polar Lander cost NASA $165 million and the 500-room Hyatt Regency hotel at Dove Mountain cost $161 million.

$425 MILLION

If Tucson made $350 million from marijuana revenues, then the total take would be $425 million. That's the amount the state expects to make this year from Proposition 301, the 0.6 percent sales tax hike that voters approved last year to fund education.

$1.4 BILLION

If Tucson made $1.3 billion from marijuana, the approximately $1.4 billion total revenue would be just about enough to make up Arizona's budget deficit this year - $1.56 billion. You could also build the Downtown Rio Nuevo project twice

The price of pot

THE PRICE OF POT

Prices for marijuana vary widely, based on the existing supply, the quality, the quantity purchased and whether it's being bought with cash or on credit. Some typical prices:

$50 per pound in Mexico

$600 per pound in Tucson

$1000 per pound in Florida or New York

STASH CITY / CHAPTER TWO: BAD COMPANY

When a pair of local marijuana traffickers suspected a snitch in their midst, they sent for her in Georgia and arranged to meet at a Tucson hotel - the Smuggler's Inn.

It was the spring of 1998. The top agenda item was determining whether Nancy Phillips had ratted out a Kentucky customer of the two traffickers, Jose Luis Arevalo and Raul Bess.

"I convinced them that I was not talking to anyone," Phillips testified last year, when she was finally called as a witness against Arevalo.

But at the time of the meeting at the East Speedway hotel, she was talking - to a Drug Enforcement Administration agent in Phoenix. And Phillips, a part-time poetry editor who was born in Ajo, would talk again - even as she continued doing business with Arevalo and even as she developed an intimate relationship with him.

Meetings like this among people like these help forge Tucson's strong link in the chain of marijuana distribution nationwide, a link that produced an estimated $350 million in revenues last year.

Last year, officers outside Arizona made 71 seizures of marijuana that was coming from Tucson. That's one new case every five days. Through November this year, the pace has remained the same, according to the Arizona High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area, an anti-drug coordination office and intelligence center in Tucson.

Meetings like this also show how investigators turn traffickers against each other to win drug-conspiracy cases, exploiting a system rife with conflicts, competition and double-crosses that nevertheless produces numerous convictions.

"I certainly think we're all playing a game, and we're all playing a little role here," said Ivan Abrams, a local defense attorney who was a federal prosecutor for eight years. "The agents' job is to catch them. The prosecutors' job is to prepare them for the table. Our job as defense lawyers is to minimize the carving upon them."

The agents have another job: Get as far up the chain as they can.

"Normally what we do when we work someone - that is, to try to get them to cooperate - is to work up the food chain, to try and go up the chain of supply," said Bill Dickinson, chief of the Pima County Attorney's Office narcotics section. "What we're trying to do is get someone who is more significant than the person we're currently dealing with."

In Phillips' case, that person was Arevalo.

"Mission Impossible"

A Douglas native who served two sentences in Arizona prisons for selling marijuana, Arevalo, 44, left prison in 1994 and got back into the business.

Within a few years, he was growing pot on a plantation in Mexico, according to testimony by Phillips and two other co-conspirators. The fields were in the Mexican state of Chihuahua, in mountains so remote Arevalo had to ride on horseback to reach them, Phillips testified, citing Arevalo's description.

Arevalo did not testify at his trial, but load driver Carl Lee did. Lee said Arevalo bought the plantation in the late 1990s.

"Apparently he hired locals to manage the plantation," Lee said. "He had a fellow that he took in from the United States, a specialist in how to grow things, and he hired some local people and told me that he had paid the Mexican government some money for protection."

Lee testified that Arevalo paid others to bring the marijuana across the border and up to Tucson. Here, Lee would pick up loads of about 3,000 pounds each from stash houses Arevalo had in the city.

Arevalo owned a number of properties, some through front companies such as J&D Land Acquisition Co. One stash house was on North Tomahawk Trail, near the corner of East Tanque Verde Drive and North Houghton Road. Another of his properties was at the top of Avenida de la Colina, overlooking Raven Golf Club in the Catalina Foothills.

Arevalo shared his interest in real estate with co-conspirator Raul Bess.

A fellow Douglas native, Bess had also served time for marijuana trafficking. After his release from state prison in 1993, Bess formed Flores Land Development, bought some Tucson properties and passed himself off as a real estate manager.

But at the same time, he was working with Arevalo, distributing marijuana across the country. His fellow traffickers called Bess "King" behind his back because he acted like he was royalty, Nancy Phillips said.

Bess, 46, and Phillips had known each other since 1985, Phillips testified.

"I met him because he was the brother-in-law of a man that was engaged to my daughter," Phillips testified. "I knew they were all drug dealers."

Within a few years, Phillips testified, she was doing business with Bess, introducing him to marijuana customers she knew in Kansas, where she was living at the time. Then, in 1995, Bess introduced Phillips to Arevalo in a Tucson park.

They soon went into business with one another. Phillips, who has a bachelor's degree in philosophy, went by the code name "Mission Impossible."

Even at the Smuggler's Inn meeting, called to confirm Phillips' loyalty, they did some business: Phillips offered to sell Arevalo and Bess a direct connection to one of the customers she had been supplying.

Her link in the chain was buying loads of marijuana from Arevalo, usually about 600 pounds at time, then selling them at a higher price to her own wholesale customers in the Southeast. In a business that's highly compartmentalized, so that losing one link doesn't unravel the entire chain, Arevalo had limited contact with Phillips' customers.

But in the case of one of her best customers, her ex-husband in St. Petersburg, Fla., Phillips offered to step aside and let Arevalo sell direct. The price of the agreement: $250,000.

Trade violence

Things got dangerous as Phillips started talking.

Threatened in March 1999 by federal agents who caught on to her, Phillips agreed to cooperate. A few days later, Lee, the Arevalo driver, met Phillips at a Howard Johnson's in Georgia to pick up a marijuana payment from her.

Phillips tipped off the agents. Lee, known by the code name Butch, was pulled over driving a motor home with about $1.2 million in cash inside. Within a week Lee, too, decided to inform.

As more people in the chain agreed to help investigators, Bess started getting nervous.

On May 24, 1999, he met in a taxi with attorney Mark Fishbein - who later admitted laundering money for the organization - and showed him a gun as they drove around north Tucson, according to an affidavit from U.S. Customs Service Agent Don W. Dunn. Bess told Fishbein not to talk to authorities, Dunn wrote.

It was too late, though; Bess was arrested two days later.

The threat of gun violence is common in Tucson's wholesale marijuana trade, investigators and traffickers said, but it's less prevalent than the volume of trade would suggest.

Pima County sheriff's Sgt. Michael O'Connor said that last year the department handled 29 homicide investigations, of which nine appeared to be drug-world hits. That made 2000 "a pretty average year" for such murders, he added.

Occasionally pot-related gunplay harms a bystander. In April 1999, a group of young men burst into a home near West Grant Road and North Silverbell Road, seeking a load of marijuana or drug money. One of them shot and killed 12-year-old Elsa Vega.

"If you're talking about the international smuggling, people in this area are not that affected by it. It's the distribution of drugs locally where the average person is apt to be more affected by it," Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik said.

Robert A. Wicks is not your average person.

Like Fishbein, Wicks learned what can happen when someone in the marijuana chain has it out for you: Last spring Wicks was kidnapped, beaten and held for $50,000 ransom in Tucson.

The reason, Wicks later told police, was unspecified problems that arose with a driver Wicks provided to marijuana traffickers to take a load to New York.

Wicks was working at a bar called MacDaddy's, 500 N. Fourth Ave., on April 7 when an acquaintance named Raimundo Lizarraga came in, according to Tucson police reports and court records. Wicks left with Lizarraga, saying he was going to pick up some vodka.

That evening, Wicks called his girlfriend to say he was being held by men who put a hood over his head and beat him, he told police.

A police officer pretending to be a friend of Wicks' girlfriend took over the prolonged telephone negotiations, police reports say. The next afternoon, the officer arranged to leave a car behind the Fry's supermarket at East Grant Road and North Alvernon Way. The keys would be on the left front tire and the cash in the trunk, the officer said.

When three of the kidnappers arrived, they opened the trunk, and an explosive device planted inside went off. SWAT officers rushed the three and arrested them. Then another SWAT team stormed the duplex on East Nebraska Street where Wicks was being held. They found him inside with his hands bound. Nine men were eventually convicted of the crime and sentenced to prison.

Wicks, now 35, was a victim in those moments but his own criminal record dates to 1993, when he admitted in U.S. District Court in Tucson that he had led a continuing criminal enterprise - marijuana trafficking - between 1989 and 1992.

Wicks now faces trafficking charges in connection with the events leading to the kidnapping, as well as felony charges of extortion and illegally conducting two businesses - MacDaddy's and another bar, called 5150, at 5150 E. Speedway.

He has also told Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agents he knew "everything" about the May 1, 1999, fire that destroyed the former Solarium restaurant on East Tanque Verde Road, according to an ATF report. Arson was the cause of the fire, which is still under investigation.

All that led Assistant Arizona Attorney General Sylvia Goodwin to label Wicks a "career criminal."

His attorney, Natalie Prince, denied that, saying there is no evidence to support the extortion or illegal-business charges.

"He's a bartender," Prince said. "He's not actually as colorful as people would like to think he is."

Interagency conflicts

The conflicts that erupt among traffickers crop up between the investigators pursuing them, too.

A cross-country investigation, driven by an aggressive U.S. Customs Service agent from Tampa, Fla., got dealer Phillips to talk and finally snared Arevalo.

It also revealed a friction among investigators so common that special offices in Tucson and across the country have developed systems to prevent it.

The agent, Don Dunn, first met Phillips when some of her marijuana money was seized in Texas on its way to Tucson. A Texas officer called Phillips and, pretending to be a money courier himself, arranged a pickup.

The meeting was set for March 25, 1999, at a tire dealership in Tampa. When Phillips drove up carrying $50,000 in cash, agents confronted her, she testified.

"I shut my door and tried to pull away," Phillips said.

The agents drew their guns, and she stopped.

"Then they came up, and Don Dunn said to me, ‘I might not arrest you today, but I am going to arrest you.' And I knew that was true. And so I said now I want to cooperate," Phillips testified.

Dunn quickly carried the investigation westward, persuading a driver and other conspirators to turn against the organization.

Operation Mission Impossible was born.

The new informants introduced undercover customs agents to Arevalo in April 1999, pretending the agents were load drivers. The agents were entrusted with a load - 766 pounds of marijuana, packed into a motor home. On May 5, investigators searched Arevalo's home in the 5000 block of North Amapola Drive, just east of the Tucson Mountains, and Arevalo was finally arrested.

But Dunn's aggressiveness brought objections from local customs agents and eventually drew criticism from a federal judge.

Two Tucson attorneys connected to the Arevalo organization, Fishbein and Marshall Tandy, had already been arrested when - on July 26, 1999 - Dunn led a search of the far Northwest Side office of a third local attorney - Natman Schaye.

Dunn was seeking information on Schaye's relationship to Arevalo's partner, Bess, a client of Schaye's.

Prosecutors planned to seek an indictment against Schaye, Assistant U.S. Attorney Anne Mosher said at the time. But U.S. District Judge Alfredo Marquez rejected the evidence from the search, calling the action illegal.

Schaye was not indicted.

Friction among police hindered another investigation, too, allowing a Tucson trafficker to remain free for six years.

Sgt. Michael Hambrook of the New Hampshire State Police testified last January that in 1992, he came to Tucson while investigating Alberto Lujan - the supplier of one of New Hampshire's biggest marijuana dealers.

Here, Hambrook teamed up with customs agents investigating some of the same dealers. Customs agent David Penrod, also testifying in January, said Lujan was using a Tucson produce company in 1992 to send loads of marijuana to Michigan and New Hampshire.

Prosecutors in Tucson and New Hampshire obtained indictments against Lujan.

At the same time, DEA agents in Michigan were cultivating Lujan as a possible source of information - in return for possible immunity - against Mexican trafficker Manuel Carter Davis, Hambrook testified. But the investigators in New Hampshire and Tucson wanted Lujan to turn himself in before any immunity agreement was worked out.

The conflict erupted during a February 1993 meeting in Tucson, Hambrook testified.

A Michigan-based DEA agent at that meeting said "he'd been a DEA agent for a few years and this man Lujan could be a career-maker as an informant," Hambrook testified.

The DEA agent involved denied making that comment, said agency spokeswoman Susan Feld.

"I was horrified," Hambrook said, because while Lujan was free, a man below him on the marijuana chain was serving a 25-year prison sentence.

The DEA in Michigan never met Lujan in person. Instead, the agency negotiated the immunity agreement via fax machine, with Lujan's lawyer as an intermediary, Hambrook testified.

Feld said the DEA talked with Lujan by phone. The agency never used Lujan as an informant, she added.

It took until June 1998 for Lujan to be arrested. After pleading guilty to marijuana conspiracy in New Hampshire last February, he was sentenced May 31 to a term of 24 years and four months. The man he was to inform on, Carter Davis, was convicted in Tucson three years earlier and extradited last Sept. 27 to face charges in Mexico.

"Sometimes they don't like to share with each other," said Raymond L. Vinsik, director of a Tucson anti-drug coordinating and intelligence center called the Arizona High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area, or HIDTA. "We're forcing them to work together and share information together."

At the HIDTA center near Tucson International Airport, 240 employees from law-enforcement agencies at all levels work in joint task forces. Thirty such centers operate nationwide.

The local center's leverage in encouraging cooperation comes in the form of a $12.4 million budget that it doles out to task forces and investigations. That money also goes to maintain a computer intelligence system that steers officers away from conflicts with one another.

"With Tucson being a transshipment area, you have a lot of agencies coming in from Texas or California or Illinois," said Pennie Gillette, an Arizona Department of Public Safety lieutenant who heads HIDTA's intelligence center. "Without some system to be able to computerize this information, you get blue on blue - officers on officers."

By entering the time and place of an intended operation, officers from anywhere can find out whether another agency is working a case at the same time and place. If a conflict arises, the computer sends a message of a conflict to the person making the query and to the agency already involved.

"The best part is," said Vinsik, "you're not giving your information to anybody except a secure computer."

Unraveling the chain

Despite the conflicts, federal agencies obtained more than 45 convictions by early this year in their investigation of the Arevalo organization and cases stemming from it.

One of them was Bess, who pleaded guilty to marijuana conspiracy and money laundering charges but is still in prison awaiting sentencing. His attorney, John Kaufmann, said Bess was involved in just one of several supply lines Arevalo ran.

Lee, the driver known as Butch, pleaded guilty to conspiring to distribute marijuana and money laundering and was sentenced to 18 months in prison.

Arevalo was tried in Tampa in February 2000. He hired famed Miami attorney Frank Rubino, who represented Panamanian Gen. Manuel Noriega. The government paraded a series of cooperating witnesses before the jury, including Phillips and Lee as well as Dunn and other agents.

Rubino did not call any witnesses during the six-day trial. His tactic, he said, "was to discredit the informant witnesses."

He did so, in part, with biting questions to Phillips about her cooperation: "You were ready, willing and able to do whatever you had to to save yourself, weren't you?"

Rubino also forced Phillips to acknowledge she sold marijuana sporadically for about 20 years and had made more than $100,000 in marijuana sales just in the four-month period before she was caught March 25.

But jurors believed the government. Within a day of beginning their deliberations, they convicted Arevalo of conspiring to distribute marijuana and to launder drug money. Arevalo was sentenced to 30 years in prison. He is appealing the convictions.

Phillips went free. She never faced any charges for her part in distributing marijuana from Tucson.

The Star could not locate her despite repeated attempts.

"The moral of the story is you can commit any crime you want if you inform on other people," Rubino said in an interview last week.

Federal authorities say the Arevalo case demonstrates that the drug-enforcement system can work. Dunn and fellow agent James Krause won a Customs Service award for their work on the case last year.

LaTour Lafferty, who prosecuted the Arevalo case, said he sees an encouraging moral.

"A criminal enterprise is bigger than one person, but it only takes one person doing the right thing to take out the entire organization," Lafferty said. Nancy Phillips, she added, "did the honorable thing. Jose Arevalo didn't."

CORRECTION RAN DECEMBER 11, 2001 A2

A story on A1 Sunday about Tucson's role in the marijuana trade misidentified The Burrito Bandit Mobile Food Service Corp., owned by Tucson marijuana trafficker Jose Luis Arevalo. Arevalo's business was not affiliated with the former Burrito Bandit restaurant, which was located at 8320 E. Broadway and was owned by Michael Lytle.

STASH CITY / CHAPTER TWO: BAD COMPANY

The links of the marijuana distribution chain and the agents sworn to bring them down are held together by fragile bonds. Their existence is rife with conflict, competition and double-crosses because all involved in the trade know what is at stake: an estimated $350 million in revenues and $75 million in law enforcement funding. Today, the Star shows how a reluctant informant and a U.S. Customs Service agent unraveled a trafficking ring. Tuesday, the Star asks local leaders how they think the trade affects us and what to do about it.

Jaime Figueroa-Soto

Tucson's most notorious marijuana trafficker of the last two decades could be getting out of prison in just over four years.

Jaime Figueroa-Soto is scheduled to be released from the maximum-security prison in Florence, Colo., on March 30, 2006, according to federal Bureau of Prisons records.

For now, it appears, he should be able to leave prison cells behind then, but the Arizona Attorney General's Office is arguing he should be transferred to an Arizona prison on that date, not released from custody altogether.

Figueroa-Soto was convicted in federal and state courts of running a massive marijuana smuggling and distribution network during the 1980s and of laundering the proceeds. Prosecutors estimated he was worth up to $109 million at the time. Figueroa owned luxurious homes here, in Scottsdale and in the Sonoran cities of Nogales and Hermosillo.

After two convictions in Pima County Superior Court and one in U.S. District Court, Figueroa-Soto fought his state sentence and was granted a new hearing at Pima County Superior Court in 1993. A new sentencing order, issued by Judge Bernardo Velasco, said that all Figueroa-Soto's prison sentences must end with the federal sentence.

On Nov. 30 this year, Assistant Attorney General Wanda Hofmann filed a motion calling the re-sentencing illegal under Arizona law, which requires that judges state a specific number of years for a sentence, not set a release date dependent on another jurisdiction. Hofmann asked that upon Figueroa-Soto's release from federal prison, he be placed in state custody, where he would be eligible for parole on April 16, 2009.

Defense attorney Bill Kirchner said he is planning to fight the state's effort.

John Dugery

John Dugery distributed Jose Luis Arevalo's marijuana, and in the process saw how the organization used stash houses.

At Arevalo's trial in Tampa last year, Dugery testified: "Once you receive the marijuana, what you do is inspect for quality. And then you check the weights because there is always discrepancies in how much they say you got or how much you actually did get.

"So you take the marijuana, you weigh it, and you wrap it to keep it fresh and as well as for transportation purposes," Dugery said. "Then once it is finished being processed, it is either boxed or put in duffel bags and transported to the point of sale."

Not just any bale could go to any customer, said Dugery, now serving an 18-month prison sentence.

"Some customers were very picky and they wanted the top, top quality. Others, you knew you could get away with giving them lesser quality."

To make sure the right customer got the right load, the packers put stickers on the box, Dugery said. Each customer also received a receipt.

"We color-coded the boxes so that it would be quick to transfer the marijuana and each customer got the correct box," Dugery said.

Jerry Hornick

Jerry Hornick's innovative business lent itself naturally to use in the cross-border marijuana trade.

Hornick ran Realistic Imaging, a company alongside Interstate 10 on the Northwest Side, which molded plastic into lifelike displays of vegetables, fruits and even a gigantic submarine sandwich.

Restaurants would buy the realistic-looking plastic molds for displays, said attorney Robert St. Clair, who incorporated the company for later owners.

Hornick also used the displays as vessels for marijuana loads shipped to Indiana, said Assistant U.S. Attorney Joshua Minkler.

"It initially started with this plastic birthday cake full of marijuana," Minkler said.

Hornick went on to send loads of marijuana in the 200-pound range to Randy Byrd, a contact in Indianapolis. Hornick and Byrd were indicted in Indiana in 1998, and in 2000 both were convicted and sentenced to prison. Hornick got a three-year, one-month sentence.

But the company's use in the marijuana trade apparently didn't end with Hornick's sentencing and his sale of majority ownership in 1998. In February, a trucker from California tipped off U.S. Customs Service agents in Boston that the company was being used to ship marijuana loads again, according to a sworn affidavit by agent John Lacinski.

On April 9, customs agents in Tucson searched the premises, at 5290 N. Casa Grande Highway, seized 606 pounds of marijuana and arrested two people, according to a search warrant return filed in U.S. District Court.

The building where the company rented space has since been demolished for a road-widening project.

"Mike"

Mike got into dealing drugs on Tucson streets, but his family made him a nationwide marijuana trafficker.

He was a small-time Tucson coke dealer more than a decade ago when he visited family in Mexico, and they showed him their marijuana fields, he said. His relatives recruited Mike to help their marijuana loads survive the trip to the East Coast.

"They didn't want me selling to no one on the streets," he said. The Star is not naming Mike out of concern for his safety.

Avoiding seizure of the loads turned out to be easy, Mike said. Sometimes they would pay thousands of dollars to a poor, young Mexican man to take 50 pounds of marijuana across the border and get caught. While officers were seizing that load, the traffickers would send in 500 pounds.

"Our only problem was not swerving or speeding between Rio Rico and here," he said.

Soon he was pulling in hundreds of thousands of dollars, visiting hot spots on both coasts, buying whatever he wanted.

He also started doing cocaine. Even during his time as a street dealer, Mike hadn't been a user, but that changed when he started socializing with his East Coast buyers. Soon he was an addict.

The freestyle life veered into violent crimes, including kidnapping customers who owed debts, Mike said. Often, relatives would be forced to put up their property as ransom.

"You end up with a ranch in Mexico, full of cars and boats," he said.

Eventually, he was convicted of one of these crimes and served years in prison. But he could not kick his habit, although he is trying to now. The hardest part may be avoiding the family members still involved in the trade.

"I love my family, but it's time for me to take charge of my life," he said.

The drug trade, Mike said "is great when you're young, ‘cause you have everything you want, but it catches up to you," he said. "You cannot win in the drug trade. You're going to end up using it, you'll end up in prison, or you'll get killed in a robbery."

Roy Tammerand

Tucson serves as a cultural meeting place in the marijuana underworld, the same way the city has for decades.

Buyers with connections to the rest of North America, often Anglo, conduct marijuana business here with suppliers who have connections to Mexico.

Take the case of Roy Tammerand.

A Canadian citizen, Tammerand said he began buying loads of marijuana in Tucson in 1987, according to a federal presentence report. He got caught at the trade and spent time in an Alberta prison.

But soon after his release in 1991, Tammerand returned to Tucson. He lived here under the name Bill Hawkins, while returning to Canada for the summers. He got back into the marijuana business, sending loads to Canada, Illinois, Massachusetts and other places.

Tammerand's source from 1995 to 1999 was Ismael Martinez-Carrero, Tammerand testified at Martinez-Carrero's trial.

Martinez-Carrero is a Mexican citizen whose family ran a tire shop called Los Compadres at 901 S. Sixth Ave. At Martinez-Carrero's sentencing, his attorney described Martinez-Carrero as a "broker" between the supplier and Tammerand.

Tammerand testified at Martinez-Carrero's trial that he himself made $250,000 per year in the marijuana trade. In 1999, when Drug Enforcement Administration agents searched the house Tammerand rented, in the 5300 block of North Camino Real in the Catalina Foothills, they found $500,000 in cash.

After their convictions, the Canadian and Mexican were sent to American prisons.

Tammerand, who struck a plea bargain and testified against his marijuana source, was released from prison Nov. 30.

Martinez-Carrero is still serving his term - 12 years and 7 months.

STASH CITY / CHAPTER THREE: TUCSON'S POT ECONOMY

Today the Star presents three differing opinions of what to do about marijuana trafficking through Tucson. While Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik advocates cracking down on growers abroad, a drug-treatment counselor, Mo Salgado, argues for more treatment. Legalization advocate Drew Foster says neither approach will eliminate the black market's estimated $350 million footprint in Tucson. Stories by Tim Steller / Arizona Daily Star

As a crossroads of marijuana commerce and conspiracy, Tucson has more at stake than most communities in how to deal with the trafficking.

Arizona voters showed a willingness twice before to voice their opinions on marijuana: They voted in 1996, and reaffirmed in 1998, to allow doctors to prescribe otherwise illegal drugs, letting patients with serious or life-threatening diseases possess them without fear of being arrested for violating state law.

In 1996, voters also called for diverting first-time drug offenders to probation and treatment.

The Star asked three Tucsonans representing the spectrum of opinion on marijuana laws what should be done about the trafficking, which creates an estimated $350 million in local revenues.

Among the questions: How much does the local economy depend on marijuana? How well do our marijuana laws work? And should we consider further measures toward decriminalization?

A small army of federal police here, along with local law enforcement officers, argue that the trade could be minimized if the United States used its full might against traffickers and source countries. So does Clarence Dupnik, Pima County's longtime sheriff and an experienced drug investigator.

Mo Salgado, a counselor at a Tucson drug-treatment center, points out we could significantly reduce the amount of marijuana traffic by increasing funding for drug treatment instead of enforcement. Fewer users mean less drug traffic, he said.

Marijuana-law reformers say the illegality of pot makes it a social problem, not the effects of the drug itself. But Drew Foster, the chairman of the Arizona branch of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, said the legalization he favors would cost Tucson its marijuana-trade and drug-war revenues.

STASH CITY / CHAPTER THREE: TUCSON'S POT ECONOMY

Mo Salgado knows Tucson's illegal-drug trade, and he sees no benefit to it, economic or otherwise.

Salgado came to Tucson from his native New York City to kick his addiction to methadone, which he had begun taking as a substitute for heroin.

Salgado spent 28 days camping alone in the Santa Catalina Mountains, he said, trying to rid himself of the need for methadone, which is a synthetic narcotic that imitates the effects of heroin. He did come down off the methadone, but when he came off the mountain, he started using again and was jailed.

"My plan was to get out of jail, stick up one of my connections and go to New York," Salgado said.

Instead he made his last attempt at a cure, this time at La Frontera Center's Casa de Vida residential treatment center near North Silverbell and West Grant roads, and succeeded quitting his habit. Now Salgado is a counselor at the center.

Salgado shares the view of many law-enforcement officials that marijuana use leads to using other illegal drugs. But he acknowledges one of the reasons marijuana functions as a "gateway" is that marijuana is illegal.

"When you're messing with an illegal substance, whatever that may be, the fact of its illegality in itself carries a trip for some people," Salgado said. "You get a rush."

He does not favor the legalization of marijuana or other drugs. What he advocates is making treatment a much bigger part of the efforts against drugs.

"If you're going to start a war on drugs, you've got to have care for the wounded," he said.

Right now, he says, it seems the approach is 90 percent enforcement, 10 percent treatment.

"If I was the drug czar, I'd put at least 60 percent treatment," Salgado said.

Joe Parker, the supervisor of Casa de Vida, said even a much smaller shift in emphasis would reap big rewards. "If we could get to the point of 65 percent enforcement, 35 percent treatment, you'd see massive social changes," Parker said.

Salgado said that far from increasing the availability of substance-abuse treatment, the health-care system "keeps cutting us off shorter and shorter."

Even the state's drug courts don't provide an adequate solution, Salgado said. Those courts, which offer drug offenders a chance at treatment instead of jail time, give an addict one chance.

And for many, as Salgado well knows, that isn't enough.

STASH CITY / CHAPTER THREE: TUCSON'S POT ECONOMY

Drew Foster is so opposed to the marijuana black market that he took his argument to the source in Mexico.

In 1996, Foster said, he traveled to Sinaloa state, the homeland of Mexico's marijuana trade, to try to convince a trafficker to grow industrial hemp instead of marijuana. Hemp would grow in the same areas and also be profitable, he said he argued.

But the trafficker was uninterested because the illegality of marijuana provided too many attractions, Foster said. Most important was the big profits generated by marijuana's black market, but there were other attractions.

"They like the power trip," Foster added. "Legal business to them means no more power."

Foster, the chairman of the Arizona branch of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, favors legalization.

If marijuana were legalized, Foster said, the big profits and underworld power trips would vanish. At a minimum he favors decriminalizing marijuana use.

Legalization would mean permitting the cultivation and consumption of marijuana, while decriminalization would mean making possession or consumption of small quantities a civil violation, like a traffic fine.

It's the illegality of marijuana, Foster said, that breeds the violence associated with the drug and that creates its associations with other illegal drugs such as cocaine. Marijuana's main side effects, he said, are much less severe, including short-term memory loss, munchies and a dry mouth.

"It's a gateway drug due to the fact that to use it you have to go to the black market," Foster said. "There's been no overdose deaths, ever, from marijuana. That's why it should not be illegal."

The main resistance to legalization comes from law-enforcement officers whose jobs depend on the endless effort to enforce drug laws, he said.

"If the drug warriors really want to end the war on drugs, and they don't want to continue this for their own benefit, then they should legalize, because it would completely eliminate the black market," he said.

But if marijuana were legalized, it would harm Tucson economically, Foster warned. "I think we would drop off as a distribution hub. The other states could produce their own, because it grows in every state."

Although Tucson might lose marijuana-traffic revenues, Foster said, it would also lose the crime that goes with the black market.

STASH CITY / CHAPTER THREE: TUCSON'S POT ECONOMY

Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik has been investigating drug crimes since before the war on illegal drugs was declared by President Nixon, and he thinks he knows a winning strategy.

The problem, Dupnik said, is the United States lacks the will to adopt that strategy.

"The U.S., if it had the will, could eliminate all the drugs in source countries," Dupnik said. "They know specifically where each acre of cocaine and marijuana is planted.

"If, for example, we had the will, we could tell a Latin American country tomorrow: ‘Either you deal with this problem, and we'll give you the resources to do it, or we're going to come down and do it for you.' "

Dupnik developed his opinion over three decades of a quiet rise within the drug-war hierarchy. He started in drug investigations as commander of Tucson's Metropolitan Area Narcotics Squad in 1967. Now he is a member of the executive committee that oversees the Southwest Border High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area, or HIDTA, as well as the Arizona HIDTA, a branch of the bigger organization based in Tucson.

The Southwest Border HIDTA coordinates drug-trafficking enforcement efforts by all levels of law enforcement along the Southwest border and is affiliated with the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy.

"We talk about a war on narcotics, but the fact is there isn't one now, and there never has been one," Dupnik said.

Dupnik acknowledges that marijuana is not as addictive as other illegal drugs and even some legal drugs, such as the nicotine in tobacco. But he believes marijuana has an overall harmful effect on the character of the people who use it, which justifies marijuana's illegality.

The same is true of tobacco, said Dupnik, himself a former smoker.

"I say outlaw tobacco," Dupnik said.

While Dupnik favors expanding the law enforcement efforts against illegal drugs, he also wants drug treatment made more available to addicts. Dupnik said he tried quitting tobacco several times before he finally succeeded.

"Almost any addict would love to rid themselves of the plague of addiction," Dupnik said. "Rehabilitation has always taken a back seat. It shouldn't. But that doesn't mean we should reduce our efforts at enforcement."