Inside ICE: Volume 2, Issue 20

ICE Arrests Seaport Smugglers

A five-year investigation by ICE has lead to the indictment of 22 members of two Colombian drug organizations on charges that they conspired to smuggle large quantities of cocaine through seaports in New York, Newark, San Francisco and Oakland with the help of corrupt longshoremen.

"Operation Pier Pressure" resulted in the arrest of defendants in New York, New Jersey, Florida, California and Colombia on September 28. One of the ringleaders is accused of supervising various international cocaine smuggling operations from his federal prison cell in Pennsylvania.

The investigation was led by ICE in conjunction with the Drug Enforcement Agency and the New York Waterfront Commission, with assistance provided by U.S. Customs and Border Control, and was coordinated by the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

The investigation began in December 2000, when law enforcement learned that Jose Escobar Orejuela was supervising an international narcotics operation from the Federal Correctional Center in Allenwood, Pa., where he is serving a 30-year sentence for his role in the 1995 importation of 180 kilograms of cocaine into Port Newark, N.J.

As a result of leads developed in the investigation, in August 2001, ICE, DEA, and the New York/New Jersey Port Authority Police arrested five individuals and seized approximately 78 kilograms of cocaine from a container at the Howland Hook Marine Terminal in New York. The five defendants were subsequently convicted of felony narcotics distribution charges.

Following additional advances in the investigation, during the next two years federal agents and inspectors seized another 270 kilograms of cocaine hidden in containerized shipments at Howland Hook.

A major development in the investigation occurred when law enforcement learned in August 2003 that a large shipment of narcotics would be arriving at Howland Hook.

During the early morning hours of August 28, 2003, agents from ICE, DEA and the Waterfront Commission observed three suspects emerge from Howland Hook carrying large bags, which they loaded into a pick-up truck. The agents arrested two suspects outside the terminal and gave chase to two others who fled in the truck.

At speeds exceeding 90 miles per hour, the truck and its occupants ran through a roadblock and escaped.

Thereafter, agents obtained recordings of Escobar’s telephone calls from prison, which confirmed that he had been expecting, but did not receive, a cocaine shipment at Howland Hook in late August 2003. Subsequent investigation revealed that the August 28 drug shipment was actually stolen by one of the members of Escobar’s crew.

Based in large part on the information gleaned from Escobar’s prison calls, in November 2003 the government obtained court authorization to intercept the telephone conversations of a trusted Escobar associate. Those intercepts, as well as other investigative techniques, revealed that the Escobar organization was expecting another cocaine shipment at Howland Hook in early December 2003.

Agents established surveillance and on December 5, 2003, seized an additional 157 kilograms of cocaine at Howland Hook, with a street value of approximately $3,925,000. Six individuals were arrested as they loaded the cocaine into a minivan. The government’s subsequent investigation revealed that the August 28 and December 5, 2003, cocaine shipments actually belonged to drug organizations led by both Escobar and Jorge Ignacio Figueroa, also an inmate at Allenwood who was serving a life sentence for his role in a 1991 importation of 244 kilograms of cocaine.

Escobar and Figueroa had joined forces and together were supervising the importation of cocaine from Colombia into Howland Hook, with the assistance of family members and associates in Colombia and the United States.

Escobar enlisted the help of longshoremen in Brooklyn and Staten Island to facilitate the importations by ensuring that the cocaine-laden containers were placed in easily accessible locations and by notifying the organization members if law enforcement was at the port. For each cocaine shipment, Escobar tasked a trusted associate with hiring a ‘break-in” crew to sneak into the terminal late at night or in the early morning hours, locate the right container, remove the cocaine, and deliver it to associates waiting in vehicles outside the terminal.

In July 2004, the government obtained court authorization to record conversations between Escobar and Figueroa and their associates during meetings in the Allenwood prison visiting room. Those conversations confirmed that as a result of law enforcement activity in New York and the costly losses of cocaine at Howland Hook, the two drug organizations were planning to import cocaine into another port, this time in the San Francisco area. During a prison meeting on August 22, 2004, Figueroa’s brother, William Figueroa, relayed an associate’s concern that the situation in New York “...is very shaky,” and that individuals arrested at Howland Hook were talking to the government. William Figueroa concluded, “...things are rotten here.”

In October 2004, Escobar’s son, Jose M. Escobar, Jr., and Julio Gongora traveled to San Francisco to meet with Escobar’s longtime associate Carmen Rodriguez and her contacts at the port to discuss moving the drug-smuggling operation to the West Coast. Upon his return, Escobar, Jr. met with his father at Allenwood and reported that “...the game cannot be done through the piers,” because the ports in San Francisco and Oakland were under such tight security that cocaine could not be successfully imported there. Escobar, Jr. told his father that based on what “the supervisor at the pier” told him “the terminal is under 24-hour surveillance by the Feds.”

ICE New York Special Agent-in-Charge Ficke stated, “It is an ICE priority to identify and dismantle the vulnerabilities that can threaten the security of our country. These arrests have taken violent criminals off the street and shut down an illegal drug trafficking enterprise that threatened the welfare of our communities. I want to thank the ICE special agents, the DEA and the Waterfront Commission for their assistance and support in this investigation.”

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ICE Arrests Seaport Smugglers

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