How Riverside County became America's drug pipeline

INDIO, Calif. – The black plastic pipe lay under the overpass, resting against the center median of Interstate 10, one of the nation’s busiest highways. It was the quintessential pipe bomb, about a foot long and an inch-and-a-half wide, with caps on both ends. No one knew where it had come from.

Alarmed, a construction worker called the cops, who sent a bomb squad. They wheeled a bomb-disposal robot toward the pipe, pointing a shotgun-like weapon designed to destroy any explosives inside.

The robot fired, and tin and copper flak perforated the pipe like buckshot. Fine white powder sprinkled out of the tiny holes. The robot eased closer, eyeing the powder with a camera.

“My guys are all cops, and they could tell it wasn’t explosives,” said Sgt. Bob Epps, the bomb squad supervisor. “They knew then it was probably dope.”

This black pipe, which shut down I-10 for about 30 minutes on Aug. 18, was filled with a half-pound of methamphetamine, and had almost certainly fallen off an eastbound truck smuggling narcotics. This was a rare moment when Riverside County’s secret drug pipeline — a cross-country conduit for tons of meth and heroin — accidentally exposed itself to the outside world.

Riverside County has become the single largest drug trafficking distribution center in the United States, built on a web of highways, nondescript suburbia and empty desert, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration. Over a three-year period that ended in September, the Riverside DEA Office, which also covers San Bernardino County, has seized about 6,500 pounds of meth and 770 pounds of heroin. That’s nearly one fourth as much meth, and one tenth as much heroin, as was seized by the entire DEA – nationwide – from 2012 to 2014.

The statistics are not perfectly comparable because the Riverside seizure totals were provided only by fiscal year and national totals were provided only by calendar year. However, even raw numbers reveal Riverside County as a centerpiece in U.S. drug trafficking, rivaling the nation’s largest cities.

DEA officials say the smuggled narcotics flow from Mexico’s Sinaloa Cartel through Riverside County stash houses en route to seller’s markets in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Canada. Drug profits, often in bales of cash, follow the same path back to Mexico.

The end result is an invisible network, valued in the billions of dollars, that weaves through the county, hidden within the same shipping and trucking lanes that carry agriculture and commercial goods from Mexico.

Business is booming.

“We are almost like the Costco warehouse of narcotics dealers, shipping this poison across the country,” said Frank Pepper, assistant special agent in charge of the Riverside DEA Office. “The amounts we are seeing are unfortunately on the rise, but we're also seizing more, getting more of this poison off the streets.”

Over the past three years, the Riverside Office has seen a significant rise in meth and heroin trafficking, according to seizure statistics provided to The Desert Sun. Meth seizures rose from 1,567 pounds in fiscal year 2013 to 2,546 pounds in fiscal year 2015, and heroin rose from 150 pounds to 395 pounds in the same timeframe. Seized heroin has been mostly white powder, rather than black tar, and officials believe these shipments are intended for East Coast markets, where white powder heroin is more popular.

The Riverside office also seized nearly $47 million in cash, vehicles and guns during that three-year span.

And these figures still don't account for all the drugs and cash seized in Riverside County. Absent from these totals are countless seizures made by Border Patrol, local police and DEA agents from Los Angeles, San Diego and the East Coast, which routinely trace the source of their drugs back to Riverside County.

“If they push an investigation far enough, there is an excellent chance it’s going to make it back here,” said Tim Massino, a DEA spokesman.

“It is not uncommon for a case that was initiated across the country – say in Chicago, Atlanta or Little Rock – to ultimately lead back to this area.”

Massino cited Little Rock just as an example, but he couldn’t have picked a truer one.

In April, Arkansas State Police found 275 pounds of meth – worth an estimated $10 million – hidden in a semi-truck on Interstate 40, about 10 miles east of Little Rock.

Troopers championed the case as the biggest meth bust in the history of Arkansas, but the truck had come from Riverside County. The driver was Javier Leon-Garcia, 53, a Moreno Valley resident who police say drove the drugs cross-country before being snagged.

If Leon-Garcia’s truck had been stopped here, instead, the case would have been far less remarkable.

Just last month, authorities arrested another Moreno Valley truck driver, Ricardo Benitez-Serrano, a fugitive who had been caught hauling $2.9 million in suspected drug profits in 2013 and 305 pounds of cocaine in 2014. Last year, four Coachella men were indicted as part of a conspiracy to move millions in Sinaloa drug profits from Canada to Mexico. Two years before that, Riverside resident Hiram Granados Alvarez was sentenced to 27 years in prison for attempting to ship 220 pounds of cocaine to a drug ring in Baltimore.

And finally, back in 2010, a DEA-led task force caught a semi-truck on Interstate-10, headed from the border to a warehouse in either Riverside County or San Bernardino County. Inside was a mountain of drugs – 2,650 pounds of cocaine, 66 pounds of heroin and 19 tons of marijuana, stacked on pallets.

“The scope is enormous here, and then spreads through to everywhere,” said a Coachella Valley DEA agent, who asked not to be identified to preserve his undercover work.

As trafficking has expanded in Riverside County, so have efforts to stop it. A joint investigation by The Desert Sun and USA TODAY has revealed that narcotics investigations have transformed this region into the most wiretapped place in America.

Riverside County wiretaps have increased eight-fold since 2010, and now outnumber any other county or federal district by more than three to one. In 2014, the county had 624 wiretaps, intercepting more than 2 million calls, texts and other communications involving more than 44,000 people.

Wiretaps are required to be last resorts for law enforcement, used only when surveillance, informants and other investigatory tools have failed. Privacy advocates described the large number of Riverside County taps as a "red flag," but the DEA said the taps are reasonable considering the breadth and complexity of drug trafficking in this region.

Massino, the DEA spokesman, insisted that everyday citizens would almost never have their conversations intercepted.

“For all intents and purposes, it’s a proven drug dealer by the time we get up on their phones,” Massino said. “We don’t fish.”

On April 5, 2011, Deputy Gerald Rohn, of the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department, dug into the side yard of an abandoned house in Lake Elsinore.

The loose dirt turned easy. Quickly, Rohn found three plastic bags, buried shallow, each filled with a pound of white powder.

It was meth.

The deputy was not surprised. For two months, Rohn and his partners at the DEA had been using wiretaps to chase a drug ring.

First, they had caught a street-level dealer in Temecula with 33 grams. Then they followed a wiretap to his supplier, who had 1.8 ounces in an RV in Perris. Another tap led further up the supply chain, to Armando Garcia Beltran, a Lake Elsinore man who smuggled narcotics across the border. Police listened as Beltran described how he got the meth in Mexico, then buried it at the abandoned house in Lake Elsinore for safekeeping until it could be sold. Without knowing it, Beltran had told them exactly where to dig.

Beltran, who was convicted in 2013, was sentenced to four years in prison. The Riverside County District Attorney’s Office has pointed to this bust as an example of the importance of local wiretaps, but the case also shows how drug trafficking has changed in this region. Fifteen years ago, men like Beltran would have been cooking meth, not smuggling it.

In the ‘80s and ‘90s, Riverside County was a hotbed for meth manufacturing, and meth labs flourished here, taking advantage of the county’s empty spaces to hide the foul smell of urine and smoke produced by mixing chemicals.

“There seemed for a long time to be a rise of ‘mom and pop’ meth labs in their homes, or out in a shack someplace,” said Steve Harmon, the Riverside County Public Defender, who has practiced law here for nearly 40 years. “We don’t see many of those anymore.”

Officials say the change was spurred by lawmakers, in Sacramento and Washington D.C., who created aggressive laws restricting access to the chemicals used to make meth, commonly called “precursors.” Without ingredients, small-scale meth labs became unfeasible. Industrial-sized labs moved to Mexico, where American laws are meaningless, and cartels now smuggle their product to their customer base in the U.S.

Superficially, the shift has made Riverside County safer. Gone is the risk of meth lab explosions and violence between rival cooks and dealers. Instead, there is a low-profile, commercialized pipeline, where violence would only cut into high profits, DEA officials say. But danger still brews below the surface.

Jeff Moore, the former narcotics prosecutor, compared the county’s drug trafficking network to the San Bruno natural gas pipeline. The pipeline quietly moved gas toward San Francisco for more than 50 years, until 2010, when a rupture sent a fireball spewing skyward, destroying three dozen homes.

Eight people were killed.

“They probably didn’t even know there was a pipeline beneath their feet,” Moore said. “They didn’t see it, they didn’t think about it and it probably didn’t have any effect on their lives at all, until it exploded.”

“Our dope pipeline is kind of like that.”

That pipeline begins south of the border, in a region of Mexico controlled by the Sinaloa cartel.

The Sinaloas have been linked to 90 percent of the drugs that move through Southern California, said Dave Stinnett, an intelligence analyst with the DEA’s Los Angeles division. Even if Sinaloas don’t move the drugs themselves, they tax any other cartel that ships narcotics through their territory, like a smuggling tollbooth.

“They are the number-one threat,” Stinnett said.

From the Sinaloa territory, drugs enter the country in Calexico, a border town in Imperial County. This is the third-busiest port of entry on the U.S.-Mexico border, and likely the largest for smuggled narcotics.

Like in Riverside, drug seizures along that stretch of border have gone up dramatically. Border Patrol officials said this summer that the quantity of meth and heroin they’re intercepting now is 10 times higher than it was a decade ago. Agents and drug dogs sweep the traffic, hunting for hidden narcotics, but there are far too many travelers to search them all.

Once smugglers pass Calexico, a majority follow one of two routes, DEA officials say. They either head north on Highway 86, into the eastern portions of the Coachella Valley, or head west to the I-15, which runs north towards Temecula, Corona and Riverside.

Now beyond the reach of the Border Patrol, the drugs settle into stash houses, which masquerade as family homes and legitimate businesses in the innocuous suburbs. An example of one such house was uncovered in 2006, when the DEA raided a home in a far-flung corner of the Coachella Valley. The house sat on Pace Lane in Indio Hills, behind a chain-link fence and a locked gate, miles from all but a few neighbors.

On Jan. 10, 2006, a DEA wiretap intercepted a call to the house, which seemed mundane.

“Your dad just called,” said Teresa Reyes, speaking to her daughter on a cellphone. “He says to hurry up and clean there because I think he’s going to take visitors.”

Then Reyes rattled off a list of chores. Straighten up the sofa. Mop the kitchen. Empty the trash in the bathroom.

“Ok, mom,” her daughter said, brimming with enthusiasm. “Well let me hang up.”

Later that day, Reyes’ husband returned to the house, driving a pickup truck. He pulled into the garage, then closed the door behind him.

The DEA decided this was the moment to strike. A team of agents cut the fence and stormed the home, guns drawn. Reyes surrendered. Her husband ran out the back door, vanishing into the desert.

In the pickup, agents found the “visitors.” Twenty-nine pounds of heroin were hidden in a secret compartment. The list of chores had been a code – get the hiding places ready.

Although this stash house was busted, no one knows how many remain undetected, small cogs in Riverside County’s gigantic drug smuggling machine.

The DEA says rural areas are ideal for stash houses because they are difficult to monitor, but other experts said surroundings don’t really matter.

They can hide just about anywhere.

“All you really need is a big garage and a garage door opener,” Moore said. “It looks just like someone coming home from work.”

Contributing: Mark Hannan in McLean, Va.

Desert Sun reporter Brett Kelman can be reached by phone at (760) 778-4642, by email at brett.kelman@desertsun.com, or on Twitter @TDSbrettkelman. USA TODAY reporter Brad Heath can be reached at bheath@usatoday.com or on Twitter @bradheath.