"How many have ended up dying — freezing to death, overdosing? These poor people came up here looking for something they need.

"But they never get it."

None of this seems to trouble municipal officials in Puerto Rico, said Oscar Miranda, a criminal-law professor at the University of Puerto Rico who's working with Albizu to understand Air Bridge.

"Police and mayors on the island are proud of doing this, because it's seen as a problem solved," he said.

And, other experts declared, having fewer addicts around enhances the appeal of the island for tourists, on whom its economy depends.

Puerto Rican officials don't believe that addicts are poorly treated on the mainland.

"We have been rescuing our people in the streets and sending them to good programs in Philadelphia," said Gladys Cintron, who runs a program in the city of Bayamón known as Nuevo Amanecer (New Dawn). She said the city no longer exports to Philadelphia, but that everyone who had gone "is doing well."

Bound by religious affinity, police, mayors, and ministers all form a natural alliance that Orlando Santiago, who is Miranda's assistant, called "booking dot com" — a way to chase addicts into coach airline seats on northbound planes with God's blessing.

"A horrific pattern"

Not much of official Philadelphia has heard of Air Bridge, including the local offices of the FBI and the DEA, as well as the Philadelphia District Attorney's office, according to spokespeople for those agencies.

Some Philadelphia police officials are aware of it, but "with murders and shootings to take care of, it's just not on my radar," said Capt. Michael Cram of the 25th District.

Slowly, however, pressure is building to address the exportation of Puerto Rico's addicts on a broad level.

"The picture is emerging of a horrific pattern in U.S. cities that's really quite shocking," said Steven Schwinn, co-director of the International Human Rights Clinic at John Marshall Law School in Chicago.

“Unquestionably a human trafficking issue.” Steven Schwinn, director of the International Human Rights Clinic at John Marshall Law School in Chicago

"It's unquestionably a human trafficking issue," he said.

Schwinn added that, in June, the clinic petitioned the United Nations Committee Against Torture to examine Air Bridge. "These so-called drug-treatment centers fail to provide appropriate medical treatment for the victims, resulting in torture or ill treatment of the victims in violation of the [U.N.] Convention Against Torture," reads the clinic's submission to the U.N. Officials from the U.N. would not comment.

The only law enforcement entity known to be investigating Air Bridge is the Cook County Sheriff's Office in Chicago.

It began its probe after reports last year on WBEZ.org and National Public Radio's This American Life on addicts being exported from Puerto Rico to Chicago.

Chicago officials are trying to determine whether the one-way plane tickets given to addicts are being paid for with federal dollars issued by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development for helping the homeless. Puerto Rico is a U.S. territory eligible for federal funds; its citizens are Americans who don't need passports to travel to the U.S. mainland.

The sheriff's office laid out its case in a 2015 letter to the HUD Inspector General's office, requesting an investigation. A spokesman for the HUD IG's office would not confirm whether an investigation is ongoing.

Sheriff's officials added that the Puerto Rican state police conduct a program called Vuelta A La Vida (Return to Life) that shuttles island addicts to the mainland. It sent 127 people from six island cities to Philadelphia between 2005 and 2014, documents from the Chicago sheriff's office show. The count, experts say, does not include drug users sent here by mayors, ministers, and the municipal police.

Officials for state and municipal police departments in Puerto Rico declined repeated requests for comment.

Advocates who have worked closely with the victims of Air Bridge are angry, and at a loss for remedies.

"People are bamboozling, profiting from, and taking advantage of injection-drug users," said Rafael Torruella, executive director of Intercambios Puerto Rico, a nonprofit that helps addicts in Fajardo, P.R.

“In the end, the ministers are making money off God’s name.” Rafael Torruella, executive director of a nonprofit that helps addicts in Fajardo, P.R.

"In the end, the ministers are making money off God's name," said Torruella, a psychologist whose Ph.D. thesis shows that Fajardo, a resort city on the island's east coast, has sent its addicts almost exclusively to Philadelphia. The attitude, Torruella said, is, "you take our Puerto Ricans [as] taxpayers foot the bill."

Rosado of Prevention Point, himself a native Puerto Rican, said that island mayors tell addicts "go to jail, or go to Philadelphia."

No one involved, said Rosado, has ever been held accountable:

"It's been driving me crazy for years."

"How is that fair?"

On weekends, thousands of boats slice through the calm waters off Fajardo, famous for its marinas and beaches.

Watching over it all is Aníbal Meléndez Rivera, the island's longest serving mayor, in office for 28 years.

"We sent drug abusers to Philadelphia for years to help them get treatment," said Rivera in his opulent office within a restored blue colonial building on the town square.

Dressed in a soccer shirt on a recent casual Friday, the mayor sat beside his wife, Diana, a retired social worker who works, gratis, for the city.

MICHAEL BRYANT / Staff Photographer Aníbal Meléndez Rivera, the mayor of Fajardo, P.R., with his wife, Diana, a retired social worker who works for the city. This summer, Philadelphia Councilwoman Maria D. Quiñones-Sánchez met with Rivera, who told her Air Bridge “was his brainchild,” along with the mayor of San Juan.

"We helped pay for their airplane tickets with city money," he said, adding, "We've taken them to the airport with police." Then he quickly reversed himself — "No, we didn't use police."

This summer, Philadelphia Councilwoman Maria D. Quiñones-Sánchez met with Rivera, who told her Air Bridge "was his brainchild," along with the mayor of San Juan. "He was very proud of it," she said. Many recovery houses fall within her district.

Rivera said that ministers from Philadelphia visited the island to offer the services of their recovery houses. He said he was never paid by the ministers to supply patients.

In a 10-year period he'd sent 30 addicts to Philadelphia, he said, though advocates on the island and the mainland say he's dispatched many more. Rivera said the city stopped exporting addicts two years ago.

Told that Fajardo addicts have faced severe hardships in Philadelphia, Rivera expressed surprise: "Our people who went to Philadelphia said everything was clean and there were no complaints."

In 2014 and 2015, Puerto Rican health officials circulated letters to 78 island mayors saying that drug addicts sent to the mainland were being poorly treated in unregulated recovery houses where their IDs were grabbed.

Rivera said he never saw any such letters.

One of his wife's friends, Yesenia Pereira, said that after she lost her right arm in a car crash on the island in 1994, she turned to heroin to blunt the pain and became addicted. People in the mayor's office then "told me to go to Philadelphia," Pereira said through a translator. "They said I would get help, and an apartment and a job."