Mexico's drug wars spill across border into US

Suburban areas in several states report activity

SAN DIEGO - The drug violence that has left about 4,000 people dead this year in Mexico is spreading deep into the United States, leaving a trail of slayings, kidnappings, and other crimes in at least 195 cities as far afield as Atlanta, Boston, Seattle, and Honolulu, according to federal authorities.

The involvement of the top four Mexican drug-trafficking organizations in distribution and money-laundering on US soil has brought a war once dismissed as a foreign affair to the doorstep of local communities.

Residents of a quiet subdivision in Lilburn, Ga., an Atlanta suburb, awoke to the transborder crime wave in July, when a brigade of well-armored federal and state police officers surrounded a two-story colonial home, ordered neighbors to lock their doors, and flushed out three men described as members of a Mexican drug cartel. One was captured after he tried to slip down a storm drain. Another was caught in the ivy in Pete Bogerd's backyard. He lives two doors up and is president of the neighborhood association.

"It blew us away," Bogerd said. "I didn't know we had that many cops."

A short while later, police hauled out a 31-year-old from the Dominican Republic who for nearly a week had been chained and tortured inside the basement, allegedly for not paying a $300,000 drug debt.

In the months after, several dozen suspects have been charged with moving drugs and money for Mexican traffickers through Atlanta, which has emerged as an important hub for thriving narcotics markets in the eastern United States.

Few regions of the nation have been immune - even Anchorage, Alaska, reported activity by the Tijuana drug cartel led by the Arellano Felix family, according to federal law enforcement agencies.

In suburban San Diego, six men believed to be part of a rogue faction of the Arellano Felix organization have been accused in connection with as many as a dozen murders and 20 kidnappings over a three-year span.

In October, three armed men disguised as police officers broke into a Las Vegas home, tied up a woman and her boyfriend, and abducted the woman's 6-year-old boy. Authorities said the men were tied to a Mexican drug smuggling operation and were trying to recoup proceeds allegedly stolen by the child's grandfather. The boy, Cole Puffinburger, was found unharmed three days later. Federal authorities have charged his grandfather, Clemons Fred Tinnemeyer, with racketeering, after he allegedly mailed $60,000, believed to be drug proceeds, from Mississippi to Nevada. Police continue to search for the kidnappers.

In September, authorities announced that 175 alleged members of Mexico's Gulf cartel had been rounded up across the country and abroad. Of those, 43 had been active in the Atlanta area, they said.

The arrests were part of Project Reckoning, an 18-month investigation that tracked criminal activity in the United States by the Mexican cartels. All told, Project Reckoning authorities have arrested 507 people and seized more than $60 million in cash, 16,000 kilograms of cocaine, half a ton of methamphetamine, 19 pounds of heroin, and 51 pounds of marijuana.

Last month federal authorities in Atlanta announced indictments against 41 people they said were trafficking drugs and laundering money for Mexican cartels. Among those netted in Operation Pay Cut were a former deputy sheriff from Texas who was stopped on a Georgia highway with nearly $1 million in cash in his pickup.

The footprints of Mexican smuggling operations are on all but two states, Vermont and West Virginia, according to federal reports. Mexican groups affiliated with the so-called Federation were identified in 82 cities, mostly in the Southwest, according to an April report by the National Drug Intelligence Center.