Tracking the drug trade to its New York endpoint

By Daniel Trotta

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The international drugs trade can take place just about anywhere in New York. Even on Broadway.

"There's a lot going on the average citizen doesn't see," said U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration supervisor Raymond Donovan, driving down a stretch of Broadway between 32nd and 26th streets in a BMW 745 that was seized from a drug dealer.

"If you go into these office buildings, they're selling knock-off (counterfeit) goods, and a lot of them are laundering money," Donovan said. "This is where 90 percent of the money from heroin is laundered."

As supervisor of a task force that includes 14 agents from the DEA, New York State Police and the New York Police Department, Donovan specializes in tracking cocaine and heroin from Mexico and Colombia.

He estimates he has arrested more than 1,000 suspects and helped seize more than $1 billion worth of drugs. Many of his colleagues can make similar claims.

Cities like New York are the end point for the untold quantities of illegal cocaine, heroin, methamphetamines and marijuana that are channeled across the U.S. border.

Drug traffickers, said Donovan, are "the epitome of evil."

Their tentacles stretch from the nondescript office buildings of Broadway, where Donovan said ill-gotten cash is laundered by financing contracts to buy fake designer handbags and shoes, to the apartments of Queens, called mills, where hard bricks of heroin are ground into powder.

Donovan has made some of his biggest busts in the Hunt's Point section of the Bronx, where trucks from all over the United States bring legal goods to a sea of warehouses and a massive wholesale produce market.

It is ideal cover for drug traffickers who may hide their illicit shipments behind a seemingly legitimate load of cabbage.

Donovan once spent nine months staring at a video feed of a property thought to be used by traffickers. For nine months not a single vehicle passed through its gates. "I'd watch it all day at work and then go home and watch it online, staying up until 2 in the morning," he said.

Finally one day, a large track backed in. Agents mobilized. They were there when a Lincoln Continental pulled out. They found 200 kg of cocaine in the trunk and another 137 kg on the property. It led to a string of busts that netted 911 kg of cocaine, $8.2 million in cash, and 32 convictions.