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From the Los Angeles Times

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Mexican cartels setting up shop across U.S.

Frediberto Pineda, a member of the Sinaloa cartel, was sentenced to 20 years in prison for heading a cocaine operation in South Carolina's capital. Similar outposts have popped up in Seattle, Anchorage and Minneapolis.

by Richard A. Serrano, Washington Bureau

April 17, 2011

Reporting from Columbia, S.C.

The house on Knightner Road is small, blue and white, with a stone front porch and a string of Christmas lights still hanging. Here, crack cocaine was sold to drive-up customers a few miles from the state Capitol in Columbia.

The one on Pound Road in rural Gaston, just south of Columbia, is a brown-and-white trailer, with a gravel driveway and woods out back. Here, federal law enforcement officers surprised Frediberto Pineda, who had 10 kilos of cocaine worth $350,000 in his possession.

Six months went by between the first FBI inquiries into cocaine trafficking at the house on Knightner Road and Pineda's arrest. But for the bureau, he was a prize worth waiting for. A member of Mexico's Sinaloa cartel, he had quietly settled in central South Carolina, put down roots and began managing one of the gang's new outposts in the United States.

As the cartels expand up and out from the Southwest border, they are sending waves of men like Pineda, many of them trained in Mexico, to run their U.S. operations. In the last few years, they have established a prosperous retail industry, with cartels staking out "market territories," lining up smuggling routes, and renting storage bins and drug houses.

Twice deported after less serious convictions, Pineda looked more like a successful businessman than a drug dealer. He drove a Ford Explorer and wore a shiny watch with red and white jewels.

"He didn't dress like a construction worker," lead FBI Agent Michael E. Stansbury said. "He was clean and well-groomed. No dirt under his fingernails."

The look of prosperity corresponded with a booming business. Earlier this month, FBI Director Robert S. Mueller told Congress that upwards of $39 billion a year in drug profits from north of the border is making it back to Mexico and the cartels.

Atlanta has become a major cartel hub, where cocaine is stored in lockers, storefronts and homes, then trucked to cities such as Columbia, according to federal officials. The Tijuana cartel has set up shop in Seattle and Anchorage, they added. Elements of the Juarez cartel have been busy in four dozen cities, including Minneapolis. The Gulf cartel has reached into Buffalo, N.Y.

When the FBI started looking into the South Carolina drug trade, agents never imagined the investigation would lead them to a Mexican cartel. In all, the effort here has led to charges against 116 people in eight separate indictments, 33 firearms seized, four vehicles impounded, 27 wiretaps approved, and $600,000 in cash and well over $1 million in drugs confiscated. So far, 111 of the defendants have been convicted, while one suspect awaits trail and four fugitives are on the loose.

No one believes Columbia has become drug free, but the city is the first in the nation to have successfully disrupted a cartel that was so deeply ingrained in a U.S. community. The success is being hailed by law enforcement officials as a major victory. "We've been standing at a dam and putting our fingers in the holes," said lead prosecutor Asst. U.S. Atty. Stacey D. Haynes.

In September 2008, the FBI decided to find a way inside the crack house on Knightner Road, after they had heard complaints of drug dealing. So they provided an informant with $100 to pay off a debt to a dealer, and that got the FBI onto the front porch.

Agents soon learned that the main dealer was a character named "G-Money," and that he sold $100 crack "cookies" off the porch. In fact, business was brisk. "They were selling crack all day, every day," Agent Stansbury said.

Agents went to court and obtained permission to start wiretapping cellphones and a land-line inside the house. They monitored calls from "Little Wheel" and "Big Wheel," and eventually expanded the wiretap and picked up on calls from suppliers. One turned out to be "Calero," one of many nicknames for Pineda.

The conversations were largely in Spanish, in a crude street code. Many of the calls were directly to and from Mexico, many by Pineda and a score of fellow Mexicans working with him. Often the calls were to air complaints about shipments, or to make sure the money was making it home to Mexico. Pineda emerged as the main target.

"We suddenly had a new case with good cartel connections," said FBI Agent Robert Waizenhofer.

To learn more about him, agents asked state troopers to stop Pineda in his truck. They found $150,000 hidden in a microwave still in the box from Wal-Mart.

But they did not start the arrests until March 2009, and Pineda and his crew were the first to be rounded up — a departure from the FBI's tactic of normally working a case up the chain. "This time," said Stansbury, "we took the head off the snake first."

When they burst inside the Pound Road trailer, they found Pineda hunched over a large Rubbermaid tub, counting packets that added up to 10 kilos of cocaine.

He pleaded guilty to drug conspiracy, but refused to cooperate with authorities for fear the cartel would harm his children in Mexico. He was sentenced to 20 years.

Stansbury said the FBI tried to draw Pineda out in an interview to learn more about the cartel, but the discussion went nowhere. In the back of a car heading from the FBI office to jail, Pineda resisted. "You know what happens in Mexico if I start talking," he said. "You know what they will do."

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-crack-house-20110417,0,6531960,print.story

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Drug war: Mexico's weak rule of law

Newly appointed Atty. Gen. Marisela Morales has a window of opportunity to help reform a system that helps perpetuate the nation's drug war.

April 18, 2011

Over the last two weeks, Mexican authorities in the northern state of Tamaulipas have unearthed more than 140 bodies. Many are believed to be the remains of passengers kidnapped from long-distance buses. The gruesome discoveries are just the latest reminder of the bloodshed that has overtaken some parts of Mexico.

President Felipe Calderon has responded by dispatching troops to the area to patrol the highways where migrants are often targeted by criminal gangs that operate with impunity. And last week, authorities arrested 16 local police officers believed to have shielded drug cartel members tied to the killings. But that's not enough in a country where 34,000 people have been killed since 2006 — 15,000 in the last year alone, according to Amnesty International.

There is no simple fix to Mexico's bloody drug war. Poverty, corruption and weak rule of law are all part of the problem. But judicial reforms are a good place to start.

The president recently appointed Marisela Morales, the former head of the federal organized crime unit, as the third attorney general in four years. Although her tenure will be short — because Calderon's term ends in a little over a year — she can make real and lasting changes in the attorney general's office.

Constitutional reforms of the judicial system adopted in 2008 have yet to be acted on. Morales should push to implement some of the changes, such as moving from an inquisitorial system — in which prosecutors build paper files that are presented to judges — to a system that relies on oral arguments in open court. This would help eliminate corruption by allowing victims and defendants to challenge evidence, while also promoting transparency.

And her office can move to strengthen programs that protect victims' family members and witnesses, who fear stepping forward. Currently, only 20% of crimes are reported to authorities, and just 5% of those are ever brought before a judge, according to a report by ICESI, a Mexican University research group. Morales must also investigate judges and prosecutors who turn a blind eye or rely on tainted evidence.

Morales alone can't fix Mexico's judicial system, but she can help restore confidence in it so that crimes are reported and prosecuted.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/opinionla/la-ed-graves-20110418,0,1115459,print.story

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From the New York Times

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Scrutiny Lags as Jets Show Effects of Age

In April 1988, when the cabin roof ripped off an Aloha Airlines 737 and swept a flight attendant to her death, it sent a startling signal to the airline industry about the dangers of metal fatigue. Airlines immediately stepped up inspections of aging jets. Federal regulators cut up old planes to look for the spots under the most stress. And Boeing redesigned the joints that hold its 737s together.

They thought they had solved the problems.

But the five-foot hole in the roof of a Southwest Airlines 737 this month and other recent incidents indicated that they had not. In fact, a stream of safety directives from the Federal Aviation Administration in the years since the Aloha incident shows that structural cracks from metal fatigue remain a persistent problem on older planes.

Chillingly, the agency said in one directive that the discovery of some of the most serious damage had been “a purely random occurrence.”

Safety experts say that the industry and regulators rely far too much on a patchwork of rules that are largely reactive: each time a problem in one part of the plane is found, inspectors add that area to their checklists. Late last year, the F.A.A. itself acknowledged the seriousness of the issue when, for the first time, it issued a rule to set flying limits for aging aircraft. “The potential for catastrophic structural failure,” it said, “is very significant.”

Even so, the F.A.A. took more than four years to write the rule, as airlines objected that it would reduce the value of their planes and force them to ground some they thought could still fly. In response, the F.A.A. toned down the rule, extending a deadline for plane makers to come up with the lifetime limits.

John J. Goglia, a former member of the National Transportation Safety Board, which investigates accidents, says the F.A.A. needs to do more than wait for the industry to set plane-retirement deadlines and rely on the airlines to do piecemeal inspections. The Southwest incident showed, he said, that the agency should order thorough inspections of a couple of the older and most heavily used 737s, using the latest technologies, to determine where cracks might develop.

Right now, he said, “it looks like you're putting Band-Aids on the airplane.”

Referring to both the Southwest incident and an earlier one in 2009, in which an 18-inch hole appeared in another Southwest 737, he said, “Here's a case where we have a small hole, a big hole and if we're not going to do something serious about the entire airplane, we're going to end up with a smoking hole.”

F.A.A. and industry officials say they are reviewing their policies on aging planes. But they note that fatigue problems have not caused any deaths on jetliners since the Aloha accident, even with millions of flights a year in the United States.

J. Randolph Babbitt, the head of the F.A.A., and Boeing officials said last week that it was too early to conclude that the latest Southwest incident stemmed from metal fatigue. He said investigators were also examining Boeing's manufacturing processes and other possible causes.

But whatever the outcome of the investigation, the older 737s have provided an early warning about the kinds of fatigue damage that other planes could eventually face. They have been sold since 1968, although the Southwest planes that have had problems are part of the series that was redesigned after Aloha, built from 1993 to 2000.

The 737 has been an industry workhorse because it is economical for both short and long trips. These planes tend to accumulate the highest number of flights. And given the weak financial state of the industry, some airlines have held on to them longer.

But engineers have long known that metal fatigue can develop as a plane's cabin is pressurized then depressurized over tens of thousands of takeoffs and landings. Crucial parts of the fuselage can develop cracks, much like a paper clip that snaps after being bent back and forth. It is when many small cracks link up that they pose a danger.

The Aloha plane had flown nearly 90,000 flights. Boeing had pleaded with the carrier to ground its most-used planes and fix corrosion problems. Federal investigators faulted Aloha's poor maintenance practices for the accident.

But this also led Boeing to redesign, twice, the glued and riveted joints that hold the overlapping pieces of skin connecting the top of the plane to its sides. Boeing figured that this design would last for at least 75,000 flights and would not need to be inspected for cracks until about 60,000 flights. (Designs of the 737 after 2000 eliminated the need for these lap joints.)

The damage on the roof of the Southwest plane, which suddenly appeared midflight on April 1 and forced an emergency landing in Yuma, Ariz., baffled safety experts because the jet, at 15 years old, had logged only about 40,000 takeoffs and landings. The F.A.A. ordered more frequent inspections of those joints starting at 30,000 flights.

Southwest checked 78 similar planes in its fleet and found five others that had developed single small cracks in various spots at just over 40,000 flights.

Boeing said on Sunday that inspections on several dozen other planes, mostly owned by foreign carriers, had not found any cracks. It said it was premature to say whether the cracks on the other Southwest jets were related to the problems that caused the hole on the April 1 flight.

Since 1988, the F.A.A. has issued nearly 100 directives tied to widespread fatigue, requiring airlines to look for cracks in various locations on a variety of airplane models. A quarter were described as urgent. The agency has listed about a dozen serious incidents over the past 16 years, including cracks that were found by people painting planes.

It said, for example, that airline inspectors had found substantial cracks in a bulkhead on a midsize Boeing 767 in 2003, and in fuselage frames of an Airbus A300 in 2002 and a jumbo Boeing 747 in 2005. The most recent incidents, since 2007, have involved the single-aisle 737s and 757s. At least nine have involved areas of the fuselage where overlapping sheets of metal are thinned out to help decrease weight.

In November, an American Airlines 757 depressurized after a two-foot hole opened over a door, forcing the crew and 154 passengers to put on oxygen masks. The plane quickly returned to Miami. Boeing had recommended inspections in that area by 25,000 flights; the plane had 22,000.

Most experts agree that huge progress has been made since the Aloha incident in 1988. Still, in 2007, an F.A.A. inspector allowed Southwest to operate 1,450 flights even though 46 of its planes had not been inspected for cracks in nine months. Southwest was fined $7.5 million for violating federal safety mandates.

The Department of Transportation's Office of Inspector General reported last December that the F.A.A. had failed to make 576 safety inspections from 2005 to 2009. Even though the F.A.A. had cut the number of planned inspections in half over the last 10 years, the report noted, some were eight years late.

The F.A.A. says that it seeks to prevent fatigue through rules governing things like aircraft design and maintenance and that pilots are also trained to handle emergencies that could be caused by fatigue.

In the rule issued late last year, the F.A.A. sought to determine the time before widespread metal fatigue could affect the entire aircraft. F.A.A. officials said the agency was still considering a separate rule on some of the objections raised by the airlines. The agency is still awaiting more testing from the manufacturers to determine what the lifetime flying limits of planes should be.

But ultimately, the answer to combating metal fatigue on older planes may simply come down to economics, aviation experts say. An improving economy, combined with concerns about fuel efficiency given high oil prices, is once more prompting airlines to buy new planes. Southwest, for one, plans to phase out its older 737-300s with bigger planes that are more affordable to fly.

9-Hour Breaks Mandated

The transportation secretary, Ray LaHood, said that required rest time for air traffic controllers would be increased to nine hours to help prevent workers from falling asleep on the job.

“We're going to make sure that controllers are well rested,” Mr. LaHood said in an interview on Fox News Sunday. “We cannot allow controllers to fall asleep.”

The F.A.A. suspended an air traffic controller on Saturday “for falling asleep while on duty” at night at the Miami Air Route Traffic Control Center.

New scheduling rules have been put in place and will be fully in effect by the end of the week, according to a statement posted on the F.A.A. Web site on Sunday.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/18/business/18plane.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&pagewanted=print&adxnnlx=1303122187-KA9QdV3iMt7Dug0vxZ8fcA

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