09:56 AM MST on Thursday, August 19, 2004

By Eric Swedlund / Arizona Daily Star

Police find hundreds of pounds of marijuana in stash houses every few days in Tucson, where loads of pot are stored and change hands before smugglers transport the drugs across the nation.

But officials say a series of seemingly routine busts about a year ago started police on an investigation that moved further up the hierarchy of one of Tucson's largest drug trafficking organizations, a multinational ring responsible for bringing up to $1 million in marijuana into the area in a single day.

Investigators with the Counter Narcotics Alliance saw the evidence pointing to a single organization and by late last fall identified the principal figures, local "brokers" who linked Mexican suppliers and Jamaican smugglers, said Tucson Police Department Capt. David Neri, commander of the multiagency task force.

The investigation also shed more light on how traffickers use Southern Arizona as a major drug shipment corridor to the rest of the United States.

"The majority of drugs in the U.S. now come through the Arizona border and millions and millions of dollars flow back to support that supply," said Anthony Coulson, assistant special agent in charge of the Drug Enforcement Administration's Tucson office, which assisted in the investigation. "Attacking the professional infrastructure that supports that is a significant part of every investigation we do."

Since early last week, when 200 officers swept across the city with search, arrest and seizure warrants in the first public strike against the organization, authorities have:

● Seized 29 properties in Tucson and two in the Phoenix area, with an estimated value of nearly $6.4 million.

● Arrested 27 people, including suspected ringleaders, with 12 outstanding suspects facing sealed grand jury indictments.

● Seized 21 vehicles valued at $255,500 and obtained seizure warrants on another 38 vehicles valued at $277,000.

● Seized 3,721 pounds of marijuana, $211,000 in cash and $111,000 in other assets. No weapons were seized.

Officials announced the figures at a morning press conference, for the first time discussing the breadth of the investigation.

The local case solidified with intelligence from the DEA and the investigation expanded, with officers turning from "old-fashioned detective work" and confidential informants to new techniques, including sophisticated financial research to uncover hidden assets and physical and electronic surveillance, including wiretaps, Neri said.

"Once we recognized the size of this, we pull out all of the stops in terms of methodology," Neri said.

With the organization now gutted, the core third of suspects behind bars and much of the infrastructure in police custody, the initial surge of roundup activity is over, but the investigation is expected to continue for several months, with still more arrests, Neri said.

"It has definitely served to dismantle an organization that has brought a substantial level of crime to the Tucson area," he said.

Investigators said the local group negotiated with Mexican suppliers and Jamaican smugglers to bring the marijuana into Tucson, providing stash houses at times. From Tucson, the drugs went to secondary hubs in Phoenix, Los Angeles, Denver, New York, New Jersey and Ohio, and likely nationwide from there.

Authorities believe the other two-thirds of the organization were small-scale associates. Some were brokers themselves but others were transporters or dealers, perhaps associated with other organizations.

Suspected leaders Maria Isabel Dominguez and David Sosa-Hernandez are among those arrested on various charges relating to marijuana possession, trafficking or money laundering. Neri said investigators expect multicount indictments against each suspect once they are formally charged.

Other high profile arrests are alleged business associates of the organization - real estate agents Patricia Mendoza and Christopher Sisneros, auto dealer Mark Allen Begurski and lawyer Hector A. Montoya.

The seized properties, believed to either be stash houses or otherwise associated with suspects and used for illegal activity, are spread throughout Tucson, though somewhat concentrated along the Interstate 19 and I-10 corridors. Included is a car dealership on East Speedway, owned by Begurski.

"The focus of the case was not necessarily to go in and round up narcotics or money so much as it was to combat the organization," Neri said.

In what the federal government estimates is a $64 billion annual industry in the United States, what enables narcotics dealing and trafficking is a collection of wealthy co-conspirators, businesses and individuals who set up straw ownership of homes and vehicles and provide houses to store tons of marijuana, silently reaping large profits from the illegal activity. Any efforts at dismantling large-scale organizations must effectively combat that infrastructure, Neri said.

"We've taken a first stab in Tucson at doing that here," he said.

Authorities have been investigating the Dominguez organization for more than a year, and while they can't say how long the ring has been operating at such a complex level, it takes decades to build trafficking networks, said Coulson.

With the Sierra Madre to the east and the Pacific Ocean to the west, natural routes used by traffickers run straight into Arizona, which Coulson said provides "one of the fastest ways to get into the national blood system of highways."

A largely remote area with quick access to highways both north-south and east-west, Southern Arizona has become the "battleground" in terms of international drug smuggling, Coulson said.

"With seizures, we're far surpassing any other location in the United States. This is a very strategic location for the fight," he said. "Our best attack is to mesh the strategies of enforcement together so we can attack the organization top to bottom, side to side, so we can dismantle the major drug organizations."

Ronald Reyna, an attorney representing Mendoza, said she has pleaded not guilty and "remains firm on that at this time."

Stephen Ralls, Montoya's attorney, said his client had some clients in the suspected drug ring, but was not involved in any drug trafficking or illegal activity himself.

"The facts will bear out that Mr. Montoya was not involved in anything illegal or anything contrary to the standards of law," he said. "His relationship with those clients was legal, ethical and moral and he never crossed those boundaries."

The Counter Narcotics Alliance was launched in January, taking over for the dissolved Metropolitan Area Narcotics Trafficking Interdiction Squads, with greater resources and more federal involvement, crucial components in efforts to combat drug trafficking organizations, Neri said.

Coulson called the collaboration with CNA "phenomenal."

"There's no other partnership in the United States like what we have here," he said. "We're taking a bold step forward. We have a number of strategies and we need to leverage resources together to make a major impact on drug trafficking in the Tucson area."

One of the greatest benefits to having extensive federal involvement in CNA is the ability to share intelligence and collaborate at a rapid pace. While drug trafficking is chiefly an international and national issue, there are far more local narcotics detectives than DEA special agents, so the various agencies rely heavily on each other. With CNA, they can function as one agency, Coulson said.

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©The Arizona Daily Star, 2004