Yakima County Drug War Heats Up -- Old Farm-Worker Routes Bring Death, Disrepute To Once-Peaceful Valley

YAKIMA - More than 1,000 miles from the Mexican border is perhaps the nation's unlikeliest drug battlefield, a small city in a farming valley that is being compared to Miami and New York.

Drug dealers riding a sort of underground railroad to wealth have turned Yakima County into the heroin- and cocaine-trafficking capital of the Pacific Northwest.

Traveling on long-established migrant farm-worker routes from deep inside Mexico, the dealers have brought death and disrepute to the once-quiet county.

The sound of an AK-47 semiautomatic assault rifle shatters the calm of one night. On another, a man's arm is chopped off with a machete, apparently the fallout from a soured drug deal. Agents of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration arrest entire families. Police use spotlights to illuminate known drug houses.

Once best known for growing much of the nation's fruit, Yakima County has become a front line in the nation's war on drugs.

``There is a war between the people of this city and the drug cartels,'' contends county commissioner Graham Tollefson. ``This is not a war we are capable of winning ourselves.''

William Bennett, the federal drug czar, visited Yakima last October and was astonished.

``(He) came away with the feeling that for a community its size there was clearly something wrong there,'' says Bennett's spokesman, David Robb. ``It definitely jumps off the map.''

Sen. Brock Adams, D-Wash., had hoped to use Bennett's reaction to pry more DEA agents and resources out of the federal government. He asked that Yakima County be designated a ``high-intensity drug-trafficking area,'' bringing more federal agents and resources.

Bennett instead designated New York City, Miami, Los Angeles, Houston and the southwest border region. But in a letter to Adams, Bennett's office acknowledged the Yakima area's problem and promised more help.

Throughout the Pacific Northwest there is a growing awareness that the Yakima Valley's drug problems do not stay between the stark ridges that form the nation's fifth-largest agricultural region.

As police investigate drug trafficking in King, Pierce or Spokane counties, the source of supply often is Central Washington, says Robert Dreisbach, head of the DEA's Yakima office.

``This is not a local consumption problem,'' Dreisbach has reported to Gov. Booth Gardner. Rather, he says, Yakima County has become a warehouse and wholesale distribution point for drugs that are eventually consumed in other communities.

``The notion of a pipeline or hub is accurate,'' Dreisbach says.

It was this facet that prompted DEA to open a full-time office in 1986 in the city of 50,000 residents. They were amazed by what they found.

But perhaps they should not have been.

While Yakima County is one of the world's premier food producers, supplying the nation with asparagus, apples, mint, pears, hops for beer and fruit juice, the metropolitan area ranks fifth from the bottom in per-capita income in 1988, in a U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics study.

The county's 186,000 residents easily have the state's highest metropolitan unemployment rate - 14 percent in January. Education levels are low and good-paying jobs are scarce, making drug-dealing an attractive career option for people seeking to avoid the fields or the warehouses of Fruit Row.

And the minority population is high compared to the rest of the state. Law officers say the county's 17 percent Hispanic population provides a perfect cover for drug dealers from Mexico to move freely in and out of the area.

The problem has spread to other Central Washington counties as well.

Nearby Franklin County, with just 35,000 residents, has the highest per-capita felony caseload in the state - and a $350,000 court budget deficit. The county seat of Pasco was the site of a mass murder in 1988 when five men were shot to death in an auto-body shop. The presumed motive was drugs. The presumed killers have escaped to Mexico.

Recently, the city of Wenatchee, 100 miles north, has shown signs of sprouting as a drug-trafficking center.

Along with the drugs comes violence and an overloaded criminal-justice system described as near collapse. Drug arrests in Yakima jumped from under 300 in 1984 to more than 700 in 1988. The new county jail is already 30 percent over capacity with more than 400 prisoners a day.

Law officers time their arrests to days when there is available jail space, Dreisbach says. Prosecutors are bogged down with caseloads triple those in nearby cities.

``We can't even put people in jail,'' says police officer Maria Schade, who for two years has been pursuing street-level dealers in the city's central business district. ``It's got to be a felony or a warrant.''

More troubling, violent crime has become almost commonplace. There were 23 murders in the county last year, following a record 28 the year before. As recently as 1984 there were only nine murders.

Not coincidentally, requests from county residents for gun permits jumped from 411 in 1986 to 2,256 in 1989, says Sheriff Doug Blair.

Police Chief Pleas Green says nearly all the murders are drug-related and believes it's only a matter of time before one of his officers is killed. ``We have stepped up training in officer survival techniques,'' he says.

Schade says extra precautions are needed when entering one of the city's known drug houses, or when encountering knife-carrying dealers in front of the seedy taverns that often serve as drug markets.

``I don't think it's safe job contacting these people,'' she says.

Some of the crimes are grisly.

In one recent killing, a man's arm was chopped off with a machete and he was dumped along a rural highway. The man died a few days later. No one has been arrested, but drugs are the presumed cause.

Recently convicted was a 17-year-old Hispanic youth charged with being an accomplice in the murder of a Seattle man ambushed in a drug deal.

Police say Norman Siu Chang, 20, was shot to death last October with an AK-47 rifle by drug dealers who hoped to rob him of $100,000 he had brought over the Cascades to purchase cocaine. Siu Chang was dumped on a street near the county jail and managed to call for help on a cellular phone before dying.

Miguel Mendoza Chavez was convicted of second-degree murder. The gunman, whose name was never revealed to police, is believed to have escaped, along with the AK-47, to Mexico. The $100,000 has disappeared.

An example of how wide the area's drug trade extends was last August's DEA raid that broke up two longtime drug-dealing families in the Yakima Valley and produced 18 arrests in Yakima, Tacoma, Seattle and Portland.

The multi-generation drug families had provided up to 200 kilograms a month of cocaine to the Seattle and Portland areas for 15 years, Dreisbach says.

The operation was not that sophisticated, but it did provide another example of the drug pipeline police have come to know and fear.

``They get into a car and drive it south,'' Dreisbach says. ``They put drugs in the car and drive it north.''

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FROM COLOMBIA TO COLUMBIA

From Colombia to the Columbia River, Eastern Washington's drug pipeline provides a steady supply of cocaine for the Pacific Northwest, say federal drug agents.

The major routes are often Interstate 5 and U.S. 97, highways that lead from Southern California to Yakima and beyond.

The area between Yakima and the Tri-Cities of Kennewick, Richland and Pasco has long been a drug-trafficking hotbed, in part because the region's many Hispanics include some people with long ties to Mexico's drug-dealing organizations, says Jim Baldwin of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration's Yakima office.

Cocaine that is purchased for $13,000 to $15,000 a kilogram (2.2 pounds) in California is resold in the Yakima Valley for $18,000 to $22,000, according to Baldwin. The cocaine originates in Colombia and then is shipped into Mexico before entering the United States at busy border stations such as El Paso, Texas, usually hidden in vehicles.

In some cases, Baldwin says, the traffickers will just drive directly to Washington, the drugs perhaps stowed in false gas tanks. Most often they take the cocaine to safe houses in California's major cities. From there, the trafficking organizations will drive it north, usually in a nonstop run, to houses in Central Washington. Or, if there are already customers in larger cities, the drugs may go directly there.

If the cocaine goes to Central Washington, Baldwin says, it will be cut into kilo packages and moved from house to house every few days and then sold to dealers who come in from surrounding cities.

Those dealers then cut the cocaine into street-level packages for sale in Seattle, Spokane, Portland and other cities. Some of the cocaine is also sold on the street level in Central Washington, although Baldwin says drug use is no higher than in other similar areas.