The young woman seemed nervous as she checked in at the airport gate on July 26, and officers could see her hand shake as she held her ticket.
Abril Save of Tucson had just flown to Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport from New York and was preparing to take a connecting flight to her hometown, court records show. But cops had received a tip about her and, after a subsequent computer check told them Save had been busted in 2008 for possessing marijuana for sale, decided to detain her for a moment.
Save admitted she was carrying a load of cash and removed two plastic bags from her purse. Inside them were 982 ten-dollar bills.
Following more questions by investigators, police seized the money -- adding it to a total of $3.4 million confiscated at the airport so far this year.
The Phoenix narcotics team aims to "dismantle and disrupt as many drug
organizations as we can," and seizing money is a great way to accomplish
that goal, says Sergeant Jim Cope, who runs the commercial interdiction
unit of the department's drug enforcement bureau.
As you've
probably heard, the Valley is considered a hub of smuggling for the
nation, with drugs and illegal immigrants going out and money coming in.
Dealers and smuggling organizations, whether small- or large-scale,
often use couriers to bring in money, then export marijuana or hard
drugs like cocaine and heroin from Arizona with mail-delivery services or by driving it across the country.
In
his eight years stationed at the airport with his street-clothes-wearing team, Cope has seen numerous cases like Save's. Other cases involve air travelers carrying $100,000
or more.
Many couriers don't even know they're
carrying large amounts of cash. They're paid by a higher-up in the
smuggling organization to take a bag somewhere; the less the courier
knows, the better.
"There's people totally shaken when we find
money in the lining of a bag," Cope says. "We give them a receipt that
they had $100,000, and they're blown away."
Others know too well
where the money is: Cope describes one case in which a suspicious
traveler was questioned, but cops didn't feel they had enough of a
reason to strip-search him. The narcotics officers are usually
conservative in their approach, he explains, and try to avoid
accusations that they've violated someone's rights for no good reason.
When they watched the man walk away, though, Cope says he noticed the
guy had an awkward gait.
They took the suspect to a private room and soon found $96,000 in two tightly packed rolls tucked into his butt cheeks.
Phoenix
PD doesn't keep all the money that officers find at the airport. The
Maricopa County Attorney's Office takes 20 percent off the top of every
seizure, and paying off informants comes second. Phoenix police deposit the remainder or split it with out-of-state police
departments or federal agencies that participated in the
intelligence-gathering process, Cope says.
Phoenix routinely ends
up with 55 to 60 percent of the gross total seizures, and the money
helps fund new enforcement operations.
While Cope hopes his
team's effort reduces both the amount of drugs on the street and the
violence that too-often accompanies the illegal drug trade, the seizures
sometimes cause violence.
Four-to-six suspects a year are
believed to be killed or hurt by members of the smuggling organizations
in connection with an airport cash seizure, Cope says. Police believe
those people (or victims, as might be the case), had previously been
suspected by crime bosses of stealing money.
More commonly, the
seizures help provide information. There's no law against carrying a
huge amount of cash on an airplane, so the suspects aren't usually
arrested. Police interview and may conduct surveillance on those folks,
though, which leads to bigger and better busts.
Cope's got no
illusions of ridding the world of drugs. He avoids worrying about the
politics of, say, marijuana legalization, and concentrates on doing his
work, he says.
If he can make drug dealers believe the airport is too risky, it might cause them take their business elsewhere, he figures.
"If we weren't here, what would it be like?" Cope asks rhetorically. "We're keeping it at bay."
Mistakes
are made every now and then. Cops understand that not every person
hauling money across the country plans to use it for a drug deal. A
couple of years ago, Cope says, two Mexican dudes carrying almost
$100,000 in cash were questioned by the airport narcotics team. They
turned out to be construction workers who had come to Phoenix to look at
a used cement truck they wanted to buy. The deal didn't work out, so
they were taking their money home.
In that case, the men showed
cops the ad for the truck and had other documentation that backed up
their tale. Most drug couriers have no such back-story.
Save, for
example, told officers in July that she had gone to New York to buy
"knick knacks and purses," but could provide no firm details. She
admitted she only made $25,000 last year in her job as a waitress, but
implied she'd gotten the cash by selling stuff on the Internet and from
receiving $4,000 a friend had owed her.
The officers didn't buy her excuses. They took the money and turned her loose.
Save filed a petition to get the money back the next month, but the
Arizona U.S. Attorney's Office launched a forfeiture action to keep it.
(The federal Drug Enforcement Agency was also involved in the case.)
Cope and Phoenix police spokesman Sergeant Tommy Thompson, who worked the narcotics detail for years, tell New Times that the seized cash is a "byproduct" of the over-arching goal to reduce trafficking, and not the focus.
Police use caution to avoid violating the rights of air travelers and
coming under suspicion themselves for being too money-hungry, they say.
No random searches of passenger manifests are conducted -- their info
most often comes from tips by informants or other police agencies.
Once cops draw a bead on someone, though, the rest is easy money.
