US DEA: violent drug cartel might be moving to Arizona/Mexico border AP - 7/16/2001

TUCSON, Arizona - The leaders of Mexico's most notoriously brutal drug cartel might be considering moving their operations to the border with Arizona, several U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agents said.

“We have information from various sources that this in fact is taking place,”Jay Woolley, assistant special agent in charge of Tucson's DEA office, told the Arizona Daily Star.

The Arellano Felix brothers have ruled the gang from its base in Tijuana, Mexico, eluding Mexican and U.S authorities for more than five years.

Police crackdowns are beginning to take their toll on the organization, however, especially after the recent extradition to the United States of Arturo “itty”Paez, who's accused of being a lieutenant in the drug trafficking group.

So the gang might be considering a move to the Arizona border, though re-establishing the organization would take a while, Woolley said.

That stretch of the border would be good territory for the gang because there is no dominating cartel but rather a series of small smuggling groups, said Ral Rodriguez, who heads the Santa Cruz County Metro Task force in Nogales, Arizona.

The Arellano Felix gang would simply need to make the smaller groups pay for each load of drugs hauled through its territory, which gang members are known to do with death threats.

“They will talk you into betraying your current business, and if you don't do it, they will kill you,”said Phil Jordan, a retired DEA agent who headed the El Paso Intelligence Center.

In Baja California, the organization is accused of ordering murders of disobedient cartel members, competitors, suspected informants, journalists and police investigators, according to a federal indictment issued in San Diego in 1999.

“These people are not only crooks, but they're sociopaths,”said Special Agent Donald Thornhill Jr., a DEA spokesman in San Diego.

Some agents fear that the group would bring that kind of violence to the Mexican state of Sonora and increased corruption across the border in Arizona.

“We didn't see a whole lot of violence or anything on our side of the border. It was all south, and that's where it stayed,”said retired FBI agent Vincent de la Montaigne, who led a San Diego-based task force investigating the organization until last year.

“On this side, what I saw was the corruption of (U.S. law enforcement) officers.”

-- Anonymous, July 16, 2001