13 Investigates highly potent pot smuggled into Houston airports
HOUSTON, Texas (KTRK) -- Three days before flying between San Francisco and Houston, police say a 32-year-old woman bought a roundtrip ticket, and despite planning on staying for just a few days, she flew with two checked bags weighing 30 pounds each.
The Houston Police Department's Narcotics Division said in a search warrant that officers recognize San Francisco to be a "source city of narcotics" based on the seizure of drugs leaving the city and money flowing back in.
When the woman arrived in Houston on May 29, she grabbed her two checked bags, but as she headed toward the exit, she was approached by a Houston Police officer who identified himself and started asking her questions about why she was in town and if she packed the bags herself, according to a search warrant.
According to the search warrant, the officer asked if he could search her bags, and she agreed. The bags contained a combined total of 61.8 pounds of hydroponic marijuana.
"You have to be pretty brazen to even risk it and put yourself at risk to think that you can blatantly walk through an airport with marijuana or transport any type of narcotics through the airport. It's pretty much a person that doesn't care, and they have that one agenda in mind, and it's to make money or sell drugs or whatever the case may be," said Keith Seafous, assistant chief of HPD's Special Investigations Command.
Seafous said last year, HPD seized nearly 3,000 pounds of marijuana packed in luggage at just George Bush Intercontinental Airport. They've seized nearly 2,000 pounds of marijuana this year through September.
"People are always creative in how they can transport and make money off of narcotics, illegal narcotics, so there's always different tactics, different ways that they attempt to do it," Seafous said. "Yes, it's shocking to see that someone would fill their bag up full of marijuana and try to fly it across the country, but it happens. My officers, they see it every day and this is what they deal with. This is what they're searching for and what they're hunting for."
HPD isn't the only agency catching drugs flying through Houston's airports. They work in partnership with other agencies, including the Drug Enforcement Administration.
Daniel Comeaux, a special agent in charge at the Drug Enforcement Administration's Houston Division, said its agents are highly trained in recognizing unusual movements or the way bags are packed and moving from airport to airport to identify drugs inside luggage.
"They come up with all kinds of creative ways, and every so often, I'll see a picture of something, and I'll say, 'Wow, how did these agents realize there are drugs in this,'" Comeaux said. "I saw one where they had. It was like a ham. The ham was carved out with drugs inside the ham. Who would've ever thought that?"
Comeaux said his agents seize drugs at both Houston airports regularly.
"Drug dealers will do anything possible to get their drugs where they need them to go, so one day it might be the highway, the next day it might be by bus or train or airport," he said. "These are not usable amounts we're talking about. We're talking about amounts that could be redistributed on the streets. That's what we're looking at, and that's what we're looking for, and we see that here."
13 Investigates interviewed an HPD sergeant who works undercover to find criminals smuggling drugs through the airport. He works with a specially-trained K-9 that can detect vacuum-sealed drugs despite efforts to conceal their smell with coffee grounds, fabric softener, oil or other odor masking agents.
"The guys in my squad work really hard and they're here early morning hours, late hours. We vary our schedules so that we're never patterned," the undercover sergeant told us. "If we start arresting a whole lot of people and these organizations keep losing their load, then they're going find another airport to go through. It's not like we're going to stop the flow, but we're going to stop the flow through Houston, Texas."
A few days after 13 Investigates interviewed that undercover sergeant, his team arrested a 24-year-old who flew into Houston with two suitcases filled with 50 pounds of marijuana.
In January, court records show police busted a suspect who purchased a last-minute ticket from San Francisco to Houston and superglued the zipper of his suitcase shut, which are both "common methods used by narcotics/money couriers."
A search warrant for that suspect shows the narcotics dog alerted them to the suitcase and two suspects were arrested for transporting nearly 120 pounds of hydroponic marijuana in four suitcases.
In May, another suspect flying from San Francisco to Houston was caught with two suitcases filled with 30 pounds of hydroponic marijuana each.
The undercover sergeant we spoke with said the weed they find at the Houston airport usually comes from the West Coast, in cities where it's legal to grow.
"We do communicate with other interdiction squads throughout the country. We have good relationships with the officers in San Francisco and LAX, and so if we feel like we might've missed something, we'll call ahead to them and tell them, and they're waiting for that plane when it lands, and likewise, they'll do the same thing," he said.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection also has a presence at the airport and seized nearly 27 pounds of cocaine hidden in a motorized wheelchair at Bush Airport.
Their agents seized nearly 175,000 pounds of marijuana nationwide during this last fiscal year.
Comeaux, with the DEA, said the drugs they're finding are not the pot of the past.
"This is high-level, high-class marijuana. This is marijuana that I've been told from others that you can take one puff of it and literally be high," he said.
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