Law Enforcement: ‘LAX Likely the Drug Trafficking Hub of the World’
Even the DEA (Drug Enforcement Agency) tries to pass the buck on this one!
Sheriff Grady Judd of Polk County, FL, began an investigation four years ago that led law enforcement agencies to conclude that Los Angeles International Airport is likely the world’s main drug trafficking hub.
“Over and over on these domestic airlines from LAX, through suitcases drugs were smuggled here,” Judd said, as he displayed luggage packed with narcotics at a press conference announcing a drug bust.
Through good police work, his agency cracked a big drug ring – and the bust illustrates a much larger problem.
“On one occasion, on one airline, six suitcases with this drug was smuggled into Orlando,” Judd said. “They didn’t so much as throw a pair of underwear in the suitcase to act like they were hiding the drugs. You think LAX has got a drug smuggling problem?”
The investigation began four years ago and involved multiple local and federal agencies, resulting in dozens of arrests.
Judd told ABC7, “It’s so easy not to be caught. We see drugs pouring out of LAX.”
Law enforcement discovered through the investigation that drug smuggling through LAX happens daily.
“They use this multi, multi-billion dollar travel industry as their go-to, to move drugs across this country,” added Judd.
An ABC7 investigation “uncovered drug cases across the United States and the globe, all originating out of LAX.”
First off, TSA doesn’t search for drugs. Jason Pantages, TSA’s security director for LAX, insisted the agency cannot search for drugs.
“We don’t have the ability to do that because we’re not law enforcement officials,” said Pantages. “We’re transportation security officers.”
Pantages added: “We can’t search for criminal activity. It’s not within what we’re able to do with our search authority.”
Okay, so TSA won’t screen the bags for drugs.
How about the DEA? You know, the Drug Enforcement Agency.
Nope:
“A lot of what they do is investigative,” said Matthew Allen, special agent in charge of the DEA in Los Angeles. “A lot of what they do is try to stop the narcotics before they ever actually even make it to LAX.”
“So part of the dilemma is if they’re not going to look at bags – then who should be doing this?”
“We all have a role to play, right? Screening is not the role of the DEA.”
The LAX police Agency?
Chief Cecil Rhambo says no because, “Bags are TSA.”
FBI? DHS?
Again…NOPE:
The FBI also plays a role in enforcing drug laws, but only in a limited sense:
When airport employees try to use their credentials to smuggle narcotics past checkpoints.
And when illegal drugs are found on a plane. But only if the doors to the cabin have been shut. While they are open, the plane is still under LAX police jurisdiction.
“It’s complicated because this airport is so complicated,” says FBI special agent David Gates.
And Homeland Security is another agency that is involved.
“We have approximately 40 special agents that reside there on a daily basis,” says John Pasciucco with Homeland Security Investigations.
But those agents are primarily focused on international drug cases, he says. And like the DEA, their focus is on investigations, not screening bags.
I should be shocked that the DEA doesn’t want to have anything to do with drug enforcement, but hey. It’s a federal agency. Agencies don’t give a crap about their jobs so I’m not shocked.
We have an open border and an open airport.
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Comments
oakland says:
hold my pipe
then arlo guthrie had it right all those years back
Comin’ into Los Angeles
Bringin’ in a couple a keys
Don’t touch my bags, if you please
Mister customs man
🙂
ou can anything you want at Alice’s Baggage Check. Exceptin’ Alice, of course.
look for an increase in “hostilities” between blacks and latinos and then just full on ms13 vs all
Investigators walked around inspecting the baggage security, with tags saying LAX everywhere, and were eventually guided to the conclusion that security was lax.
Metal detector line is a public space. Nothing stopping an officer and canine from any agency walking it.
1) Officials want to multiply subordinates, not rivals.
2) Officials make work for one another.
“Like most generalizations, these are not always true, but the incentives that apply specifically to tax-funded government bureaucracies make them true much more often than not. They make a striking contrast with the almost exactly opposite behavior observable in private enterprise.
That young bureaucrat will profit from deliberate ineffectiveness to the extent that he can get himself viewed as an asset by his superiors and a non-threat by his peers. His superiors want him to produce justifications for the enlargement of their domains. His peers simply ask that he not tread on their provinces.
Milton Friedman noted that bureaucratic resource allocation involves spending other people’s money on other people, so there are no compelling reasons to control either cost or quality — but a bureaucrat will learn, given time, how to “spend on others” in such a fashion that the primary benefit flows to himself.
To do this, bureaucrats must manage perceptions, so that their work seems both necessary and successful.”
In short, we, the U.S. taxpayers, are paying them salaries to do nothing.
Just like local LEOs fill out incident reports and file them.
Every so often, a cop is involved in the death of a drug-addled perp and gets sent to prison by a jury of his peers (the perp’s, not the cop’s) and his brothers and sisters on the force say “Uh,uh! not for me”, and go back to filing reports.
TSA is such a manifest joke and disgrace.
This wretched agency is too politically correct to give richly-deserved and rationally warranted extra scrutiny to Muslim men and women (as if no adherent of that supremacist, totalitarian and pathology-laden ideology has ever engaged in aviation-related terrorism), but, ensuring that non-Muslims and seniors are given plenty of scrutiny, to avoid being accused of “profiling.”
TSA agents will also strut about with swelled chests, as if their confiscation of your tiny Swiss Army Knife is proof of their alleged high competence, while thousands of kilos of illicit narcotics (and, God knows what else) move undetected and unmolested through their hands.
The manifest absurdity and obnoxious nerve of Muslims in claiming alleged “discrimination” and “profiling” with regard to their fairly receiving heightened security screening, given that their co-religionists have been/are responsible for the vast majority of global terrorism, is nauseating and galling.
x10
Funny how the Israeli airport security agents don’t have the same aversion to concentrating on an obviously violence prone demographic.
When I traveled for work, I encountered more than a few TSA agents that could barely compose a declarative sentence if their life depended on it. Shuck and jive types. Overly loud women barking commands of the people online. But as you state, useless.
I once walked past a TSA agent in Phoenix who was telling her co-worker, “I got this government job, and I’m set for life”. That’s the problem.
According to TSA, (no snickering please) they x-ray all checked luggage,
only so they can open the ones that appeal to them
All checked baggage is CT scanned for explosives. They could be scanned for drugs as well if the TSA required the equipment suppliers to install/develop algorithms to do so. Some foreign governments do use the scanners to screen for drugs.
Do not say incompetent when corrupt fits the scenario better.
when ms13 types are your agents……
Los Angeles is a major hub for the drug trade?
Don’t that beat all, Eustace!