UNNECESSARY EPIDEMIC Hidden Powerhouses Underlie Meth's Ugly Spread

FRESNO, Calif. A cross the West and Great Plains, small-town residents blame the arrival of meth abuse in their communities on the influx of local meth labs.

The reality is that 80 percent of meth comes from Mexican drug cartels operating here, in the rural expanses of Central and Southern California. According to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, only 20 percent of the supply is made by local users themselves.

A decade ago, the cartels in California pioneered a technique for industrial-scale production of meth that police dubbed the "superlab."

Built with commercial-grade lab equipment and fueled by hundreds of pounds of chemicals, a single superlab can churn out 100,000 or even 1 million doses of meth in a two-day production run. A typical "user" meth lab can make a maximum of 280 doses at a time.

The cartels' prodigious supply of methamphetamine, sent out across the Plains as far east as North Carolina, created a demand where none existed before. Many of the supply lines lead back to the nation's agricultural powerhouse: the Central Valley of California.

"This," said Carl M. Faller Jr., a Fresno federal prosecutor, "is Colombia for meth."

The influence of the superlabs is overlooked because although they account for the bulk of the drug's production, they represent only 4 percent of the labs. The vast majority of meth labs nationally -- 8,000 of the 8,300 seized in 2001 -- are home-user labs.

Home labs can become an obsessive outlet for users on the multiday runs without sleep known as "tweaking." The designs are primitive and vary widely. They consist of a jumble of over-the-counter pseudoephedrine, household lye and scraped-away matchbook covers. The reaction vessel usually is a jelly jar. The output might provide a cook $250 to $500 worth of meth to sell, with two weeks' worth left over for personal use.

Although tweaker labs are costly to clean up when they explode or spill, their role in supplying meth to U.S. users is minor. The main culprit is the superlab.

California superlabs achieve a level of sophistication, uniformity and efficiency seldom seen in tweaker labs.

The superlab's signature is a globe-shaped piece of glassware that drug agents call a "22." Designed for scientific research, the 22-liter reaction vessel could hold the contents of 11 two-liter soda bottles. The 22 sits in an aluminum cradle lined with heating coils. The cradle and globe together sell for $3,000 to $4,000.

Inside the glass ball, a blood-red brew of pseudoephedrine, red phosphorus and hydriodic acid reacts to form meth. The temperature dial is turned up to set the mixture bubbling, then down to cook. Orange hoses stretch like octopus arms from the neck of each 22 to a box filled with cat litter, which absorbs reaction gases.

Jerry Massetti, a chemist with the California Bureau of Forensic Services, recalled the first rumors of such monster labs in San Diego in the early 1990s.

"You'd wonder whether it was an exaggeration," Massetti said. "Then you'd hear similar stories of labs in Riverside, Orange County, Los Angeles."

Then the monster headed north, he said, "like a shadow passing over the landscape."

In the Central Valley, the highly standardized superlabs arrived en masse one week in July 1992, according to Massetti's notes and a journal article he wrote at the time. The labs, he wrote, "corroborated rumors about multiple tons of ephedrine being processed in this way."

The biggest Massetti ever saw came eight months later, in a Tulare County fruit-packing shed. The lab was so enormous that operators used a forklift to crush all the cans of Freon emptied during manufacturing. Twelve glass 22s were strung together, creating a capacity of 144 pounds of pure meth per batch. Cut to street purity, that could keep 21,000 serious addicts high for a week.

The labs are so standardized that the first time police found high-thread-count Martha Stewart sheets -- used to filter solid meth from surrounding liquids -- in one lab, identical sheets were discovered the next day in a lab 100 miles away. The smallest detail, down to the way in which hoses are duct-taped together, is replicated from one superlab to the next.

Police say the cookie-cutter approach reflects the guiding hand of Mexico-based drug cartels, which run the labs in California and distribute the finished product across the country.

Labor comes from migrant workers. California drug agents call these lab operators "mopes" -- police lingo for low-level henchmen.

The mopes don't use meth but hire themselves out in standing crews of four or five, available for a weekend's hard work cooking the drug. From the Central Valley, a typical crew of mopes could travel across Pacheco Pass through the Coast Range on a Friday night to the Bay Area. They'd pick up a stash of chemicals from a San Jose storage locker, then return to a small valley town such as Merced, where their employer would secure a secluded barn or farmhouse by bribing a ranch foreman.

After laying in a supply of groceries, the mopes would work for two days without sleep to monitor the delicate reaction. A misstep could cost $50,000. Some are told their families in Mexico will be killed if they speak to the police. At times, drug agents have come upon mopes in a lab padlocked from the outside.

In Medford, Ore., police say 15 major dealers ferry the drugs regularly from the Central Valley. In Woodburn, Ore., police once seized 30 pounds of meth shipped directly by a top member of the Amezcua cartel in Southern California. The local dealers had customers up and down Interstate 5, from the Portland suburbs to the Grants Pass area of Southern Oregon.

Blinding dust billows across county roads. Derelict outbuildings, rusting farm implements and 100-foot stacks of wooden pallets dot mile after mile.

Through long experience, the 20-member Fresno Methamphetamine Task Force has learned the routine of catching mopes in the act.

Team members cull junk mail at lab waste dumps for addresses. They watch abandoned farmhouses where the occasional car has been seen to come and go. On a stakeout, they'll ask permission to park in a rancher's yard by saying they're investigating the theft of farm implements.

If they're lucky, they'll sneak up on what Fresno Sgt. Don Mitchell calls a "real nice lab" -- 22s bubbling, surrounded by a smell some liken to rotting citrus.

Agents tell of moonlit "low crawls" with camouflage and automatic weapons through rows of grapevines; of the leg broken in a fall through a rotting barn roof; of mopes who ran, or "leg bailed," and ones who slowed down long enough to be deported.

Whether the mopes get caught or get away, they often leave behind relics of Jesus Malverde -- the mustachioed 19th-century bandit whom Mexican traffickers have made their patron saint. The relics offer prayers like this one, printed on a container of incense:

"Oh Miraculous Malverde, Oh Malverde my Savior, grant me this favor and fill my heart with joy.

"Grant me good health, Lord, give me peace, give me comfort, and I will rejoice."

10:10 PM 5/4/1997

'The Narco-saint'

Jesus Malverde, who may have been myth, attracts thousands of followers in Mexico

By SAM QUINONES
Copyright 1997 Special to the Chronicle

CULIACAN, Mexico -- Every third night, Florentino Ventura can be found sleeping outdoors, guarding the large, blue shrine that honors his belief in a lawless man.

It is Ventura's faith that keeps him there.

In the summer of his 23rd year, when Ventura was working as an oyster diver in Mazatlan, he became tangled in his rope underwater. He wrestled with the cord and began to drown.

Suddenly, the face of the bandit Jesus Malverde appeared to him. Ventura finally freed himself, rose to the surface and immediately came to Culiacan, to the bandit's shrine, to give thanks.

Now 34, Ventura's been here ever since.

Along the way, he gave up his law studies and a political career. "The Mexican political system is useless," he says. "It is false, pure lies."

He found more truth in Jesus Malverde.

Ventura is one of thousands of people who have formed a sort of cultlike following that believes the bandit -- who may have been real or may have been myth -- works miracles to this day.

All year long, they come to his shrine to ask for favors and thank him for those they think he's granted. They leave behind photos and plaques with grateful inscriptions: the Lopez family from Guamuchil; Lorenzo Salazar from Guadalajara; the Guicho Rios family from Mexicali; the Leon family from Stockton, Calif.; and many more from the great Mexican Diaspora in Los Angeles.

The Pacific Coast state of Sinaloa, home of the commercial city of Culiacan, is one of those places in Mexico where justice isn't blind and the lawless aren't always the bad guys. Having the government as an enemy can be good for a reputation.

So maybe it's not so hard to understand how thousands of people could come to believe that Jesus Malverde, a renegade long dead, performs miracles in their lives.

But the faith in the bandit gets even stranger.

Over the last 20 years, Malverde has also become the patron saint for the region's many drug smugglers. The press has dubbed him "The Narco-saint."

The transformation was a simple one. Mexican drug smuggling began in Sinaloa. Here, smugglers are folk heroes, and a "narco-culture" has existed for some time.

Faith in Malverde was always strongest among Sinaloa's poor and highland residents, the classes from which Mexico's drug traffickers emerged. As the narcos went from the hills to the front pages, they took Malverde with them.

He now represents the religious side to the narco-culture.

Legend has it that Jesus Malverde was a bandit who rode the hills near this capital of Sinaloa around the turn of the century.

They say Malverde robbed from the rich and gave to the poor, a Mexican Robin Hood. In 1909, so they say, the government hanged him from a tree and left his body to rot.

Historians, however, have found no evidence that Jesus Malverde ever lived.

"If he lived, faith in him is a remarkable thing," says Sergio Lopez, a dramatist from Culiacan who has researched the Malverde phenomenon. "If he never lived, it's even more remarkable because people have created this thing to achieve the justice that is denied them."

What does live is a rich and fluidly changing lore about the bandit.

In some versions, he's a construction worker. Most have him beginning a life of crime after his parents died of hunger. Some versions say he was betrayed by a friend who cut off his feet and dragged him through the hills to the police to collect a 10,000-peso reward.

Others have him betrayed and shot to death.

The governor who wanted him arrested, Francisco Canedo, may have actually invented the Malverde legend to keep in check the abuses by his more brutal hacienda owners, Lopez says. But there's a story that Canedo challenged Malverde to rob him. Malverde, as a construction worker, reportedly gained entrance to the mansion, stole the governor's sword and wrote on a wall, "Jesus M. was here."

His first miracle, according to one version, was returning a woman's lost cow.

Eligio Gonzalez, whose work to keep faith in the bandit alive has earned him the nickname "The Apostle of Malverde," tells still another story.

"The rural police shot him in the leg with a bow and arrow," Gonzalez says. "He was dying of gangrene. He told his friend, `Before I die, compadre, take me in to get the reward.' His friend brought him in dead and got the reward. They (hanged) Malverde from a mesquite tree as a warning to the people.

"His first miracle was for a friend who lost some mules loaded with gold and silver," Gonzalez said. The friend "asked the bones of Malverde, which were still hanging from the tree, to find his mules again. The friend found them, so he put Malverde's bones in the box and went to the cemetery where the governor is buried. He bribed the guard to let him bury Malverde there. He buried him like contraband.

"No one knows where."

Malverde's shrine stands near the railroad tracks on the west side of Culiacan. Nearby are Malverde Clutch & Brakes, Malverde Lumber and two Denny's-like cafeterias, Coco's Malverde and Chic's Malverde.

Outside the shrine, people sell trinkets, candles, pictures and tapes of ballads to the bandit. A plaster bust of Malverde can cost up to $8. Inside are two concrete busts of the man. Malverde, supposedly a poor man from the hills, turns out to look a lot like a matinee idol: dark eyes, sleek mustache, jet-black hair, resolute jaw.

In glass display cases, farmers have left corn. One man has left a plastic bag of hair with thanks to Malverde for helping him survive a prison term at San Quentin. There's false teeth and a false leg.

A fisherman has left a large jar containing formaldehyde and a shrimp easily weighing a quarter- pound as thanks for a successful catch.

Faith in Malverde is a private affair. There is no ceremony at the shrine.

A constant stream of people arrive, place candles near one of the busts, sit for a while, bless themselves, touch Malverde's plaster head, and leave. Some are poor. Others arrive in shiny trucks and cars, looking very middle class.

Gloria, a housewife, arrived from Guadalajara. She spent all night, 11 hours, on the bus to get here and brought with her a collage of photos of her five children, mother and husband.

Her only reason for the trip was to visit Malverde's shrine. Then she was right back on a bus home for another 11 hours.

"Three years ago, some friends of mine told me about Malverde," she said. "A great faith was born in me. You know that faith moves mountains.

"He helped me a lot. My son was drinking a lot. Now he's studying car transmissions."

Says Florentino Ventura, sitting near the shrine: "He's the saint for whoever believes in him, not just narcos."

Sam Quinones is a free-lance journalist based in Mexico City.

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