TK

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 HUNT
The
WHI T E OC T OBER
As Colombian traffickers continue their battle to smuggle cocaine onto the streets of America, a new front has
developed in the war on drugs: below the surface of the
ocean. An inside look at the world of drugs subs, and the men trying to catch them.
There’s a popular saying in the port city of Buenaventura:
“Those who talk are carried away by the tide.”
So it’s understandable that Diego Morales doesn’t want to reveal too
many details about why he agreed to undertake such a perilous mission.
All he will say is that his sister owed money to the wrong people. And
owing money to the wrong people in Colombia’s new cocaine capital is
a goodBywayFrank
to end up dead.
Owen for Maxim
“I needed a lot of pesos fast,” says Morales, 52, a sullen-looking fire-
plug of a man with a scar over his right eye.
So imagine the relief when the offer came: 30,000 American dollars,
half now, the other half when the work was completed, a mind-boggling
amount of money for someone used to living on the equivalent of $5 a
day. And all he had to do was go on a fishing trip.
It was August 2007 when Morales was picked up in a truck and taken
to a damp estuary on the outskirts of Buenaventura, a vast, tangled net-
work of rivers and inlets bordered by dense jungle. He glimpsed men
wearing camouflage uniforms and cradling assault rifles guarding
something half-submerged in the muddy creek. Morales was expect-
ing a fishing boat, so he was puzzled to see a rusty cigar-shaped metal
contraption about 60 feet long and eight feet wide. Suddenly, it dawned
on him what it was—a narco-submarino, the latest weapon in the Colom-
bian drug traffickers’ campaign to smuggle cocaine into North America.
Morales had heard the stories about fishermen who went on one of these
deadly vessels and never came back.
“I didn’t know that I was going to be traveling in a vessel underwa-
ter,” he says. “But I couldn’t say no. When someone takes you to one of
these things and you say no, you can lose your life.”
The coke was already in place, five tons wrapped in plastic and tight-
ly packed in the fore and aft. Morales was ordered on board, and he
squeezed his thick frame through the hatch into the sub, where he saw
three figures crouching in the shadows: the burly captain, Arturo Gon-
zalez; a mechanic named Arley Arraya whose face was blistered with
nasty-looking burns; and a Mexican “load guard,” Luis Galindo, a 25-year-
old with jug ears sent by the drug traffickers to make sure their precious
cargo reached its intended destination.
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for
By Frank Owen for Maxim Illustration by Eric Heintz
The interior smelled of rusty iron, and the walls dripped with conden-
sation. Morales had worked on some junkers in his nearly four decades
as a fisherman, but nothing like this. “There was nothing inside except
cocaine—no beds, no toilets, no kitchen,” says Morales.The Captain told
him the mission would take about eight days. The assignment was to
transport the contraband, worth about $100 million on the streets of
America. Though the crew didn’t know it, they were headed some 1,700
miles to Mexico’s Gulf of Tehuantepec. Morales’s job was to help Gonza-
lez and steer the mini-sub when the captain was asleep.
Ready to go, Captain Gonzalez started up the 350-horsepower diesel
engine and rode the receding tide out of the estuary, puttering at a slow
and steady five knots into the darkness of the Pacific.
****
The frontline in the war on drugs has now shifted under-
water. The U.S. Coast Guard calls these cocaine submarines SPSSs (self-
propelled semi-submersibles), so called because they don’t dive like
military subs but glide just below the surface of the water. Sightings of
these subs have skyrocketed in the last year. Back in 2006, the Coast
Guard detected only three; now they are spotting as many as 10 a month.
Last year alone, more drug subs were seized at sea and on dry land than
in the entire previous decade. According to the DEA, as much as a third
of the cocaine that arrives on American shores comes via these some-
times comical conveyances. They’re usually bound for Mexico’s west
coast, where the cocaine is off-loaded onto speedboats or fishing ves-
sels and taken ashore, while the sub is sunk.
“We can’t say exactly how many there are and how many are getting
through,” says one DEA source. “But there’s a lot.”
Regarded as a joke by law enforcement when they first appeared in
the early 1990s, the prototypes were jerry-built contraptions, difficult to
steer and limited in how far they could travel and how much cocaine they
could hold. Now, with a new fleet of faster, more seaworthy vessels that
can travel as much as 2,000 miles without refueling, the U.S. government
officially regards cocaine submarines as “an emerging threat.”
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 Anatomy of a Drug Sub A detailed look at the latest weapon in the war on drugs.

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8

16

10
2
17
13

11 15
3 4 9
6

1
5 7 12

1 Rudder. 2 Bales of cocaine packed in the stern 3 Scuttle valves, used to sink the sub in the event of capture 4 Diesel engine, capable of speeds up to 20
knots and traveling underwater for 2,000 miles without refueling 5 Bilge pump 6 Mechanic 7 Bucket used both to bail water and to prevent the engine
from overheating 8 Cooling system, which funnels exhaust from the engine; exhaust is cooled by the ocean before being released, thwarting Coast Guard
attempts to spot sub using infrared technology 9 Crew member 10 Storage space for food and water 11 Armed “load guard” hired by drug traffickers to
make sure the crew stays in line 12 Toolbox 13 Sub captain, in charge of steering, navigation, and communicating with traffickers on land 14 Pilot house, the
only portion of the sub that rises above surface level 15 Steering wheel 16 Satellite radio 17 Compass 18 Bales of cocaine stored in the submarines bow.

Commander Timothy Espinoza of the U.S. Coast Guard told a recent
maritime security conference, “An SPSS can smuggle 10 to 12 tons of
coke without detection. What else can they smuggle: money, guns, ille-
gal aliens, terrorists, weapons of mass destruction?”
These subs cost upwards of $1 million, which sounds like a lot until
you realize that each vessel carries cocaine worth 100 times that amount.
They’re built in secret jungle shipyards on the outskirts of Buenaven­
tura, protected by armed guards and shielded from aerial surveillance
by a thick canopy of trees and near constant cloud cover.While their con-
struction may be a secret, their existence isn’t. Everybody in Buenaven-
tura knows about the narco-subs. People line up at the dockside for a
chance to work on one. For some in the slums, a job on one of these boats
is like winning the lottery, a ticket out of deprivation.
****
The first couple of days were intolerable. With nowhere to
lie down, the crew slept sitting up, eyes half-closed, leaning on each oth-
er’s shoulders.They survived on stale bread and canned tuna, and if they
wanted to go to the bathroom, the captain had to surface and the crew
defecated with the fishes.
Worst of all was the punishing humidity. Morales had to keep pouring
water over the engine to prevent it from overheating, releasing clouds
of steam that turned the narrow space into a sauna. It was so hot the
crew worked in their underwear. The ventilation system that poked up
through the surface of the water didn’t provide nearly enough air in the
cramped quarters for four people.
Morales’ main role was to steer the submarine when the captain was
otherwise occupied. A compass sitting on top of a metal box guided
the way, and Morales could see where the vessel was headed by looking
through a narrow slit level with the ocean surface. But only the captain
was allowed to communicate with the traffickers via the radio.
By the seventh day, the food and drinking water were running low.
Things were officially desperate. Where were they going? The captain re-
fused to say. The traffickers had sworn him to secrecy on pain of death.
Then, in the early evening, the Mexican load guard who had popped
his head up through the hatch to get a breath of fresh air and looked up
to see a propeller-powered military plane circling overhead. He rushed
back below and told his comrades:
“Americanos.”
The captain turned off the engine, fearful that the U.S. plane might fire
at them. And then the sub started to leak. Throughout the voyage, Gon-

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18
Each drug sub is
capable of transporting
$100,000,000 worth
of cocaine.
zalez had to stop periodically and surface to let Morales pump out pud-
dles of water. But this time the Pacific Ocean roared into the interior and
soon the panicked crew was up to its knees, frantically operating bilge
pumps in a futile attempt to halt the tide.They thought about abandon-
ing ship, but were worried about being eaten by sharks. So instead they
donned their life vests and clambered onto the deck, where they waved
T-shirts in the air in a frantic attempt to attract the attention of the mili-
tary plane. What if the Americans couldn’t reach them in time? Galindo
the load guard predicted that they were all going to die.
****
On the evening of August 20, 2007, the USS DeWert out of May-
flower, Florida was on a routine counter-narcotics patrol in the eastern
Pacific about 300 miles southwest of the Mexican-Guatemalan border
when the call came in. A U.S. Navy marine patrol airplane had just spot-
ted a suspicious vessel about 35 miles away. “It looks like a fucking sub-
marine,” one of the surprised Navy airmen blurted over the radio.
The captain ordered the DeWert to change course to intercept the SPSS.
Below deck, LEDT 102, a U.S. Coast Guard law enforcement deployment
team led by Petty Officer Nathan Fornicola, was preparing to conduct
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what is called an ROV (right of visit). At 26, Fornicola had six years ser-
vice with the Coast Guard. He had joined the service two years out of
high school in San Morales and now led a group of guys many of whom
were not long out of high school themselves.
At approximately 1:30 a.m., Fornicola and his five-man team dropped
over the side of the DeWert and into a high-speed inflatable boat headed
for the target zone. The Navy patrol plane flew overhead to guide them.
About a mile from the vessel’s last reported position, they saw a faint
light flickering in the distance.
As they closed in on the position, they noticed four people in the
water, all of them wearing life jackets, one of them holding a flashlight.
Their vessel was gone but the crew was still very much alive.
Officer Lutz shouted in Spanish. “What happened to your boat?”
“It sank,” a voice in the darkness replied.
With rifles and side arms trained on them, the survivors were instruct-
ed to swim to the boat one at a time. Once safely onboard, Fornicola told
Lutz to ask the crew members where they come from. Three said they
were Colombian, the other said he was Mexican. Fornicola noticed that
the Colombians were nervous. Not so for the Mexican.
“Relax,” he said in English.
Asked what happened to their vessel, Galindo stamped his foot on
the deck and said, “There was a crack in the boat.”
The sub crew had spent about a half-hour in the cold water, but they
looked in fairly good physical shape, so Fornicola brought the survivors
aboard the DeWert. The whole crew felt relieved. They were alive, and as
far as they knew, they were in the clear, the evidence 3,000 feet below
on the ocean floor.
After dropping off Morales and his pals, Fornicola, accompanied by
Officer Schulz and Officer Michael Karnoff, headed back out to see if there
was any debris left behind. Karnoff, 30, the oldest member of the team,
was at the front of the speedboat when he first noticed a plastic water
bottle bobbing on the water. Fornicola’s ears pricked up at the news.
Then Karnoff spotted what looked like a plastic-covered brick, then
another, and another, followed by a burlap sack that contained what
looked like 20 individually wrapped kilos of cocaine.Two hour later, two
small boats laden with 11 bales and 60 bricks—five tons in all—headed
back to the DeWert.
It was a big win for the U.S. Coast Guard, the sort of bust that garners
headlines, which it did on CNN and other news outlets. Fornicola and
his team had managed to retrieve enough drugs to send Morales and
company to federal prison for long stretches. Still, it nagged at him that
they had failed to capture the vessel before it sank. Every time the Coast
Guard tried to board one of these subs, the crews would scuttle them,
sending boat and cocaine to the bottom of the ocean. If the Coast Guard
could actually capture one and thus be able to examine the technology
that powers them, it would shed some light on the drug traffickers’ tac-
tics: how they communicate with each other, how they constuct these
subs. They might even be able to discover who is building them.
****
Withthe demise ofthe Cali and Medellín cartels inthe 1990s,
some observers incorrectly predicted the beginning of the end of the
Andean cocaine trade. By 2000 it was practically impossible to ship coke
of any great weight through the Caribbean, so drug traffickers turned to
the Colombia’s untamed Pacific coastline. Instead of declining, cocaine
production boomed as the role of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of
Colombia, better known by their Spanish acronym FARC, took on a
new importance. The FARC needed the money to buy weapons and
to continue to finance their half-century-long struggle against the
Colombian government. Now they took on a more active role, not just
pro­viding protection but also assembling a small navy of drug
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 vessels to transport the contraband on the high seas.
“The FARC became the FedEx of the cocaine business,”
says Daniel Castillo, aTampa-based defense lawyer who has
represented a number of foreign maritime cocaine smug-
glers caught at sea by the U.S. Coast Guard. “They don’t own
the product, but make money by ensuring that it’s delivered
to the right address.”
But the FARC had a problem. The Colombian navy had
Buenaventura blockaded. And even if a FARC drug boat
made it into international waters, the U.S. Navy and Coast
Guard were there waiting. A multipronged crackdown on
maritime cocaine trafficking called Operation Panama Ex-
press was eating into the narco-terrorists’ profit margins.
“The success of Operation Panama Express in stemming
cocaine trafficking over the water is a big part of the reason
why the Colombians went underwater,” says Castillo.
The FARC turned to a man nicknamed Captain Nemo
for help. Enrique Portocarrero was a shrimp fisherman by
trade who once worked at a commercial dry dock, where he
learned the rudiments of boat design. Short and squat, with
the crumpled face of a bulldog, he owned a shipyard about
20 miles south of Buenaventura, where, according to Co-
lombian law enforcement, he invented a new generation
of narco-subs—sleek, V-shaped fiberglass boats specially designed for A little over a year after DIEGO Morales and his crew were
stealth. The only thing visible above the water line was the top of the apprehended in the USS DeWert incident, the Coast Guard received an
pilot house, along with the goose-neck-shaped ventilation and exhaust urgent bulletin from Operation Panama Express saying that a suspi-
pipes which give the vessels the appearance of something dreamed up cious vessel had left Buenaventura on August 31, 2008 at around nine at
by Jules Verne. Each boat is custom designed to carry a specific load. A key night heading north-northwest. Rather than relying on luck to stumble
feature of the boats were the scuttle valves that Portocarrero installed across one of these cocaine submarines in the vastness of the Pacific,
which enables the crew to flood and sink the vessel along with the in- this time the Coast Guard had actual advance intelligence. If the opera-
criminating evidence if they are stopped. tion was planned correctly, they would be able to seize one of Captain
Cocaine mini-subs are actually an old idea updated (see sidebar), Nemo’s vessels before it sank.
but Captain Nemo’s were actually fairly easy to construct. Portocar­rero Just after midnight on September 17, 2008, Petty Officer Alberto Del-
would build a ship’s mold, put the fiberglass in place, buy a diesel en- gado was relaxing in his bunk on the USS McInerney, when he received
gine, and procure navigation and communication devices. Though the word that he has been waiting for all day. The SPSS had been spot-
the design was simple, the boats took a long time to construct, three ted 350 miles off the coast of Guatemala. Delgado stood in the door of
months or more, mainly because Portocarrero had to stagger the de- the cramped sleeping quarters and told the members of his crew the
liveries of materials to avoid being caught. Captain Nemo’s subs were good news: “Wake up. We found it.” The five other members of the crew
ideally suited to their task. For the time being, though, Captain Nemo pulled themselves out of their bunks and sprung to attention.Then they
remained something of a mystery. Law enforcement didn’t know where went over the plan of attack.
or from whom he got his materials, nor how many subs he was capable of Delgado had 12 years’ experience in the Coast Guard. Over the years
churning out. If the authorities could just get their hands on one of his he’d boarded hundreds of vessels looking for drugs: trawlers, cargo
vessels, they would achieve a rousing victory in the war on drugs. They ships, tankers, you name it. He was proud of the fact that he’d helped
might disrupt his supply lines, halt the trade at the source, maybe even seize in total about 16 tons of cocaine worth nearly $300 million.
get Captain Nemo himself. But that night, equally as important as the cocaine, was the vessel it-

Undersea
Evolution
Captain Nemo is
hardly the first to
seek his fortune
under the sea.
1515 1620 1775 1864 2000
Leonardo Da Vinci Cornelius Drebbel builds American inventor David The Confederate semi- The Phoenix 1000 personal
sketches a design for a first sub; tested in the Bushnell develops “the sub HL Hunley sinks the luxury sub is sold by US
semi-submersible, Thames, stays sub- Turtle,” the first military Union battleship USS Submarines. Price tag:
though it’s never built. merged for three hours. submarine. Housatonic. $80,000,000.

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 Caption Caption Cap-
tion Caption Caption
Caption Caption
Caption Caption Cap-
tion Caption Caption
Caption Caption
Caption Caption Cap-
tion Caption Caption
self. Federal lawyers back in Tampa were having difficulty prosecuting
the operators of the SPSS’s without the vessel as evidence.
In the predawn hours Delgado’s team headed out to capture the SPSS.
It was quiet in their small, inflatable boat, the atmosphere a mixture of
adrenaline and anticipation.
It took nearly an hour to get to the sub.The only thing Officer Delgado
could see through his night-vision goggles was the white foam coming
out of the back of the vessel. The sub was thrashing through the water
at 10 to 12 knots, a steady clip for a SPSS. Removing his goggles, Delgado
instructed one of his team to fire a 40 mm White Star flare. They could
now see the strange-looking, goose-neck-shaped exhaust pipes that
poked out from the top of the 60-foot sub. The Coast Guard boat pulled
up parallel, and Delgado and two of his team jumped onto the top of the
moving sub. The deck was slick with seawater, and Delgado had trouble
keeping his footing. Once aboard, Delgado, a 9 mm pistol in one hand,
used his other to bang on the hull.
“Policia. Policia. Americano. Americano!” he shouted.
Suddenly, the sub lurched sharply into reverse, the engine dipping in
the ocean, the bow rising out of the water like a surfacing whale.
“Hold on to the pipes,” Delgado shouted at the other guardsmen.
“Watch out for the propellers.” He worried that his team might slide
down the slippery deck and be mangled.
The sub then started making erratic side-to-side movements, trying
to shake the guardsmen off the hull. The vessel began to sink: six inch-
es at first, then a foot, then three, close to waist high. Somebody inside
was trying to wash the Coast Guard into the ocean.
Delgado could see people carrying knives moving around inside
through the porthole and shouted at them to halt.
“Para el bote. Para el bote.”
It seemed to take forever, but after about four or five minutes, the sub
crew complied with Delgado’s command.The steel and fiberglass vessel
glided to a halt, the hatch slowly opened, and one of the crew popped up
his head. Delgado ordered him back inside at gunpoint. He knew it was
a trick: Three crew members squeeze themselves one at a time through
the narrow hatch, giving a fourth member enough time to sink the ves-
Map illustration
sel. Not this time. Delgado climbed down into the sub and spotted one
of the crew in the engine room preparing to open the scuttle valves. He
pointed a gun at the engineer and told him to stop what he was doing
and put his hands in the air.
The names of some of the people in this story have been changed to protect their safety.
APR FEAT Cocaine Subs;25.indd 6
Then the groggy crew members—three of whom were asleep when the
Coast Guard came calling—were taken outside and ordered to sit atop
the sub with their hands on their heads. After being patted down and
searched for weapons, they were handcuffed and told they were being
detained by the U.S. Coast Guard.
While the drug smugglers were taken back to the USS McInerney, Delga-
do stayed with the sub. Battered but relieved, he took a deep breath and
headed inside. The interior smelled like a mix of diesel, salt, and dirty
feet, and there was a foot of water on the floor. Another few minutes and
the sub would have sunk. But the living conditions weren’t bad.The crew
had plenty to eat, and there was even on-board air-conditioning and
bunk beds. Despite being at sea two weeks, the quarters were surpris-
ingly tidy. After making sure the vessel was seaworthy, Delgado started
to count the coke. There was a lot, maybe as much as seven tons.
Even more surprising to Delgado was the technical intricacy of the
vessel. Captain Nemo had done good work. There was a powerful long-
wave radio, a GPS device, and a satellite telephone. A mariner’s compass
sitting on top of a metal box guided the way. The only retro detail was
the wooden steering wheel, which looked like something you’d find on
the wall in a fish restaurant.
The McInerney towed the coke sub to the Costa Rican Coast Guard base
of Punta Arenas en route to Key West, where the vessel would be taken
apart by investigators who would be able to glean valuable information
about how the drug traffickers communicated with one another, how
they navigated the vessel, and maybe even proof of who was building
these things and where they got their materials, critical advance intelli-
gence that would help the Coast Guard to better plan to interdict these
coke subs in the future.
“We were very proud, very excited,” says Delgado. “It was the first of
the new generation of semi-subs ever caught by U.S. government.”
****
And what ofthe people of Buenaventura? Security for ordi-
nary residents has improved somewhat in the last year thanks to Pres-
ident Alvaro Uribe, who dispatched 2,000 marines and Special Forces
trained in urban combat to patrol the slums. The city is hardly calm, but
the crackdown is having an effect. Murder rates have dropped by 70 per-
cent since 2006. And the narco-terrorists are feeling the pinch. The St.
Petersburg Times reported last November that FARC commanders in
Buenaventura were having trouble paying their members because co-
caine revenues have been cut in half.
In the meantime, the DEA, in cooperation with the Colombian equiv-
alent of the FBI, is going after the sub builders. In December the culmi-
nation of a joint three-year investigation led to the arrest of Buenaven-
tura’s very own Captain Nemo at his home, where police found $200,000
hidden in the spare tire of his car. The next day armed drug agents de-
scended on Portocarrero’s secret shipyard and demolished two of the
vessels. Enrique Portocarrero is expected to be extradited to the United
States to stand trial in Tampa. What hasn’t improved, and what is un-
likely to improve anytime soon, is the appalling living conditions that
drive the desperate to risk their lives. As far as real estate goes, for 80 per-
cent of the population it’s still hell with an ocean view.
“I’ve personally heard DEA agents down in Buenaventura say that if
they had to grow up in these types of conditions,” says a Spanish inter-
preter who works with American law enforcement, “they’d be the first
one to get on one of these subs.”
Meanwhile, Diego Morales is in federal prison in Florida for the next
eight years, thankful that his sister is still alive, though he misses her.
He rues the day he ever set foot on the cocaine bathtub.
He sighs in Spanish, “Fueron los peors siete días de mi vida.”
“It was the worst seven days of my life.”
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