Affordable Housing Institute : US

Essential to the tradecraft of espionage is the dead drop.  When Person A has something to convey to Person B without making direct contact, or even necessarily knowing who Person B is, the parties can use a dead drop.  A pre-specified location – a tree bole, a fake rock on the front porch, a sneaker submerged via fishing line from a Hamburg barge house  – any definable location that both A and B may plausibly pass at different times, and a camouflaged cachement to safely conceal the consignment during the interval between drop and pickup.

 

[In Goldfinger, it's a bar of gold under a specified bridge on France's N 27; in Get Shorty, it's a bag-check locker at LAX – Ed.]

 

When the package is a human being, the dead drop must be larger, and it’s a substantial challenge to find a place so conspicuous yet so invisible – like an innocuous rented house in quiet residential suburb. 

 

Behind whose walls, as reported in the Wall Street Journal, the Phoenix police found this:

 

From the Wall Street Journal:

Scenes From a “Drop House”: In Phoenix, gangs that smuggle people in from Mexico are increasingly holding the migrants captive for ransom in rental houses. El Mirage Police Department

 

EL MIRAGE, Ariz. — A whispered 911 call from a cellphone early one January morning brought police to a home on West Columbine Drive in this Phoenix suburb. Inside, they found more than 30 half-naked and shivering men – prisoners police say, of a gang that had smuggled them in from Mexico.

 

Beaten and threatened with a 9-mm Beretta pistol, a local detective’s report said, the men were being shaken down for as much as $5,000 apiece, a ransom above the $1,000 that each had agreed to pay before being spirited across the border.

 

Though the smuggling is not yet big business, it’s certainly organized business, and as it’s illegal, it is necessarily organized crime.  As such, the business model has evolved rapidly to an optimized value chain, starting with the major hub, Phoenix, which offers the perfect combination of strategic location (on the northbound human highway) and attractive property inventory – attractive, that is, to those who need empty houses and neighborhoods of the incurious.

 

No crime to see here, folks

 

The home on West Lumbee Street had two characteristics attractive to smugglers: a site close to an Interstate highway and a large attached garage that made it easy to move people in or out undetected.

 

Easy off, easy on.  In the photo below, note the highway running east and west just above our neighborhood.

 

How many illegal immigrants can you find in this picture?

How many hostages are being extorted?

 

Another factor: the volatile housing market in the city, which has left it strewn with thousands of rental houses on sometimes sparsely populated suburban blocks, handy places for smugglers to store either drugs or people. The police call these “drop houses.” They say federal, state and local authorities discovered 194 such houses in 2007, then 169 last year and dozens more so far in 2009.

 

These are micro-slums, slums behind closed doors, slums one building at a time.  They are hideous.

 

Police photos of the scene reveal a thick black stain running the length of one bedroom wall where hostages allegedly were kept, a residue left by sweaty bodies jammed in tightly. “The darker it is, the longer they were there,” said Lt. Robert Smart of the Arizona Department of Public Safety.

 

Which of these houses is a micro-slum?

 

Local authorities learned of the house when someone called police in New Jersey and said a relative who had recently crossed into Arizona from Mexico was being held hostage. Lt. Smart said New Jersey authorities traced the alleged extortion demand to a ring operating from Tucson, about 135 miles away from Avondale, which police believe was handling negotiations for those holding the immigrants.

 

What flows between these two points is money and information, not convictable evidence

 

Key to any dead drop is distancing the drop from the handlers, so that if the drop is compromised, the handlers are not.  Dead drops also require a complex value chain, and the more links in that value chain, the more it costs, and the more sophisticated it must become, and the more places to attack it.

 

Four nights later, at a second house three miles away in the same suburb, police say they rescued 34 immigrants, including two pregnant women, who law-enforcement officials estimate had been held anywhere from three days to two months.

 

Earlier, one house was raided twice in two months.

 

In spy tradecraft, vast resources are deployed on both sides because the packages are enormously valuable.  In the human tide of illegal alien smuggling, the per-unit profit is smaller, the candidate dead drops are plentiful, the cost of establishing a new dead drop is low, as are the chances of being caught. 

 

One way of getting in: packed into the seat cushions

 

They found out about the house in El Mirage when a dispatcher answered a 911 call at 7:50 a.m. on Jan. 31 and heard the word “help” — along with what sounded like the chirp of a smoke alarm.

 

It’s whack-a-coyote with lives at stake.

 

Hit those coyotes!

 

Officials say that in 68 alleged drop houses identified in the first five months of 2009, authorities found 1,069 illegal immigrants.

 

Let’s dimension the problem.  Assume the police have found 25% of the drop houses.  [I have no idea of the right figure, but it's hard to imagine it much higher – Ed.]  That’s 300 house in circulation at any one time.

 

By the time the mortgage market faltered in mid-2007, according to the Maricopa County assessor’s office, the supply of houses for rent in the Phoenix area had swelled to 73,700, up nearly 75% from 2000.

 

The bust has enlarged rental-house numbers by 12,000 more, as strapped owners of hard-to-sell homes try to rent them out.

 

Even 300 houses represent only 1 in 40 of those single-family homes for rent, so it’s by no means a large share.  The 68 seized averaged 15 people per house, and let’s figure the average hostage is kept one month, so the turnover is 12 times, meaning 180 people smuggled through each house.  That gives us 54,000 people being illegally smuggled – and extorted, and beaten – through Phoenix every year.

 

And only a handful get caught

 

In a bit we’ll return to that figure.

 

What’s happening here marks a shift in the people-smuggling business. A couple of decades ago, workers commonly traveled back and fort across the U.S.-Mexico border, going to the same American farm or construction job each year. To make the passages they often would use the same smuggler, called a “coyote,” each time.

 

Running regular routes

 

Now, organized gangs own the people-smuggling trade.

 

In short, we have a classic industry professionalization, value-chain integration, and market consolidation. 

 

According to U.S. and Mexican police, this is partly an unintended consequence of a border crackdown.

 

Making crossings more difficult drove up their cost, attracting brutal Mexican crime rings that forced the small operators out of business.

 

We’ve already seen that the smuggling value chain has become more complex.  Complexity requires management.  It also requires organization, and the development of systems – electronic or people – to coordinate activity.  Scaling up also encourages capital investment (e.g. in vacant houses) and specialization (e.g. in front-men renters):

 

The owners of the house are Aniceto Alcantar, who works at a plastics factory, and his wife, Laura, a schoolteacher. After moving to another house, the Alcantars had offered the one on West Columbine for rent in December. Weeks went by without a nibble, but finally they received a call from a young couple.

 

The young couple, we presume, are ‘professional renters.’  That is, they are hired to present the appearance of being the godsend applicants for an amateur landlord looking to reverse the carrying cost of an empty house.

 

Who wouldn’t rent to them, even if they had no ID?

 

There are also, in espionage tradecraft, cut-outs.

 

Just untraceable links in the chain

 

They exist simply to break the evidentiary value-chain link.  They’re disposable – use once or twice, then discard, making them difficult to trace. 

 

And they might even have been innocent themselves, duped by a convenient story.  It’s easy enough to imagine a conversation in Spanish between the handler and the cutout couple: We need to rent but we have an illegal grandmother – you know how the Norte Americanos discriminate against us – so could you do us a favor?  Sign the lease for us? Two hours’ work and you’re done.  Bring us the lease and the keys and we’ll pay you five hundred dollars.

 

Okay, boss, now where’s my $500?

 

Mr. Alcantar, 37, says it didn’t bother him that the two — Mexican-born, like himself — had no references. “They said they had just moved to Phoenix from California. Supposedly they sold cars for a living, out of their home,” he says. What gave him confidence they weren’t criminals, Mr. Alcantar adds, was that they said they were too poor to afford the security deposit and asked to pay it in installments.

 

The cover page is a piece of value-chain software; the young-couple prep is a disposable element (like a plastic drinking cup).  When the thieves are professionally consolidated and the dupes (either cut-out couple or single-family home owner) are amateurs, it’s an unequal contest.

 

The Phoenix area also was affected because tougher enforcement at the border focused on traditional routes in Texas and California — funneling more traffic through Arizona along desert corridors controlled by Mexico’s Sinaloa drug cartel.

 

Another dynamic of the value chain.  A business under pressure squeezing out costs, finding the best route, the geodesic.  The path alley through the Border-Patrol mountains runs through the Valley of the Sun.

 

By the time they get to Phoenix, they’ll be captives

 

Even the recent falloff in immigration resulting from U.S. job losses helps to fuel kidnapping, some authorities believe. They say that as border crossings decline, gangs earn less money directly from smuggling fees than from holding some of their clients for ransom, before delivering them to their destination farther inside the U.S.

 

So the kidnapping/ extortion is a supplementary element of revenue that may, in fact, be as essential to the business model’s viability as is the change order to the small general contractor – and this is where the business, already ugly, becomes unspeakable.

 

[Continued tomorrow in Part 2.]

 

Send post as PDF to