Inside The Subterranean Marijuana Railroad

On a quiet night along the Tijuana border, you can almost hear them coming: the faint scraping of metal on dirt, falling clumps of earth, muted voices in the depths. At any given moment, there are men underground here, chipping their way toward the United States with antlike determination.

Many of the drug tunnels will be discovered and shut down before they're operational, but it doesn't matter; more will come. The economics are unassailable. A good tunnel can take nine months or more to build and cost up to $2 million, but if it can stay open for only a few hours, the cartels can move enough marijuana through it to satisfy entire time zonesâ€"making enough money to pay for twenty more tunnels. That is why they never stop coming, and why, on November 29, 2011, Special Agent Tony Armanza ¹ found himself lying in the bushes overlooking a nondescript warehouse in San Diego's Otay Mesa, waiting for signs that one of the tunnels was about to go live.

“It's getting dark out here, man. I'm starving,” he said into the radio. “What are we gonna do?” He and half a dozen other agents from the San Diego Tunnel Task Force had been watching the warehouse since 5 A.M.â€"an hour they sardonically called “the butt crack of dawn.” Armanza, face-first in the dirt all day, had been on countless stakeouts before and knew that the odds of the warehouse becoming active were diminishing with the sun; tunnel traffickers like to move their drug shipments during the day, when their trucks can blend in with the thousands of others coursing through the busy shipping district.

Half a mile away, Tim Durst, the supervisor of the task force, heard the exhaustion in Armanza's voice. Durst was well liked by his men; he knew that Armanza wasn't the only one tired. With a strong, goateed chin, an angular face, and closely cropped brown hair, Durst looks like a slightly weathered version of the G-man Keanu Reeves played in Point Break. He had been taking down tunnels on the mesa for five years, and today nearly one hundred agents and local cops were on call, all of them waiting for Durst's decision. “Five more minutes,” he told his team. Experience had taught him that successful operations sometimes hinged on ridiculously small windows of time and chance. Sure enough, a few minutes later, Armanza reported that a tractor-trailer had backed up to the warehouse's docking bay.

Armanza couldn't see inside the warehouse, but he knew what was going on: Men caked with dirt would be scrambling to load shrink-wrapped bales of marijuanaâ€"fresh from their passage through the tunnelâ€"onto a truck as quickly as possible. Each bale would weigh some fifty pounds and would soon be tucked into a crate or cardboard box. One by one, they'd be lifted onto the semi. Hundreds of them.

An hour later, when the work was done, the truck's engine roared and the rig pulled away from the warehouse district, heading north toward the freeway. The agents could have stopped it immediately for an easy seizure, which would give them a search warrant to enter the warehouse and take the tunnel, but Durst's goal was strategic: He wanted not just to disrupt the operation but to deal a critical blow to the Sinaloa cartel. That meant following the truck and arresting as many players as possible. As the semi turned onto the freeway, teams of agents in unmarked vehicles followed, each car dropping off as another one picked up the tail, “passing the eye.” But after only thirty miles, the truck's driver pulled onto a side road, got out of the truck, and walked away.

“We're burned,” crackled an agent's voice over the radio. “He's abandoning the truck.”

This meant another decision for Durst: Should he order his men to move on the truck or wait and see if this was a handoff? He told everyone to wait through the night. At about 6 A.M., another car pulled up and dropped off a fresh driver, who got into the truck and resumed moving the load.

The new driver was cautious, trained to pick up tails. First he continued north, toward Los Angeles, then east, then west again. He finally pulled into a warehouse in the City of Industry, a dense industrial zone outside L.A., where he met with at least four other men. They powwowed for a few minutes; then the semi driver motored to yet another warehouse, where five vans were waiting. “It was gonna be like The Italian Job,” Durst would later say. “They were gonna load the dope into the vans and all leave and go in different directions.”

Durst wanted to wait once more and follow the vans. Where would they go? How many more nodes of the cartel's distribution ring could he take down? By now he had called forty-five men into the field. Helicopters buzzed overhead. Tailing five vans to God knew where would require more men and resources than he could readily muster. The whole operation was on the verge of becoming a crazy, unwieldy hydra. Durst had let the string unwind to the last manageable point; now there was only one option.

“Take it down,” he finally said.

As a veteran of an unwinnable war that has gone on for twenty-one years and turned the U.S.-Mexican border into Swiss cheese, he'd given that order many times before. But this bust would be unlike any other. In addition to the vans, there was the tunnel itself, which turned out to be a marvel of illegal engineering. The Mexican entrance, hidden in a two-story warehouse near the airport, had an elevator that popped up out of a tile floor. Its shaft descended thirty feet, to a staging area where bales could be loaded onto an electrically driven mining car. The railway traveled through the 550-yard tunnel atop wood planks. “It is clearly the most sophisticated tunnel we have ever found,” said Lauren Mack, the task-force spokesperson on-site at the time. The tunnelâ€"along with many othersâ€"was believed to be the pet project of a single man. American law enforcement had been hunting him for years, but he had always managed to remain far enough removed from his creations that nobody could get to him. That is, until Durst let the string unwindâ€"right to his doorstep.

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Of all the ways pot comes across the borderâ€"in hidden compartments of cars driving through legal ports of entry, on boats and airplanes, or lugged in burlap sacks by human mulesâ€"none are as efficient and profitable as a drug tunnel. Ever since the first one was discovered, in 1990, most have been linked to a single organization, the Sinaloa cartel, now one of the largest drug-trafficking organizations in the world. They are an innovation, in fact, that is inextricably tied to the rise of both the cartel itself and its leader, Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán Loera, currently the most wanted man in Mexico.

Believed to be in his midfifties, Chapo is the son of a poor cattleman from Sonora who also grew opium poppies. He got his nicknameâ€"“Shorty”â€"thanks to his five-foot-six-inch height, and he was briefly the only outlaw billionaire on the Forbes richest list. Legend has it that he has eluded capture largely because of his expertise at bribing officials. But the more likely reason is his unrelenting focus on one thing and one thing only: moving drugs. When he engages in other enterprisesâ€"kidnapping, extortion, and mass murderâ€"it's largely in service of the business's bottom line.

After learning the ropes of narco-trafficking from one of his father's friends, he quickly rose through the ranks of what would become the dominant group in Baja, the Arellano-Felix Organization, or AFO. While there, Chapo is believed to have pioneered the first drug tunnel discovered, a football-field-length passage connecting a home in Agua Prieta, Mexico, to a warehouse in Douglas, Arizona. The passage was well lit, its walls lined with concrete; a sump pump had been installed to prevent flooding. But most ingenious was the tunnel's entrance, hidden beneath a pool table and a concrete slab in the house's family room. When an operator turned a small spigot-like device, a hydraulic lift would raise both the slab and the pool table five feet in the air, revealing a portal. “It was like something out of a James Bond movie,” said a Customs spokeswoman at the time. Authorities estimated that hundreds of millions of dollars in cocaine and marijuana had moved through in just over six months.

If there is a patron narco-saint of drug tunnels, it is "El Chapo" Guzmán, head of the Sinaloa cartel.

Chapo and the AFO were so impressed with the Douglas tunnel that they began constructing more passages, many of them in Tijuana, but throughout the 1990s more established, cheaper smuggling methods dominated. Then came the border crackdown following September 11. Chapo, who by now was head of a rising AFO splinter cartel known as Sinaloa, needed a new way to get his product in. That's when heâ€"or someone close to himâ€"did the math.

A large part of the Sinaloa cartel's estimated $3 billion profits comes from marijuana, but weed is bulky. Huge piles of it back up in Tijuana warehouses after every harvest as brokers and the cartel scramble to find ways to get it into the United States. Building a tunnel is time-consuming and expensive, but it can pay for itself many times over in a single day. No sniffing dogs, no checkpoints, just a straight shot into the world's largest drug market. Since a tunnel can't be moved, it's also a liability, easily shut down if discovered. The key would be to build not just one tunnel at a time but many. To do that, Chapo needed an area close to the U.S. border where it was easy to dig, with many possibilities for hidden exit points on the other side.

It had always been right under his feet: San Diego's Otay Mesa. A five-mile-long, 500-foot-high plateau that rises gently as it crosses the American border, the mesa is made of a rock known as caliche that is self-supporting and as workable as wax. Best of all, the area had become one of the busiest warehouse districts in the Southwest, thanks to a new immigration checkpoint. So it was decided. Otay would become the latest front in the cartels' unending siege on the U.S. border.

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“This is our south-side entrance right here,” task-force special agent Ryan Thomas* said, pointing toward the grainy image of a warehouse on a plasma screen. “This is live, right now.… We believe this to be a drug tunnel in progress.”