2,400-foot tunnel 'beats them all'

Builders of passage were well-funded, investigators say

By Onell R. Soto and Leslie Berestein
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITERS

January 27, 2006

In the corner of a cavernous Otay Mesa warehouse, a small room held a big secret: the door to a passageway from Mexico.

U.S. agents had been investigating the possibility of an elaborate drug-smuggling tunnel between Tijuana and San Diego for more than a year, but couldn't find it despite using military equipment so advanced it's classified.

Instead, as often happens with drug cases, the break came from tips.

The tips led to the discovery of the longest cross-border tunnel in U.S. history, running nearly a half-mile from a small warehouse near Tijuana's airport to the large Otay Mesa warehouse.

“This tunnel beats them all,” said Michael Unzueta, special agent in charge of the San Diego office of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which investigated the case along with the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Border Patrol.

The tunnel runs 2,400 feet through sandstone and compacted sand and is equipped with lighting, ventilation and groundwater drainage systems.

Chest-high water collected at its deepest point, more than nine stories below warehouses and busy border roads in Otay Mesa.

“This is like being in a really big, long mine shaft,” Unzueta said after walking through the muggy passageway. “It's really just carved right into the earth.”

Concrete was used to provide steady footing at a steep incline on the U.S. side as well as to support the walls of an 85-foot shaft under the Mexican warehouse.

The tunnel was the work of a well-funded and determined drug-smuggling group, Unzueta said.

Mexican agents seized 2 tons of marijuana on the Mexican side. Their U.S. counterparts found 200 pounds.

Neither side has reported any arrests.

The head of the San Diego DEA office was asked at a news conference yesterday if the Arellano-Felix cartel was responsible for the tunnel.

“It's the usual suspects,” John Fernandes said, naming the notorious Tijuana cartel, which has been locked in a battle with rival groups for control of the region.

“The sophistication (of the tunnel) indicates the organization is equally as sophisticated,” he said.

The Arellano-Felix cartel was dealt a blow several years ago with the arrests and killings of its leaders, but officials on both sides of the border say reports of its demise are premature.

Other drug-running groups headed by accused traffickers Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada and Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán operate in Baja California and move drugs into San Diego County and the rest of the United States.

Investigators said yesterday that their work is just beginning.

While some agents continue to follow tips, others are working to determine how long the tunnel has been in use. They are poring over what they've found so far, looking for fingerprints, DNA evidence, cell phones and computers that might link the tunnel to those who built and operated it.

“Right now we are in the midst of running down leads,” Fernandes said.

The 48,222-square-foot Otay Mesa warehouse was built about three years ago on Siempre Viva Road by a U.S. partnership that bought the 1.6-acre lot in June 2001 when it was vacant land, according to property records.

A representative for the partnership was unavailable yesterday, as was a 45-year-old La Habra woman who bought the warehouse last year. Its value is assessed at $2.8 million.

It is unclear to whom she rented the warehouse.

A sign outside says it is home to V&F Distributors LLC, but the building appears abandoned The inside is empty except for a couple of pallets of merchandise.

Neighbors in the industrial park two blocks from the border say that most of the activity at the warehouse stopped abruptly in October.

Before then, the warehouse was busy, with trucks regularly pulling in and out of its 12 docks, said Luis Barraza, who works at a company across the street from the rear of the warehouse.

Barraza said he believed the beige-and-brown building had been occupied by a produce company, but in November it appeared that new tenants had moved in. The landscaping around the warehouse was spruced up, but Barraza said the only visible traffic was a truck bearing a blue shipping container, which would be at Dock No. 9 by the time workers at nearby businesses arrived in the morning.

The container covered the entire door, and would remain there for one or two days before disappearing during the night.

Sometimes, Barraza said, people inside the warehouse would leave a few of the shipping bay doors open, and workers across the street noticed the warehouse was empty.

“It's a pretty big warehouse, and nothing was happening there,” said Barraza, 27, a warehouse supervisor for Mecalux USA Inc., which makes shelving systems. “We used to joke that maybe they were laundering money or something. That's expensive rent.”

The parking lot was so deserted that truckers going to nearby firms sometimes used it as a staging area, he said.

In Tijuana, investigators searching the warehouse where the tunnel began found seven cell phones, a van and two trucks and several documents, the Mexican attorney general's office said.

That warehouse is part of Ejido Tampico, a group of landowners that rents property in the neighborhood to a variety of industrial users, including junkyards, truck yards and small workshops.

A watchman at a nearby heavy-equipment yard said he was surprised by the news that an immense tunnel had been dug under were he stood.

“I work at night,” he said. “I should have heard something, but I didn't.”

A security guard at a nearby truck yard, from which the warehouse is visible, said he had not noticed anything strange.

However, another neighbor said tenants in the area could be reluctant to talk about anything they might have seen out of fear of retaliation.

“Everybody is afraid of problems,” he said, declining to give his name.

The construction of the tunnel, nearly 1,000 feet longer than an unfinished passageway discovered nearby in 1993, has raised several questions. It is unclear how long it took to dig and how that could be done without anybody noticing.

A 2,400-foot tunnel would generate several hundred truckloads of dirt, said Richard Hanlin, a retired San Francisco contractor with tunneling experience.

“That is a tremendous volume of material,” Hanlin said. “It's not something you stuff in your pants legs and drop when you're gardening.”

There were no conspicuous piles of dirt near either warehouse.

The pace of digging couldn't have been fast, he said. Investigators said the walls bore the marks of air-driven instruments, such as a jackhammer or a clay spade.

But G.T. Lineberry, a professor of mining engineering at the University of Kentucky, said that given enough time, such a tunnel is possible to dig by hand.

“One doesn't need to have a tunnel-boring machine or sophisticated rock cutting instruments,” Lineberry said.

Agents marveled at how the engineers were able to find their way underground.

It's possible they got lost.

The tunnel from Tijuana goes north for hundreds of feet. Inside the United States, it intersects with a second tunnel coming in from the Otay Mesa warehouse. The main tunnel continues for about 100 feet before coming to a dead end.

The builders of the 1993 tunnel used San Diego County planning documents but still came up 120 feet short of their target. The Arellano-Felix gang was suspected of constructing the tunnel, but no arrests have been made.

Drug traffickers will go to ingenious and costly lengths to smuggle their wares into the United States, Unzueta said.

“People are always going to find a way around us,” he said.