Operation Pipeline was over. It had been a 13-month investigation, a campaign that involved Customs, the FBI, the National Guard, the Internal Revenue Service, the U.S. attorney, and all four county police departments. "We have totally dismantled the organization," said Lt. Henry Tavares of the Hawaii County Police Department's vice squad. And that appears to have been no small feat.

Mike Cox, Customs Supervisory Special Agent in Hawaii, says the 20 pounds of heroin and the $160,000 seized during the raid represent only part of the $2 million worth of heroin the drug ring distributed during its four years of operation in Hawaii.

From 1997 to 2000, police statistics reported a ten-fold increase in the number of people arrested for heroin possession. Law enforcement officials across the Islands say that heroin and crystal methamphetamine have clearly overtaken cocaine and marijuana as the new "drugs of choice," and that some users routinely combine heroin and "ice" to counter the harsh reentry that sometimes accompanies a crystal meth high.

Operation Pipeline took off on Thanksgiving weekend 2000, and law enforcement officials had already arrested 18 suspects - residents and Mexican nationals in the country illegally - and deported a number of them before the final raid on December 20, 2001.

The trail

Special Agent Cox says Mexican ring members would bring the heroin into the United States on foot, then by vehicle to Los Angeles. At that point, couriers would transport the heroin, hidden in their waist belts, via air from Los Angeles to Honolulu, and on to Kilo on interisland flights. Once the heroin was in country, it was farmed out to secondary distributors whose job was to market the drug thoughout the state. Most of these distributors are heroin addicts themselves. Some are aging druggies still pursuing a 60s lifestyle, while others are simply local renegades. They inhabit an isolated area on the Big Island that local law enforcement officials have dubbed the "Wild West" - a swath of bush where a community of addicts and outcasts from 20 to 60 play out their destinies in shanties and plywood shacks.

"The area is so isolated," says Cox, "that, in many cases, we had to depend on the National Guard to get us where we had to go to deliver our search warrants. A National Guard driver would show up in a Humvee - this massive, camouflaged vehicle — and we would get in and roll up in front of some shanty with no running water or any of the basic amenities, and start banging on the door to serve the warrant. Some of these places were in such bad shape, that if you kicked the front door, the whole place would fall down. The squalor, and the fact that people will live like this to support their addictions, is unbelievable."

Drug profits traveled back to Mexico via Western Union - usually in amounts less than $1,000 to avoid reporting requirements. Special Agent Cox credits interagency teamwork, and the special contribution of Special Agent Frank Okamura, the case agent for Operation Pipeline, for the success of the investigation.

The National Guard Counter-Drug Division did its part as well, transporting Customs agents into areas they could not have reached any other way, and then flying defendants from the Big Island to the federal court in Honolulu.

"It was a pretty desolate scene," says Special Agent Cox, "moving these prisoners, many of whom were sick and going through withdrawal, across a muddy tarmac in a driving rain. Getting them into the Chinook the National Guard provided and to Honolulu was tough. But we made it happen."