HOTSHOT PILOTS ENJOY CHASING SMUGGLERS;
THE CUSTOMS SERVICE AIR TEAM'S MAIN JOB: KEEP SELLERS FROM SLIPPING DRUGS INTO
PUERTO RICO. By Jim Leusner and Henry Pierson Curtis of The Sentinel Staff
Copyright (c) 1997, Sentinel Communications Co.

The catandmouse game of chasing drug smugglers begins
when the sun sets fiery red in the Caribbean. The playing
field covers 6 million square miles of water.

The goal is Puerto Rico.

Smugglers head there aboard almost anything that floats
or flies. The job of protecting the 311mile coastline
belongs to many, but the primary line of defense is the
group of pilots wearing shoulder patches depicting a
helicopter and a skull and crossbones.

They call themselves The Flying Mofongo Brothers.

Jokingly named after a local dish of baked plantains,
the pilots are members of the U.S. Customs Service Air
Branch.

With up to 12,000 hours of flying time each, they are
some of the hottest pilots anywhere. They patrol a 150mile
sweep around Puerto Rico, from the tip of the Dominican
Republic in the west to beyond the British Virgin Islands
in the east.

The island is increasingly important in the nation's
drugfighting strategy. Once drugs get ashore in Puerto
Rico, a U.S. territory, there are no further customs checks
to keep them from reaching the mainland. "When the sun goes
down, we get busy," said John Fillmore, a customs air group
supervisor. "There's been smuggling here for 400 years. A
little customs involvement isn't going to stop that."

"But one seizure of 1,000 pounds of coke is 1,000 pounds
that's not going to hit the street."

At least 25 percent of the U.S. supply of cocaine passes
through the eastern Caribbean and Puerto Rico, federal drug
officials say. Earlier this month, the heads of customs,
the FBI and U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration all
pledged more money, manpower and equipment to step up the
drug war in the region.

"Drug smuggling in the '70s was across the southwest
border," said pilot Dan Philipps, a 12year customs
veteran. "In the '80s, it was Miami. And now in the '90s,
it's Puerto Rico."

The air crews work up to 15hour days looking for
airborne smugglers and suspicious ships, comparing notes
with the Navy, Coast Guard and island police.

Some used to do similar flying along the Mexican border,
but pilots say drug flights dropped sharply when the North
American Free Trade Agreement opened the border to easy
vehicle traffic. Last year, the unit helped seize nearly 12
tons of cocaine, 7,500 pounds of marijuana and 45 vessels,
resulting in 67 arrests. So far this year, nearly 4 tons of
cocaine and seven vessels were seized, capped by 19
arrests.

The trails of smugglers keep changing. A few years ago,
they routinely flew 520 miles at night from Colombia's
north coast to Puerto Rico and dropped waterproof bales of
cocaine to waiting fishing boats.

Lately, the drug flights have avoided Puerto Rico and
headed instead for the Lesser Antilles. There, the planes
circle St. Maarten and other picturepostcard islands until
dropping their drug loads at prearranged map coordinates to
speedboats below.

Smugglers hire top pilots

The patrols often are long and boring and sometimes
there are weeks between seizures. The unit averages four or
five seizures a month. The latest came April 13, when they
alerted St. Kitts island police to a plane seen dumping 300
pounds of cocaine offshore. The plane then fled back to
Venezuela.

The smugglers often fly twinengine planes and appear as
skilled as the customs pilots who chase them, Fillmore
said. Some are thought to be former South American military
pilots, possibly trained in the United States.

"We try to be at the right place at the right time with
the right equipment," said Fillmore, 45, who previously
worked at Port Canaveral.

"It's like finding a needle in a haystack. But we find a
lot of needles."

One find came last month when a customs plane spotted
small boats heading by night to Norman Island in the
British Virgin Islands. A helicopter was dispatched, and
its crew found fresh footprints from the beach to a rocky
area nearby.

British authorities later found 390 kilos 858 pounds
of cocaine hidden in the rocks.

The smugglers in that case escaped. To avoid detection
they often have the latest in radio, radar and navigation
equipment and sometimes the help of corrupt police.

Even the smallest smuggling boats, known as yolas, are
equipped with handheld satellite navigation devices to
help pinpoint coordinates within 100 feet. Drug pilots use
the same gear to fly in the dark and drop bales of cocaine
to the waiting boat crews.

Satellite telephones, which make it easy to talk to
bosses in South America or Puerto Rico, have been found
aboard some smugglers' boats.

Some ride so low in the water that only the tops of
their 150horsepower outboard engines are visible. Covered
with fiberglass or wood, the custommade craft carry up to
1,000 pounds of cocaine, ride out 10foot seas and make 20
knots in calmer waters.

The unit's 28 fulltime pilots and six pilots and
sensor operators on 30day tours try to even the odds
with four helicopters, eight twinengine airplanes and
plenty of hightech equipment of their own.

Three of the airplanes are 300mph Piper Cheyennes with
long noses loaded with radar and Forward Looking InfraRed
scanners. FLIR, as it's known, turns night into day to let
customs air crews watch smugglers without being detected.
FLIR videotapes that show smugglers dropping bales of drugs
from airplanes are used in court to help convict them.

FLIR and radar operators still remain in short supply.
Three boxey Australianmade Nomads are among the unit's
most heavily used airplanes. They can circle for hours
while the pilot, copilot and FLIR operator stake out a
boat or landing strip.

When radar detects a suspicious airplane or drug agents
call in a tip, customs crews have 10 minutes to get
airborne. Speed is important because the flight to the
Virgin Islands can take an hour.

Copters use night vision

Flying at 200 mph at 2,000 feet, pilots hunt their prey
with lights off, relying on the array of radar, infrared
sensors and nightvision goggles. Officers with submachine
guns ride in the rear of helicopters in case they need to
pursue smugglers on the ground.

The unit's pair of Blackhawk military helicopters is one
of its main weapons for chasing boats and planes. Painted
black, they carry extra fuel tanks and a 30 million
candlepower spotlight nicknamed "the 10ton flashlight."

Pilot Philipps used his Blackhawk to help nab five
crewmen in December on a speedboat that beached on a reef
near Salinas on Puerto Rico's south coast. Using the
helicopter's 100mph rotor winds, he blew water into the
faces of suspects trying to swim away and steered them to a
reef where customs officers waited. About 1,100 kilos of
cocaine was recovered.

"You can blow dust in their face if they're on the
ground or push water in their face in the water," said
Philipps, who flew medical evacuation helicopters during
the Vietnam War. "It's just another useful tool when you've
got nothing else going for you."

In September, he helped intercept 1,500 kilos of cocaine
3,300 pounds dropped with phosphorescent glow sticks in
fields 60 miles south of San Juan. Philipps' Blackhawk
surprised the smugglers' accomplices searching the fields
for the drugs. Two were later arrested.

Mofongo pilots show up for work at an old hangar at the
former Ramey U.S. Air Force Base in Puerto Rico's northwest
corner. Despite the unit's hightech equipment, its
headquarters is a decrepit, onestory block building filled
with radios, computer terminals and scanners. It sits in
the middle of what looks like a fenced, aging trailer
court. The eight trailers are offices for pilots and
supervisors. Fillmore, a former Marine recon lieutenant
trained to hunt people on the ground, now hunts them in the
air. He was assigned to the unit last July after serving in
a customs unit in Jacksonville and working on a customs
35foot cigarette patrol boat at Port Canaveral.

Pilots looking for action

He now works down the street from the abandoned Air
Force hospital where he was born in 1952 and on a base
where his father helped schedule B36 bomber flights.

"How else would I ever come back to a Caribbean island,
less than a half mile from where I was born?" said
Fillmore, a 12year customs vet. "It's just a strange
coincidence. I wish my Dad was alive to tell me some
stories about this place."

The pilots are often junior aviators who come to Puerto
Rico for more action and the lure of quicker promotions.
Many veteran pilots avoid permanent transfers, citing
harsher living conditions, poorer schools and medical
facilities than their families are used to on the mainland.
Because they are two hours from San Juan in a remote corner
of the island, the Mofongos are a closeknit bunch. They
drink together, play racquetball together and jog together.

The youngest may be 30. Most show a little gray at the
temples. One is missing so much hair, he's called "Skull."

Pilot Greg Horwath, 49, of Jacksonville and Fillmore are
typical members of the group runners and weightlifters.
Several also are National Guard pilots who drill with other
Mofongos one weekend a month.

Others, such as Philipps, have mustaches, collarlength
hair parted down the middle and look more like the hunted
than the hunters.

Sixyear customs pilot Chris Giles, 36, is looking
forward to joining the Mofongo Brothers next month, when he
is scheduled to transfer from Tampa.

"They're getting seizures and the results," said Giles,
a former Seminole County deputy sheriff originally from
DeLand. "If you want to get into the action, that's where
it's at." GRAPHIC: PHOTO: Drug plane. Customs airmen used
Forward Looking InfraRed scanners to take picture of
bundles of cocaine dropping from smugglers' aircraft for
boats to pick up. U.S. CUSTOMS