Colombian Cocaine Cartels Infiltrate LA's Inner-City

The Story of Brian "Waterhead Bo" Bennett

By the mid-1980s Los Angeles, California became the new Miami, the emerging center of the nations drug industry. At the beginning of the 1980s the national wholesale price of a kilogram of cocaine was approximately $40 to $50 grand, but by the dawn of the crack era, that price had dropped to around $14,000 in Los Angeles, about $2,000 less per kilo than in Miami. The drop in price of cocaine, despite the increased seizures and purer product, suggested that the amount of cocaine in the United States grew steadily throughout the 1980s. The wholesale market became flooded with cocaine and prices dropped dramatically as a result of the glut.

Traditionally, the United States was fed cocaine from the twin East Coast drug capitals that anchor the 1-95 corridor-Miami and New York. But by the mid-1980s, big changes were ripping through the drug world. In response to the beefed up air and sea interdiction along the South Florida coast, Colombian drug cartels were moving smuggling routes westward, forging alliances with Mexican smuggling organizations and routing their cocaine across the Southwest border into Southern California.

The upshot was to turn Los Angeles into what federal drug agents called "the new Miami"- an emerging drug distribution and money laundering center that rivaled Florida. Law enforcement officials estimated that as many as 5000 Colombians working for the rival Medellin and Cali cartels moved intot he region, supervising the movement of aobut 40 percent of the US cocaine market. The Los Angeles Times even ran an article about it headlined Adventures int eh Drug Trade: How 4000 Colombians Took the 'Champagne Drug' to the Inner City and Turned LA into a Cocaine Capital.