All it took was three hours, some crafty reconnaissance, and a broken tail light for narcotics officers to nab $523,000 in alleged dope money lazily stashed in the cab of a flatbed trailer truck.
The bust in Fort Bend County this week was one of the biggest cash seizures in the area in recent years involving proceeds that authorities contend belonged to an organized-crime network that regularly ships illicit product north. In this case, it was shipping cash from sales back to Mexico.
“They have probably done this 1,000 times and got sloppy and relaxed,” Capt R. Glendening, of the Fort Bend County Narcotics Task Force, said of traffickers.
Although it is just a smidgen of the billions of dollars drug cartels are believed to sneak back to Mexico and Colombia annually, the seizure underscores how much money passes through Texas, with the Houston area its consolidation point for criminals and their money.
Glendening would not say how the team first flagged the truck, but he said that as the flatbed trailer loaded with sandbags made its way through Houston, drug agents kept their distance and watched where it went and what the driver did.
And because of a broken tail light, they knew they could pull over the driver at any time, he said.
When it was clear the truck and its driver, who has not yet been charged, were done in Houston and headed back to the border, it was stopped in Fort Bend County on U.S. 59 near Spur 10, he said.
The money was reportedly shrink-wrapped in plastic and sitting under the cot, rather than stashed in elaborate hidden compartments seen in other busts.
The cash has since been deposited in a government bank account, Glendening said.
The truck’s driver, a U.S. citizen from Mission, has been released for now. To reclaim the money, he would have to prove to a judge that the cash came from a legitimate source.
Glendening declined to reveal much about the driver, other than he is a “blue collar guy” who owns a small trucking company and had somehow allegedly fallen into the drug business.
After making sales around the United States, drug gangs sneak cash in smaller quantities back to Houston before rolling it into larger loads for the journey back home, according to a 2009 Justice Department report.
The Drug Enforcement Administration’s Wendell Campbell said cartels have increasingly tried to smuggle bulk cash into Mexico as a way to hide their illegal fortunes.
“That is an absolute home run, a significant amount of money,” he said.
