Atlanta: Largest Distribution Point For Mexico’s Drug Cartel

Atlanta is more than 1-thousand miles from the Mexican border. But the Southeast’s largest city has become a major distribution point for Mexican drug cartels.

“We now ship more drugs from Atlanta to Florida than we get from Florida,” says David Nahmias, U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Georgia.

Federal authorities say many of the same things that make Atlanta attractive to legitimate business make the metro area a logical base for cartel operatives. The city is a transportation hub, boasting interstates in six directions.

“You can get anywhere east of the Rockies in less than a 24 hour drive,” Nahmias says.

Investigators say traffickers usually use trucks to smuggle the drugs into “stash houses” in Atlanta, where they’re broken down into smaller amounts and then driven to other eastern states.

“We see it in tractor-trailers with cover loads of produce, in vehicles with very sophisticated concealed compartments,” says Rodney Benson, special agent in charge of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s Atlanta Field Division. Click on the video to watch our interview with Benson on a DEA helicopter surveillance flight.

Often the same trucks are used to bring the proceeds from drug sales back to Atlanta, where the money is counted and shrink wrapped to prevent tampering during the drive back to Mexico.

On tonight’s Special Report w/ Bret Baier, we’ll take a look at how Mexican cartels are taking advantage of immigration trends in the U.S. to conceal their activity, and what the feds are doing to infiltrate these secretive organizations.

Fox News