Drug smuggling now takes flight

U.S. prosecutors in a series of court cases say they are beginning to unravel the latest innovation in drug smuggling: South American gangs that are buying old jets and other planes, filling them with cocaine and flying them more than 3,000 miles across the ocean to Africa.

At least three gangs have struck deals to fly drugs to West Africa and from there to Europe, according to U.S. indictments.

"The sky's the limit," one Sierra Leone trafficker boasted to a Drug Enforcement Administration informant, according to court documents.

Most of the cocaine flown to Africa is bound for Europe, where demand has been rising. South American gangs are turning to airplanes because European navies have been intercepting more boat shipments along the African coast, trafficking experts say.

"We started stopping the maritime traffic, basically, so then they started going to air traffic more and more," said Theodore Leggett, a smuggling expert with the UN Office on Drugs and Crime in Vienna.

The UN agency began warning about trans-Atlantic drug planes after Nov. 2, 2009, when a burned-out Boeing 727 was found in the desert in Mali. Drug smugglers had flown the jet from Venezuela, unloaded it and then torched it, investigators said.

In the last year, arrests in Africa have begun shedding light on how the air routes work. The cases are being prosecuted in a New York federal court because some of the cocaine was supposed to have been sent to the United States.

"The quantity of cocaine distributed and the means employed to distribute it were extraordinary," prosecutors wrote in one case.

They warned of a conspiracy to "spread vast quantities of cocaine throughout the world by way of cargo airplanes."