Operation Crank Call, a 15-month joint investigation by Tempe Police and the Drug Enforcement Administration, resulted in 203 arrests in connection with the Sinaloa Cartel.
In addition to the apprehensions, nearly $8 million in cash and about $12 million in drugs were confiscated, according to a Tempe Police press release.
Those numbers may increase as the investigation continues, Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne said during a Dec. 20 press conference.
“It is frankly an obscene amount of drugs and money,” he said. “Those numbers reflect the horrific scope of the drug trafficking problem in our community.”
The investigation began after a Tempe patrol officer observed and arrested a drug dealer attempting to sell methamphetamines, Tempe Police Sgt. Steve Carbajal said.
The dealer happened to be in connection with a drug trafficking organization associated with the Sinaloa Cartel.
Horne said if it weren’t for the officer’s vigilance, the operation might not have been possible.
“That officer’s work was the genesis of this operation, which involved the dedicated work of many more law enforcement professionals,” he said.
Operation Crank Call was originally established to combat the rise in methamphetamine use in the Valley and infiltrate the drug trafficking organization, according to the press release.
“This investigation, although it went after methamphetamines and street-level drugs, got us into some things we didn’t really anticipate, (such as) the level of activity in our county that we actually uncovered,” Tempe Chief of Police Tom Ryff said at the press conference.
Tempe Police detectives and the DEA communicate closely in regard to drug enforcement. When the two agencies found overlapping similarities in the cases to take down the organization, they joined forces, along with the Phoenix, Avondale and Gila River Police Departments, Carbajal said.
The continued goal is to make arrests higher up the chain of command in the Sinaloa Cartel, Tempe Police Cmdr. Kim Hale said at the press conference.
The Sinaloa Cartel is compromised of mostly family members and very close friends or associates, making infiltration difficult.
“These folks operate just like any other business,” Hale said. “They got their wholesalers, they got their retailers, they got distribution networks and the idea is try and feel out that organization.”
Despite the investigation’s early success, Ryff said, there is still more work to be done, and it is still too early to tell what level of impact was made on the organization.
“We’re here today to talk about the success of this investigation and to alert the community to the problem that we’re having within Maricopa County specifically and also within the state of Arizona,” Ryff said.
Hale said no one was harmed on either side of the investigation and operations ran smoothly.
While law enforcement of drug trafficking is only half the battle in combating the use and abuse of drugs, Doug Coleman, DEA acting special agent in charge of the operation, said the other half is education and prevention.
“(Enforcement is) one arm of a strategy to try to keep people from circling the drain of addiction,” he said at the press conference. “(The DEA) will never relent. We will continue this fight as long as people want to do things that will damage our communities and damage American society.”
Reach the reporter at sraymund@asu.edu
