By Alexia Campbell
The Sun-Sentinel
FORT LAUDERDALE — It wasn’t your average speedboat. It was the high-powered kind with four engines used by dope smugglers, and that caught the attention of the U.S. Coast Guard.
Lt. Steve McCullough and his team hovered in a Coast Guard helicopter over the boat that was speeding through the western Caribbean. They flashed blue lights. They fired three machine-gun rounds into the air to warn the boat to stop, and when it didn’t, they shot out two of its engines.
“As soon as they saw us bring out the sniper rifles, that’s when the bales [of cocaine] started going off the vessel,” said McCullough, as the crew of the Coast Guard cutter Bear got ready to unload 1.6 tons of the seized cocaine in Port Everglades on Thursday.
The load had a street value of $100 million. It was likely headed to Mexico, where it would then be smuggled into the United States, McCullough said.
On the afternoon of March 18, a Coast Guard aircraft alerted the Bear of a suspicious boat 40 miles off Nicaragua’s coast.
The Bear sent a helicopter and a small boat to check it out.
McCullough’s chopper tracked down the speedboat and blew out two of its engines. The boat finally stopped. But the helicopter ran low on gas and had to turn around. That gave the men their chance to race into Nicaraguan waters before the inflatable Coast Guard power boat could reach them.
“At that point, we were unable to pursue out of respect for our neighbors down south,” said Wes Pulven, commander of the Bear, whose crew pulled 50 bales of cocaine out of the water.
The 3,200 pounds of pure cocaine were tightly packed in burlap sugar sacks.
About a dozen crew members wearing surgical masks and gloves unloaded the contraband from the 270-foot cutter in Port Everglades.
FBI and DEA agents loaded the dope into a U-Haul truck to take away.
The Coast Guard seizes an average of 150 tons of cocaine a year, officials said. In 2007, the agency seized a record $4.7 billion worth the cocaine.
Copyright 2008 The Sun-Sentinel