The Mexican Drug Cartel's Underground Marijuana Tunnel:
Durst wanted to wait once more and follow the vans. Where would they
go? How many more nodes of the cartel's distribution ring could he take
down? By now he had called forty-five men into the field. Helicopters
buzzed overhead. Tailing five vans to God knew where would require more
men and resources than he could readily muster. The whole operation was
on the verge of becoming a crazy, unwieldy hydra. Durst had let the
string unwind to the last manageable point; now there was only one
option.
“Take it down,” he finally said.
As a veteran of an unwinnable war that has gone on for twenty-one
years and turned the U.S.-Mexican border into Swiss cheese, he'd given
that order many times before. But this bust would be unlike any other.
In addition to the vans, there was the tunnel itself, which turned out
to be a marvel of illegal engineering. The Mexican entrance, hidden in a
two-story warehouse near the airport, had an elevator that popped up
out of a tile floor. Its shaft descended thirty feet, to a staging area
where bales could be loaded onto an electrically driven mining car. The
railway traveled through the 550-yard tunnel atop wood planks. “It is
clearly the most sophisticated tunnel we have ever found,” said Lauren
Mack, the task-force spokesperson on-site at the time. The tunnel—along
with many others—was believed to be the pet project of a single man.
American law enforcement had been hunting him for years, but he had
always managed to remain far enough removed from his creations that
nobody could get to him. That is, until Durst let the string
unwind—right to his doorstep.