Blood and Money

The East Valley Tribune has a great FLASH piece up on Immigration called the "Blood and Money".

A small exerpt:

Four people lay bleeding on the floor of a Phoenix restaurant, gunned down by a human smuggler strung out on methamphetamines, marijuana and booze.

One of the victims later died.

As the gunman made his escape, a witness copied down his license plate number.

That scrap of information led police and federal agents to a Phoenix drop house and helped them build a criminal case against Anastacio Franco-Cabrera, the man they say is at the top of one of the state's most violent human smuggling gangs.

Rosalio Franco-Perez was a driver and drop house operator in the Franco smuggling organization, according to police reports and court records. On the day of the shooting, he and a group of friends were eating at Don Jose's Taqueria on West Camelback Road when they began bickering with strangers at a nearby table.

Franco-Perez went to his car, grabbed his rifle and returned to spray the crowd with bullets. When the shooting stopped, Miguel Mazariegos was mortally wounded with gunshot wounds to his chest and leg. Three others were also hit, but survived.

That level of brutality is not unusual in an industry that treats human beings as cargo, according to police and federal agents who work the front lines battling the escalating violence that smuggling gangs have brought to the Valley.

Human smugglers like the Francos have built sophisticated criminal enterprises generating an estimated $2.5 billion annually through their Arizona operations alone, according to the Arizona Financial Crimes Task Force, a collaboration of federal, state and local police and prosecutors targeting the financial resources of human smugglers.

In recent years, highly structured organizations have squeezed out most of the small-time operators, said Armando Garcia, of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE.

Working in league with Mexican drug cartels, human smuggling kingpins have set up networks of drivers, warehouse operators, distribution specialists and enforcers to move their loads from northern Sonora through the Valley and to their final destinations throughout the United States, said Garcia, acting assistant special agent in charge at the Phoenix office of investigations at ICE.

The smugglers, or "coyotes," call the immigrants "pollos" — chickens — human cargo without value beyond what it can bring on the open market.

"For a while, I think there was a sense that the coyotes were sort of freedom fighters, that they were one step removed from the humane borders people who provide water and transportation out of the goodness of their hearts," said Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard, whose agency has gone after the money generated by human smuggling rings.

"The people we are dealing with are well-organized, very well-armed, and apparently will stop at nothing to maximize their profit from human beings. That includes examples of severe brutality and murder. It makes the drug business look almost good by comparison."