Major bust nets 'boat load' of drugs, money

The piles of cash were jaw-dropping.

Twenties, fifties, hundreds. All vacuum-wrapped in plastic and stuffed inside four duffel bags.

All of it was taken from alleged drug dealers who are part of a Mexican cartel that has infiltrated South Carolina.

On Thursday, state and local law enforcement officers raided three homes in Columbia. They found more than 2,000 pounds of marijuana, a kilo of cocaine, the cash and one person, who was arrested and is awaiting charges.

Thursday's bust was one of the largest ever in Richland County, said Sheriff Leon Lott.

"We read a lot and hear a lot about the Mexican drug war," Lott said. "You're seeing it here now. This is not a small-time operation."

The bust began Wednesday evening when S.C. State Law Enforcement Division agents and narcotics officers with the Greenville Police Department made a traffic stop, said Capt. Roger Heaton, SLED's assistant director.

SLED and Greenville police had been investigating a suspect for some time and decided to make the arrest Wednesday. They found marijuana and $14,000 cash in the car, Heaton said.

Clues from that arrest led to Richland County. SLED agents called the sheriff's department and the Columbia Police Department for assistance. Then, they got search warrants for a home on Roberson Street near the Haskell Heights Community off Monticello Road.

Agents raided the Roberson Street home at 8:15 a.m. Thursday, Heaton said. Inside, police found marijuana bundled in green plastic wrap. Most of it was divided into bales that weighed 20.2 pounds. The rest was in bulk in black garbage bags.

The marijuana was stored in multiple rooms in the house.

"This the best marijuana I've ever seen," Heaton said. "People that smoke marijuana look for the biggest buds. This has big, sticky buds."

One kilo of cocaine also was found.

A man inside the house was armed with a semi-automatic handgun, Heaton said. He tried to escape but was caught in the backyard.

Police arrested Celso Soriana Vasquez, 23. He is being held at the Alvin S. Glenn Detention Center.

A police raid a few hours later at a house on Hutchinson Street, a few blocks away, did not turn up drugs or cash, Heaton said. No one was home.

However, police gathered clues from those two houses that led them to seek a warrant to search a third home.

About 11 a.m., police raided a house on Leeside Circle, off Old Percival Road, near Fort Jackson. That's where they found the cash.

Henry Myers, a 19-year-old neighbor, said he saw police swarm the neighborhood about 11 a.m.

He said he was going to his car to go to register for his college classes when he noticed "there was a tank outside," he said, referring to an armored vehicle owned by the sheriff's department.

Myers said his family has lived in the neighborhood for about five months. They did not know their neighbors.

"I never expected anything like that," he said. "I thought it was a regular household."

Two women were home when the police showed up, Myers said. However, no one at the house was arrested, police said.

Most of the money found in the Leeside Circle home had been tightly sealed in plastic. Wrapping cash with a vacuum-tight seal is a trend Heaton said he only recently noticed as drug agents have arrested more Mexican dealers.

The dollar figure for the cash seized was not available Thursday night.

The piles of cash were the star of a hastily called news conference Thursday afternoon. Police posed for pictures with the money, and the most veteran law enforcement officers said they had never seen that amount of cash in one place.

"It takes money to wage war," said Columbia Police Chief Tandy Carter. "You can see how well equipped they are."

After the news conference, the money was taken to a bank by two members of SLED's SWAT team and two people from the agency's finance department.

"There's 100s, 50s and other large denominations," Heaton said. "It'll be six figures, probably in the hundreds of thousands of dollars."

SLED Director Reggie Lloyd said Mexican drug runners have been moving out of Atlanta because of increased police pressure. Now, they are moving to South Carolina and North Carolina, he said.

"We don't want these guys to get a foothold here," Lloyd said.

The people behind Thursday's bust are big-time, he said.

"They've been running this type of operation for a while."

The two men arrested in Columbia and Greenville are small players, Lloyd said. He and other officials want to go after their bosses.

SLED will get help from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, he said.

Getting to the dealers higher up the chain will take hard work, Heaton said.

"We got the cash," he said. "We got the bad guy. We got the guns. We got the dope. Tomorrow begins the hard part of the investigation."