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National Drug Intelligence Center |
Some law enforcement reporting suggests that the Gulf Cartel--the primary drug organizational threat to the North Texas HIDTA region--and certain members of Los Zetas have broken ranks, allegedly splitting the cartel into two factions. The split would leave Jorge Eduardo Costilla-Sánchez and Antonio Ezequiel Cárdenas-Guillén in charge of the Gulf Cartel and Heriberto Lazcano-Lazcano as the head of a new cartel with Miguel Angel Treviño-Morales as second in command. Given Treviño-Morales's influence within the North Texas HIDTA region, the formation of this new cartel could signal a further rise in prominence of the Dallas/Fort Worth area as a major drug trafficking center.
Because of the continued success of highway interdiction programs in Oklahoma, drug traffickers will continue to vary their transportation methods and techniques and alternate their transportation routes to avoid law enforcement detection, particularly along highways transiting the state that are heavily patrolled by interdiction teams.
It is probable that the availability of locally produced powder methamphetamine in some Oklahoma counties in the North Texas HIDTA region will increase over the next year as former producers of the drug return to their criminal activities after completing prison sentences. Local producers in Oklahoma will quite likely increase their use of the one-pot method of methamphetamine production and set up operations in those smaller communities where law enforcement resources are less concentrated or limited.
The increasing abuse of CPDs in the North Texas HIDTA Oklahoma region will most likely result in an increased heroin abuser population in the area because abuse of CPDs, which is a serious concern in Oklahoma, frequently leads to heroin abuse. As prescription drug abusers are unable to obtain sufficient quantities of those drugs to meet their addiction needs, they may turn to heroin and its increasingly available supply to satisfy those needs.
The current economic decline in the real estate market will not diminish the threat posed by house-flipping money launderers in the Dallas/Fort Worth area. Members of criminal groups and other money launderers, including a growing number of Mexican drug traffickers, will increasingly take advantage of foreclosed properties in the area to commit mortgage fraud and launder drug proceeds through the purchase of these properties.
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