ICE agent with "el Grande" tunnel vision

Washington Post:

Sometime in January, one of the men who works for Miguel "Mike" Unzueta, special agent in charge of the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement bureau in this salubrious southern Californian border city, got a tip. It seemed that drug smugglers had bored a tunnel from Tijuana across the border.

As with much of the intelligence generated by Unzueta's team of investigators, this tip provided specific information about what was going on in Mexico but scant detail about what was happening on the U.S. side of the line. "We were hearing rumors. The tom-toms started beating. People started talking, 'There's a tunnel.' The difficulty was to find it, to corroborate the rumor," Unzueta recalled.

By Jan. 23, Unzueta's agents had pinpointed the site of the tunnel in Tijuana, and Unzueta had passed on the information to Mexican counterparts. After a 36-hour wait for Mexican authorities to issue a search warrant, Mexican and U.S. lawmen entered the tunnel in Tijuana and, guns drawn, slid 80 feet below the surface of the earth and then groped their way 2,400 feet north only to pop out into the middle of a 50,000-square-foot warehouse in Otay Mesa, a suburb of San Diego.

The tunnel is known to the men and women of the ICE bureau in San Diego as "El Grande." Dug through a composite of clay and decomposing granite -- perfect for tunneling -- the shaft had electricity, a ventilation system, pumps to remove groundwater, concrete flooring for traction in steep areas, and wood roofing to bolster the walls and ceiling.

On the Mexican side of the line, authorities discovered two tons of marijuana. In the United States, agents found 300 pounds. Work had begun on a cold storage facility in the U.S. warehouse. Apparently the smugglers were planning to move narcotics around the United States in fruit and vegetable trucks. In subsequent weeks, Unzueta's agents arrested a Mexican man in connection with the warehouse and are seeking two others.

...

There is much more. A remarkable fellow who spent time as an undercover agent before moving into his current position. "For some reason, I had a knack for buying heroin," Unzueta said. "People just trusted me."