April 24, 2003 – Federal and local law-enforcement agencies on Thursday announced six drug-related arrests over the last week, four of them of cruise ship passengers accused of smuggling cocaine, heroin and crack cocaine into the territory.
U.S. Attorney Davis Nissman said in a release that two pairs of passengers aboard the Norwegian Sea, which arrived on St. Thomas from Curaçao on April 20, were found to be in possession of the drugs.
While the ship was tied up at the West Indian Co. dock, Bureau of Customs and Border Protection agents conducted a routine onboard search, the release said. A search dog named B-anka led them to two suitcases found to contain drugs.
Christopher Brown and Nadine Willis were arrested and charged with possession with importation of and intent to distribute more than five kilograms of cocaine.
Nissman said a suitcase which Brown identified as his contained 54 flat-taped wrapped packages and one brick-like package. Field testing proved positive for cocaine with a total weight of about 31 kilograms. Brown and Willis admitted that they body-carried the narcotics onto the ship while it was docked in Curaçao, the release said.
Venris Clarke and Melissa Peak were arrested on the same charges as Brown and Willis.
The release said a suitcase which Peak said was hers was found to contain 53 flat-taped wrapped packages and six brick-like packages. Testing determined the contents of the taped packages to consist of about 30 kilos of cocaine, that four of the other packages contained about 2 kilos of crack cocaine, and the other two held about 1.1 kilos of heroin.
Nissman said Clarke and Peak admitted that they body-carried the narcotics onto the ship while in Curaçao and that they had made similar trips on multiple occasions in the past. Peak said she would be paid $10,000 to body-carry drugs off the Norwegian Sea when the ship arrived at Bermuda, the release stated.
In an unrelated incident, Nissman said two men were arrested Wednesday and charged with drug conspiracy and possession with intent to distribute more than five kilograms of cocaine and more than one kilo of heroin.
The complaint, Nissman said, alleges that members of the Drug Enforcement Administration's High-Intensity Drug Trafficking Area Task Force were conducting surveillance on the western end of John Brewers Bay when a man was observed on a small blue boat at the beach of the vacant Xanadu Resort. Another man was observed entering the water to hand a blue and white cooler to the man in the boat.
The boat then left the area, Nissman said.
Authorities identified the boatman as Luis Angel Rosario Vazquez and the man who handed the cooler to him as Gabriel Gregorio Santana.
According to the release, the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents subsequently interdicted the boat while en route to Puerto Rico. The cooler was found to hold cocaine and heroin.
"The law-enforcement community has long suspected that the Virgin Islands are being used by international drug traffickers who treat our islands as a venue for smuggling," Nissman said in the release. He said these cases "demonstrate that through aggressive anti-drug efforts of the law-enforcement agencies, drug traffickers will be caught and be prosecuted."
Nissman commended the federal, local and joint agencies involved in the three cases.
The penalty for the drug offenses in each case is a minimum mandatory sentence of 10 years to life imprisonment, a $4 million fine, and a five-year period of supervised release. Each of the defendants had an initial appearance before U.S. Magistrate Judge Geoffrey W. Barnard and was remanded to custody pending a pretrial detention hearing.
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