Fighting the Fentanyl Crisis with Mike Sena
This episode is sponsored by Culligan Water
The United States is in the throes of a devastating fentanyl crisis, claiming over 70,000 lives annually. This epidemic, as detailed in a recent episode of The Adrenaline Zone podcast, is a multi-faceted problem with roots stretching from China to Mexico and impacting communities nationwide. The crisis not only results in a staggering loss of life but also drains over a trillion dollars from the nation's economy each year. Fentanyl, a synthetic opioid, is often laced into other drugs, leading to accidental overdoses among unsuspecting users, and proving to be far more dangerous than other drugs.
Mike Sena, Executive Director of the Northern California High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (HIDTA), joined hosts Sandy Winnefeld and Dr. Sandra Magnus to shed light on this issue. Sena's career in law enforcement began with a deep-seated desire to help his community, which was heavily impacted by drug-related violence. His journey took him from contemplating a military career to working undercover, busting drug dealers, and eventually coordinating efforts to combat drug trafficking at a national level.
Sena's early experiences involved posing as a drug buyer and seller in his own community, leading to significant drug busts. His undercover work extended to collaborating with various task forces, including a memorable stint with the FBI on a kidnapping case. These experiences provided him with invaluable insights into the operations of drug trafficking organizations. He learned how to portray various roles when undercover and even got schooled by a high-end dealer on how to dress like a top-end dope dealer.
The rise of Mexican drug cartels, particularly the Sinaloa and Jalisco New Generation cartels, marked a turning point in the drug trade. These organizations have taken over the distribution of fentanyl in the U.S., flooding the market with cheap and deadly drugs. The transition from Chinese-produced fentanyl to Mexican labs, using Chinese precursors, has made interdiction efforts even more challenging. The bulk price of fentanyl has dropped significantly, making it more accessible and profitable for dealers, despite the high risk of overdose for users.
Coordinating a national response to this crisis requires collaboration across federal, state, and local agencies. Sena highlighted the Overdose Response Strategy, a joint effort between HIDTA and the CDC, aimed at building resilient communities. This initiative involves bringing together law enforcement, public health officials, and community groups to address the crisis holistically. One of the key successes of this program has been the distribution of Narcan (naloxone) to law enforcement personnel, a crucial tool in preventing overdose deaths.
The financial aspect of drug trafficking is equally complex, with billions of dollars being laundered through various channels, including money service businesses and potentially cryptocurrencies. The difficulty in tracking these funds has hampered efforts to dismantle drug organizations. Moreover, emerging synthetic substances like xylazine, which are not reversible with Narcan, pose a new and alarming threat. Xylazine, an animal tranquilizer, is being mixed with fentanyl, leading to a more potent and deadly high.
Despite these challenges, there are glimmers of hope. Community-driven efforts, increased awareness, and collaborative strategies are beginning to make a difference. The dedication of law enforcement officers, public health professionals, and community leaders is crucial in turning the tide. Public education about the dangers of fentanyl and the importance of seeking treatment for addiction is also a vital component of the solution, along with getting treatment for those who need it.
The fentanyl crisis is a stark reminder of the need for a unified and comprehensive approach to drug enforcement and public health. As Sena emphasizes, it's about more than just seizing drugs; it's about saving lives and restoring hope to communities ravaged by addiction. By fostering collaboration, enhancing communication, and focusing on both prevention and treatment, there is a path forward to ending this cycle of destruction. The fight against fentanyl is far from over, but the collective efforts of dedicated individuals and organizations offer a beacon of hope for a healthier, safer future.
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Transcript
Mike Sena: So the success that I'm seeing every day is that level of collaboration, seeing the seizures that are happening and more importantly, seeing people get the treatment they need and seeing, in many cases, courts helping people get the treatment they need as well. We've got to end this cycle of destruction. To me, the greatest thing I'm seeing out there is the hope in the eyes of the individuals that are in these meetings, knowing that they can make a difference and then seeing them make a difference.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: Our nation has been suffering for years from a crisis of substance dependence that has turned deadly. Over 100,000 people die from overdoses each year, with 70,000 perishing from fentanyl and fentanyl laced drugs.
Sandy Winnefeld: This epidemic is also costing our nation over a trillion dollars a year. Most of these drugs are made in Mexico from precursors imported from China and then smuggled into the United States in both commercial and private vehicles and through packages.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: And we're at a particularly dangerous stage of this crisis because deadly synthetic drugs like fentanyl are also being laced into other drugs that can kill unsuspecting users.
Sandy Winnefeld: It's a multidimensional problem with a multidimensional solution, including public awareness to reduce stigma, prevention, medical response, treatment and recovery. It also involves interdiction. And that's where today's guest, Mike Sena, comes in.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: Mike is the Executive Director, Northern California High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area and the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center.
Sandy Winnefeld: He's responsible for coordinating efforts at the federal, state and local level for countering trafficking in these deadly drugs. That involves plenty of risk management, and we're pleased to have him on the show.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: But first, many thanks to our sponsor for this season of The Adrenaline Zone, Culligan.
Sandy Winnefeld: With Culligan's drinking water systems, you can get the ultra filtered water you need to fuel your high performance lifestyle right on tap. Learn more at culligan.com.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: And we caught up with Mike at his headquarters in San Francisco.
Sandy Winnefeld: So, Mike Sena, welcome to The Adrenaline Zone. This is a little different for us. We normally interview adventurers and athletes who take risks. You represent a completely different type of risk that's really important to our nation. So thanks so much for joining us.
Mike Sena: No, thank you. I appreciate having me on the call and happy to answer any questions you have about careers in law enforcement and kind of my experiences over the years.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: Well, we're really looking forward to it. Actually, my brother's in law enforcement as well, so compare notes a bit later. But we like to start at the beginning. So can you explain how you got started in law enforcement? And what was your journey to your current position?
Mike Sena: When I started out my career in law enforcement, I actually from a young age was looking at what I could do to help my community. I always tell people I didn't grow up in the greatest community as far as crime free zones or anything like that. It was pretty much a crime filled zone. The environment was often filled with violence related to narcotics trafficking and violent crime that's associated with it. So looking at the community, there were lots of liquor stores, not a whole lot of grocery stores nearby. Those were kind of the centers of bad things happening. That and bars. In my law enforcement career early on, I was looking at potential going into the military and army as a path, and in college actually attended ROTC. That was kind of the path I thought I was going to take until I had an injury. And they said, “Yeah, this isn't the path you're going to be able to take anymore.”
I became the president of our criminal justice association at California State University, San Bernardino. And part of the job was to bring in guest speakers to recruit. I'd hit up every agency out there bringing people in. And back in the late ‘80s, early ‘90s, there weren't a whole lot of agencies hiring. They had very few positions and they had thousands of people applying for them. And so about the time I was getting ready to graduate, I had brought in a new person to come in and recruit. And it was somebody from the California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control. And at the time it was like the only two people were hiring were the Department of Corrections for California Department of Corrections and ABC. I went with the Alcoholic Beverage Control. I just couldn't see myself sitting in the prison. And the person that came in, she gave a great overview. Hey, this is a job you can come into, learn investigative skills, work undercover and make this your own. I went down that path after graduating from college and really immediately went into buying drugs and weapons. And for me, one of the best parts was I was able to go back into my own community and go to a location that was a center for selling drugs and selling weapons and violence and able to actually shut the place down. And that was based on undercover work where I bought crack cocaine in front of the place, went inside, talked to the clerk and said, “Hey, I just bought some crack, but I don't have anything to smoke it with.” And the clerk actually made a crack pipe for me. And so, yep, and so it was that combination of things.
And then over and over again doing those types of investigations that kind of led me to learning my basic skills and really working task forces. That's where I learned to work on different task forces. One of the task forces I went to support for a little bit was a kidnapping case, which turned out to be a kidnap and homicide of a young child. They needed investigators. And so going to work and supporting that effort, I got to meet just a phenomenal supervisor with the FBI who was leading the way and kind of the process for working a major investigation. And he taught me a lot. Taught me a lot about mistakes that can be made. Taught me a lot about the pressure of working a major case where for a period of time you're trying to find this juvenile that's been kidnapped and then dealing with the heartache when they find the body. I learned a tremendous amount of working major investigations from that. And a few months after that, I was asked to go and work on a major task force. There was a Alcoholic Beverage Control investigator, the first, who'd been assigned to this task force. And it was the Inland Crackdown Ally Task Force, INCA Task Force. And the focus of the task force was working Colombians and working cocaine trafficking. It was still the cowboy days of crazy amounts of cocaine being shipped from Colombia through Mexico in many cases. Or we actually saw this transition of cocaine being shipped and moved by Mexican drug trafficking organizations into the United States. And there were plenty of Colombians that were working. But it was this kind of nuance of seeing these Mexican drug dealers and the rise of Mexican drug trafficking organizations. And I got to, during that period, do incredible work. I mean, multi ton seizures of narcotics and millions of dollars seized in cash. But see these organizations, international, global organizations that were having a direct impact on communities across America.
And especially going back to my own, I mean, I started buying crack cocaine on the street portraying myself as a drug buyer. And I also worked undercover as a seller of narcotics. And I saw the direct impact it had on people and the lives that were being lost because of it. And so seeing the tons of it coming in and being able to interdict those drugs and ultimately see those suspects go to prison for decades after that. It was good to at least see what we were able to do in identifying the threat and combating the threat.
Sandy Winnefeld: I would imagine having a passion for your job is incredibly important, but what a kind of passion that is that you grew up with. But I got to back up for a second. You're telling me that you were buying at a fairly early stage of your career, crack, cocaine, undercover. Now, you don't look exactly like a guy who's going to be out. And for our listeners, this is your white classic white guy we're talking to here. Did you use disguises or how did you set yourself up for success in doing that?
Mike Sena: Early on, and my family came to the United States in the late 1600s into New Mexico, the center side. And so the family, Spanish speaking historically and intermarried with folks in the native land there in New Mexico and been there for 300 years and my mom is white. So I came up looking very much like my mother, but speaking Spanish as a kid, I learned Spanish well. And so I always had to have a good cover story about how I came to be, family and all that. And that, yes, I look white as heck, but Hispanic heritage.
Sandy Winnefeld: Okay. If I was a drug dealer and you walked up to me and said, “I want to buy some drugs,” I'd go, “This guy's got to be a cop.” So you must have a really good story.
Mike Sena: Oh, it's all portraying the roles. I grew up most of my life in the black community and black culture is part of my life as well. And so knowing the community, knowing how to talk and knowing how to relate to people is all it takes. And building trust, you're building trust with a drug dealer so that he doesn't think you're a cop or for whatever reasons. And oftentimes, I mean, my attire and my look would change based on what I was doing, whether I was being a street seller. And I have to tell you, the funniest thing was dealing with a high end dealer one time. I mean, he actually schooled me on what I should be wearing. And he goes, and you need a Rolex here, here. And he gave me one of his watches. He goes, “Put this watch on.” So you got to portray the part. He goes, “I'm going to get myself killed if you aren't portraying yourself as a top end dope dealer. “ And I'm like, “Yep, you're absolutely right.” So you learn from everybody, even the crooks. And so they got me into a spot where I was able to do that work. And I had phenomenal mentors too in law enforcement. A guy who later became my brother in law, Tony Ibarra, legendary cop in Southern California and ran the LA Impact task force for a number of years. He's the guy that my first day on the job working major narcotics task force operations, he's the guy that picked me up and taught me and schooled me through everything out there. And Tony and I ended up spending a lot of time. Initially, the California highway patrol at the time had a program, K9 Narcotics Enforcement Program. And they were specifically targeting large loads of narcotics. And so every time they would stop a large load of narcotics, Tony would eventually start taking me to these interviews. And we'd interview these guys within minutes of them being stopped and being taken into custody for a large load of narcotics. And our job was to get whatever information we could and try to develop them into sources and informants.
And back then, it was much easier. We could actually deliver the loads of narcotics with that person because we didn't have all the electronic surveillance we have now. So we could turn an informant in 30 minutes or less, tell them, “This is the path you're going to take. And if you don't take this path, there's always the other alternate path where you potentially go to prison for a very, very long time. Or you can work for us.” And we would immediately tell them, “Hey, these are the pros and cons of this, and if you work with us, we'll do everything we can to reduce your sentence and move this path forward.” I can tell you the number of times that we've had people that had done that work, and we were able to work enormous cases with them and literally turn their lives around. In fact, one of those subjects that we had that decided to become an informant, he turned his life so much around that years later, I got a call from one of my old supervisors saying, “Hey, I've got this amazing story. A guy came up to me today. He recognized me. He recognized me because you and I were together on one of the operations.” And he had told me, he said, “Hey, thank Mike Sena, because he changed my life. I have cleaned up, never sold drugs again after that, got my family back together, and best of all, now I'm coaching basketball.” The reason that my old boss was there was because he had just signed his kid up for basketball. And so this guy was going to be his son's coach.
Sandy Winnefeld: Wow.
Mike Sena: Now, he did say, well, I did give him all my home address information in retrospect. But he goes, he's cleaned his life up. And it was one of those great stories that makes you feel good that you're doing the job you did and help helped him get his life around for being a multi kilo drug dealer to being a basketball coach.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: I feel like we could just take this whole interview and a whole conversation about your undercover work, because talk about risk. I know we have a lot to ask you about what you're doing today, but I just want to dwell on that. I mean, how do you deal with the risk of being undercover and the pressure and the emotional impact of those experiences? That has to be hard.
Mike Sena: It's hard in many ways. One piece of it is you're working these individuals and gaining their trust, getting them to think that, hey, he's not a cop and he's a good dude and he's a guy that we can trust with dope and we can trust with money or whatever it is. And then consequentially there's that cost on family because you're away from family a lot, and then you're always worried that you're going to get spotted off duty, something's going to happen. And I have had instances where I've seen the bad guy not working and it's like how do I avoid this? Or if he sees me, what's this going to be like and I'm with my family? It's not good. And so trying to balance that out or the times where I didn't arrest the suspect, but I arrested other people around them. And I've had that happen where I had a location where I'd basically bought drugs from like 20 people in the bar. I'd gotten warrants for all these people. And on the day that we did the arrest, there was one guy who wasn't there. I ran to that guy later on. He comes up to me and goes, “Thank God they didn't get you.” I was like, okay.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: Your cover was good.
Mike Sena: Yeah, that's pretty good. So I was like, man, because you're always worried that you're going to get burnt. And separating that life from your normal life, that is something that you have to figure out. And some guys don't do well with that, and some guys take to it– I mean, I always balanced it with– And I, at times when I see a guy who's going to prison for 20 years for moving drugs, you think about the impact that has on their family. And I always offered people the opportunity. It's not the safest opportunity becoming an informant for the government, but your other opportunity is not seeing your family for two, three decades. And I remember I had one individual and his kid was 2 years old, and he got 20 years, young wife. I was like, there's very little opportunities for this guy. And now that he's gone, his family has no money, and so what's going to happen with them? So there's an impact on that emotionally from many angles.
Sandy Winnefeld: But I would also think, Mike, that when you're undercover, it's not just the risk of having a case get blown if you're exposed. I mean, there's actual physical risk for you. These people are not going to be happy.
Mike Sena: Oh, no.
Sandy Winnefeld: So you have backup whenever you're on duty, and they have a way of getting to you quickly if something goes wrong.
Mike Sena: Absolutely. I mean, part of it is, especially if there's going to be a takedown. Literally, if we're doing operations, under cuff for operations, I've in the past stood up on tables and go, “I'm the undercover. Do not kick my butt if I'm in there.” And I have to tell you, there was one time, and I think I was in East LA at the time because of the agency that happened with. I do remember that I'm getting jacked up by one of the police officers that comes in. I'm like, damn. I guess he's playing along with this really well. Holy, that hurts. And one of my partners comes up to the dude, he goes, “What are you doing?” He goes into his ear, he goes, “He's the undercover.” He was like, “Oh, I'm sorry I missed the briefing.”
Dr. Sandra Magnus: Like, thanks, buddy.
Sandy Winnefeld: I hate it when that– You guys don't practice like the movies where you know it's a fake punch or something like that, and you–
Mike Sena: Oh, no. I was like, “Man, this is realistic.” I'm like, “Oh, no, this is not right.” Luckily the partners caught that and saw that what was going on.
Sandy Winnefeld: So let's kind of shift into what you're doing now. You've obviously graduated from– You're probably no longer undercover. You're doing a lot of other things on a much grander scale, frankly. And before we get too much into what you're actually, what currently are the primary drug trafficking threats and the challenges in the Northern California region? Are they unique to Northern California? Are they similar nationwide? What is the problem right now for you?
Mike Sena: When you look at the landscape, the biggest threat right now is fentanyl. That is our biggest threat. I mean, we have methamphetamine and cocaine trafficking and other narcotics that are being moved around the nation.
Sandy Winnefeld: And a lot of it is laced with fentanyl.
Mike Sena: A lot of it has fentanyl, or it's being sold as something else, and it's just fentanyl. And that's what's killing a lot of people. Over 106,000 people dead last year. That is, across the nation, one of our number one killers. But not only that, the poisonings that it's causing is causing a number of people to go to the hospital. Reverses of the overdoses from naloxone are keeping some of those numbers down to what they could be. But micrograms of fentanyl will kill you. And so you look over in my office area, I'm in the tenderloin of San Francisco. Talk about not the nicest of neighborhoods, but a good, strong community of people who just want to live their lives. But within that, you've got an insane number of drug dealers here. And so we're dealing with over 700 drug dealers. Many of our drug dealers that are in this almost a square mile area are from Honduras, the same Sierra Valley and Honduras. The majority of them come up here to sell dope and they are making hundreds of millions of dollars across a wide region of this country selling drugs for the Sinaloa Cartel. And so we have Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generation, that is the CJNG Cartel and the Sinaloa Cartel that have kind of taken over the main distribution of fentanyl in the United States.
But I have to back that up a little bit because initially there were hundreds of labs in China manufacturing fentanyl and shipping it through the mail into the United States. A portion of that started getting detected through efforts that we did to put a task force at airmail facilities to try to interdict that. And within a very short period of time, the chemicals that were being used in those labs in China were then being shipped to Mexico, where now they have the labs in Mexico and all that stuff's coming across the southwest border. And to the tune of when we first started looking at– And I'll talk a little bit about my current role as a high intensity drug trafficking area director, a HIDTA director. There's 33 high intensity drug trafficking areas across the country. And the goal of the HIDTA program since it was formed in 1988 through the Anti Drug Abuse act, really the goal was to do a few things. One was to develop strategies to deal with narcotics trafficking organizations, those drug trafficking organizations. And the other one was to develop intelligence, information sharing capabilities and really support federal, state, local, tribal and territorial law enforcement. Those task forces around the country are about 23,000 full time task force officers from federal, state, local, tribal and territorial agencies. Those task forces a few years back, six years ago, were only getting like half a ton of fentanyl. That has exponentially increased to now 14,000 kg. Almost 14,000 kg seized. There's a whole lot more that's getting out on the streets that's not being seized. So we have a huge flurry of that in kind of the epicenter of that in my area around my building. And last year we had 806 people that died that were basically murdered by drug dealers poisoning them and over 5,000 overdoses. So when you consider a small square mile area with a huge impact like that, it is insane. And then you multiply that by cities across America. That's our biggest threat is fentanyl distribution, those poisonings and overdoses that are happening every day. And then the resources that are required by law enforcement communities to deal with the death and carnage and rehabilitation and people just dropping every day.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: So how do you coordinate? I'm going to combine these two questions, Sandy, because how do you coordinate across all of these different law enforcements and agencies? And it seems like, because this is sort of nation state sponsored, there's a national security part of this. So that implies that the intelligence might be a larger swath of the community that you guys are coordinating with. So how coordinated is this whole effort and how do you guys manage that?
Mike Sena: I can tell you about 12 years ago, we were having conversations. One of my other jobs is providing advice to and sitting on advisory committees for a number of organizations out there. I was having this conversation with the Director of National Intelligence at the time, Jim Clapper. It was myself and Rick Fuentes. And Rick Fuentes was the colonel of the New Jersey State Police. And Rick and I had been telling the DNI about the horrors we were seeing from the opioid epidemic or what we were seeing at the early ends of it. And Rick goes, “I had more overdoses last year than people dying in car crashes.” He goes, “This is the first time we've ever seen this.” Immediately we turned over to him and said, “What are we going to do about this?” And we had a leader from the DEA in the room, and then he turned over to them, “All right. What are we going to do about this?” And then they looked at me and go, “Mike, what are we going to do about this?” So I ultimately go, “We need to bring people together, sit in a room, talk about this threat, and start working on a threat assessment.” And our first meeting we had over 100 folks from around the country. And we were noticing all kinds of strange issues related to opioids. And then not too long after that, we did our first threat assessment on the opioid epidemic. And not long after that, I had the same conversation going, fentanyl is killing people left and right. And certain people in the IC and other folks said, “Well, it's poisonous. Why would anybody in their right mind think that was a good idea to sell it? They'll kill all their customers.” And not too long after that, it blows up and we are seeing death left and right. It's because they had more than enough customers, and they'll kill everybody. And it's the best high, at the time, any heroin addict had ever seen. Now, there's a consequence. People die because of it. People who are addicted don't think rationally. They don't look at the consequences of this will kill you. I'm getting the best high I can ever get.
Sandy Winnefeld: Well, and actually, it's also, I want to stay away from withdrawal for somebody who's deep in addiction. It's less about the high than it is avoiding the withdrawal.
Mike Sena: But we have seen the diminishment of heroin usage because of fentanyl. And you can say sustained, I hate to say it, off of heroin, methadone, and other things, but the cost is also a thing. The cost got so cheap. I mean, we had reports of, at the border, the bulk price going down to $0.35 a pill. Now, at the street level, you're still going to pay $20. But they're making such a profit off of this and such ease of access, especially when it's in pill form. But now we also have it in powder form. So there's such an influx of fentanyl in our nation that it scares the heck out of me every day. We have literally dealers on the street carrying five pounds of fentanyl on them.
Sandy Winnefeld: That's enough to kill a whole city.
Mike Sena: It is if it was dispersed the right way, absolutely. I mean, true, it's an inhalation hazard. It's not something that if you touch, it's going to kill you from touching it. But you get that in your nose and you're going to have some major issues if you don't have naloxone or narcan handy. Being able to have those handy is critical. And I can tell you I had some interesting battles with conversations about getting naloxone for law enforcement, where folks are like, “Well they'll never use it? Why issue it to them? They'll be wasting it.” And then I had folks that would not allow cops to have it or would not sign off on cops to have it. And that attitude changed pretty quickly as the death number started to rise.
Sandy Winnefeld: I carry three hits of Narcan in my backpack with me wherever I go.
Mike Sena: Yep.
Sandy Winnefeld: Because I never know when I'm going to be on an airliner or someplace and somebody's going to have an overdose. And I will be prepared to help that person.
Mike Sena: Absolutely.
Sandy Winnefeld: I encourage anybody in the country to do that because you could save a life easily.
Mike Sena: Absolutely. And I can tell you the things that we've done in response to that. So part of it is there's an opioid or an overdose response strategy, an AURA strategy that the HIDTA program has developed in partnership with the Center for Disease Control and the CDC foundation as well, are great partners in this. So we have drug intelligence officers that are assigned to the HIDTAs, and we also have public health analysts that work together. Part of our effort is going out to communities and building those communities, resilient communities, to deal with the threat. And I can tell you the first time we did it, it was really thanks to an ER doctor out of Monterey, and she is phenomenal, helped bring all the partners together. But they saw the overdoses and they're like, “We got to do something. We need help.” And so we got all the folks together. And I can tell you it was the first time many of these people had ever met. And I mean, we had the police, we had sheriff's personnel, we had rehabilitation people, we had the doctors, really the community effort groups that are out there. And I can tell you that it was hard. It was a very hard conversation. We had one officer that the night before, he had dealt with a 16-year-old being stabbed to death by a drug addict. And he had very harsh feelings about people who are addicted to drugs. And in the end, after we got through the pain, he was suffering through as much as he could, we asked, “What can we do to help you and your cops that you work with to be safe and to deal with the threat?” And he's like, “None of us have Narcan. None of us have the ability to protect ourselves, let alone people we were helping or dealing with.” And so that year, doctor and her doctor husband went out to their car and brought boxes of naloxone for every officer in that county. And that started that conversation. And we're doing that county by county across the country, having those conversations. How can we make a change?
The other one is dealing with the threat. And DEA has done a tremendous job as one of our key partners focusing effort on the two organizations that are the biggest threat to our nation south of the border that are producing most of this fentanyl. The other component of that is working communities. So one of the things that we did here locally was we were coming across all kinds of issues. Lack of communication among law enforcement agencies, issues of prosecution. And so what we ended up doing was we brought together a fentanyl distribution disruption group, a working group of executives, the people who could solve problems, and got them all in room and said, we need resources from all of you to bring this ad hoc group together. And in San Francisco, they also had a drug monitoring group, a DMACC group that they had here to try to help bring all the city support resources together in one physical location. And I can tell you that that combination of work helped identify those now 900 folks that we have now identified as narcotics dealers, identifying the organizations and the people that are involved get federal prosecution. Previously, we had minimal capabilities on the state and local prosecution side. And the federal prosecution side was not as engaged. And now there are nearly a hundred cases that they've done. And this is just since May of last year, hundred cases they've done as far as the coordination effort, federal prosecution. They've extradited people from Honduras who fled to Honduras, or shouldn't say fled, because these guys are building mansions in Honduras where they're putting logos of San Francisco sport teams on the metalwork on the gates in front of their homes.
Sandy Winnefeld: That's a bit– Yeah.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: So doesn't it require, though– You talked about targeting the cartels. So if the Honduras people are the distributors, you still got the fact that Mexico is allowing this to happen, China is facilitating this to happen, the cartels are located in other countries. So how do you tackle that kind of big business, nation, state motivated piece of this? Because that seems quite a snarl.
Mike Sena: And that's the hardest part because as I said, we've got large labs that are in Mexico, chemicals being shipped from Asia to manufacture. We've got a whole distribution network that brings it across the border. But from the foreign perspective, it's a number of partners and agencies. DEA, of course, has a major league in this, as well as our partners in the intelligence community gathering information on the enemy. And they truly are. I mean, their impact on the United States is larger than any terrorist group attack ever has ever happened. We are losing so many bodies on this. But unlike when a terrorist attack has happened and going back to 9/11 or we send resources to Afghanistan and later to Iraq for our military efforts, we don't have the same capabilities right now in the environment that we're dealing with. And we're also dealing with that coordination, collaboration with the Mexican government. So we have a lot of hurdles to get over to deal with that. And true, the end mile of this is the Honduran groups that have now set up chop not only in San Francisco, but in Salt Lake City and Denver and Portland and Seattle and other groups on the east coast that are doing the distribution network for them. They have created this kind of almost what I see the Mexicans, when they took over the work from the Colombians back in the ‘80s and early ‘90s, I see now these other groups taking over that last distribution node. And so it really is. And these guys are effective as heck. I mean, when COVID happened, so many distribution networks of legitimate distribution were falling apart in the country. But the drug distribution, they didn't miss much of a beat. I mean, they jacked prices up for a bit because they said it was harder to move things. But the amount of drugs that they were moving didn't change a whole lot. They were still moving a lot. And if they lost a million pills, they're like, “Don't worry, we'll get you another million pills in two days.”
Dr. Sandra Magnus: Wow.
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Mike, the common, I think, perception among Americans is that people are carrying this stuff over the border in backpacks walking through the desert, which is really not the case. It's coming through in vehicles and packets coming through FedEx, DHL, mail. Can you talk a little bit through that? And also the types of technical surveillance that we can use to find those things and whether we have enough of that or not.
Mike Sena: We absolutely don't have enough of the technical surveillance capabilities that we need. I can't get into too much detail on that. I always want more. We always want more of those physical detection devices and capabilities. But when you're looking at the amount of narcotics that they're moving, we have had multiple stories of these folks just throwing them in the back of trunks of cars because they're moving so much of it that it's got to get across the border. If they lose 10, 15 cars, they still have 50, 100,000 cars that are getting across and bringing the narcotics in. So that shotgun approach of bringing things in, especially the quantity that we're talking about, almost 14,000 kilos of fentanyl. I mean, you don't bring that overall in backpacks. It just doesn't happen. It has to be moved most often by motor vehicles. And one way or another, it's being moved across in the motor vehicle most often. And then from there, it's being broken down and distributed across the entire United States. The air mail, there's always going to be some movement via air because you want things quickly, you want them shipped and postal too and those things. That was how they started off moving drugs via the mail across the United States. So to a lesser extent, most of the stuff, large quantities, is being trafficked via vehicles.
Sandy Winnefeld: And I guess if you're the driver, you're sort of playing border roulette, that if there's 200 cars and they're going to catch 10 of them, I'll take those odds because my family is poor and I'm going to get paid a nice dividend for doing this. So they have people willing to do it?
Mike Sena: Oh, they do, because they're oftentimes desperately poor, and they can make a decent amount of money just by doing that transportation. And we do have a domestic highway enforcement program. We got a great former lieutenant colonel from the Illinois State Police who runs it, and he does a phenomenal job of coordinating with all our domestic highway enforcement folks that do highway interdiction work. And there are a good chunk of how those narcotics are being seized once it crosses the border if it doesn't get caught by custom, our CBP partners down there, that's kind of the last resort we have, is stopping on the highways of America, trying to make sure it doesn't get to its final destination. And then from there, we've got our task forces across the country, 23,000 task force officers that are out there on the streets, developing sources, doing the work that I used to do, going out there with informants and making those deals and going out and making those arrests on the street. So coming back to street level, I mean, that's what that team has been doing since May of last year. Bringing all those folks together, getting out there and doing pushes. I can tell you that before that team started, we had people dealing drugs outside of the federal building where I'm standing.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: That's annoying.
Mike Sena: I have the special agent in charge of DEA walk right through the door over here and say, “Hey, can I look out your window? The teams are out there right now, they're going to do a deal with a guy who's sitting right across from the guard shack with all the police vehicles lined up selling a pound of fentanyl.”
Dr. Sandra Magnus: Do you have any option to go after the money and kind of catch the other side and seize that?
Mike Sena: The money is critical. They can always make more dope, but they can't print more money. That's been a hard thing. Our stats and on the HIDTA side are put at hidtaprogram.org and I can tell you that the number of dollars seized has gone down dramatically. One of the concerns we've got is how is the money getting moved? We still don't have a good fix on how that's happening. Some of this is going through money service businesses, especially our Hondurans here. And there was a money service business that the owner of the business was indicted for laundering money. Just egregious money laundering. But we have a number of individuals that have money services businesses around a country that are laundering cash. And so trying to figure out, is it being moved through crypto, is it being moved through money services businesses? That is the one thing that we are saying we've got to get a better handle on.
Sandy Winnefeld: I would have guessed crypto would be a huge player there. If you can find somebody who will convert it for you into crypto because there's no way to trace that, right?
Mike Sena: There are always ways to track the blockchain, but it's hard. And that's not the way normal law enforcement operates. In the old days, we are used to money drops. You've got a guy that's got $5, $10 million. And this was back in the days with Colombians and Mexican DTOs. They've got to move all that cash. And so one of the things we learned after, especially after we did some very large seizures of cash, is they're not keeping all that cash in one place anymore. So they learn every time that we hit them, they learn how to manipulate and operate to reduce their liability. So we're playing a game of catch up right now, figuring out how all that money is being moved. Because there's no doubt in my mind that there is no shortage of narcotics being sold. Prices haven't fallen off the map. And so they're making more money than they probably ever have, and we have been seizing less.
Sandy Winnefeld: How about just a quick shot of your thoughts on the emerging synthetic substances like xylazine and that some of which are not exposed to Narcan. Narcan will not reverse an overdose. Any thoughts there?
Mike Sena: Luckily, on the west coast, we are seeing samples of Xylazine. Small samples have been popping up. The East coast has seen it more, and obviously it's an animal tranquilizer. So if your dog goes down from it, they got something that can bring it back up and revive it, similar to our Narcan, but there's nothing for humans. And the big problem is that we have a number of folks out there, especially on the east coast, they're saying that the users are saying that that mixture, that combination gives them an amazing hot. It also gives them the most deadly dosage of fentanyl they've ever had. Because with a Xylazine overdose, the naloxone will not work. And so there is a good likelihood that if we see a huge increase in mixtures of Xylazine and fentanyl, all those reversals that we've had, those thousands and hundreds of thousands of people that have been saved because of naloxone, they'll become useless. That's a huge fear that we have, is that we don't have an agent right now to counteract Xylazine or some of the newer synthetics, which have the potential of being much more potent than fentanyl.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: It seems like a never ending cycle, like of whack and wall.
Mike Sena: It very much is. The other hard part is it's been difficult to get legislation, especially at state levels on fentanyl. We used to have a number of sanctions. If you carried a larger weight of a narcotic, you had enough that you're a drug dealer, you're not a user. With fentanyl, there's no enhancement. There's nothing to say, all right, you've got a gram of fentanyl or you've got a thousand kilos, you're not getting charged any more severely.
Sandy Winnefeld: Why do you think there's resistance to that? Is it just bureaucratic inertia?
Mike Sena: Well, there were a number of concerns over the years, especially about things like crack cocaine. And we all remember the days of crack cocaine. People said, “Hey, this is so highly addictive. There needs to be enhancements for crack cocaine.” And then folks said, “Well, most people you're arresting for crack cocaine possession and sales are African American.” And they go and unfairly target a specific ethnic group in the community. And so there's a lot of pushback in the last 10 years or so saying we shouldn't be putting enhancements on things. And so there's still that kind of stigma about putting enhancements on sales of narcotics based on the type of narcotic or the weight of the narcotic. And so we've struggled with that tremendously. But the unfortunate thing is, without anything that is going to hinder these groups, they're selling things. There's no–
Dr. Sandra Magnus: There's no downside for them.
Mike Sena: Early on, before we started the fentanyl distribution disruption working group, we had drug dealers that would get arrested. They would be taken and booked in jail, and they would be back out on the street within six hours selling in the same location. So there was no real deterrent to that. It wasn't until we went there and said, “No, you're being charged federally.” And then they started crying because they realized that meant prison and that they weren't going to be released that night. That's the thing. If there's no consequences for their actions, negative consequences, then how do you change the behavior?
Dr. Sandra Magnus:
How does that hurt the morale of the law enforcement community who's desperately trying to do good here? And, I mean, I can't imagine, that has to be an issue.
Mike Sena: Oh, absolutely.
Sandy Winnefeld: And this goes all the way back to what you started with, is that you sort of dedicated your life to this. It matters to you. It's not just a job.
Mike Sena: Definitely. And as you're seeing people dying every day around you, I mean, I can tell you there were days where all I would hear was the ambulance going by my office every day to pick up another overdose. The coroner's office is going to pick up another body, a person who has expired. It's painful seeing that happen every day and then seeing the person released immediately. Or arresting the guy who's got the ankle monitor on him, who's already been arrested twice while having the ankle monitor on them. I mean, it's very frustrating. But I got to tell you, dedicated cops.
Sandy Winnefeld: Mike, this is a multidimensional problem. It involves public awareness. Try to get rid of stigma about drug treatment and the like. It involves prevention, kids in schools, that sort of thing. We talked about medical response, Narcan, prescription drugs, that sort of thing. It's treatment and recovery supporting families. But the interdiction piece is a real key part of this. Is there anything we could do better in your view, realizing you have to be careful what you say because you got a job. But is there anything we could be doing better on the interdiction side? Is it coordination, resources, laws, technology, anything for our listeners that you'd want them to hear on that?
Mike Sena: No, absolutely. It's a combination of things. My struggle since September 11th and going back to that timeframe, I got involved in building our intelligence center and a network, intelligence centers and fusion centers across the country. That was because prior to 9/11, I was working with Middle Eastern groups that were raising funds by the distribution of Sudafed. And they were doing that to make methamphetamine. And I would watch them hand that directly to Mexican drug trafficking organizations. And they were making hundreds of millions of dollars off of this stuff and sending a portion of that money back to organizations that were looking at harming our country and hurting us. So early on after September 11, I was asked, “Hey, you worked with these guys before. We need you to work this new threat.” And of course it also let me play in the area. I had my whole professional career in narcotics enforcement. I looked at the problems we had with communications and information sharing. And early on, I mean, right after 9/11, I transferred from the Alcoholic Beverage Control to the California Department of Justice. I actually hadn't left the office where I was assigned to a task force. I transitioned right into working the task force working for the California Department of Justice, the Bureau of Narcotics Enforcement. And they decided to branch out with a Bureau of Intelligence that they're building out. And so building a platform to communicate was important to us. And so a joint venture between the California Department of Justice, the New York Police Department and the Defense Intelligence Agency. Back in the day, the tool was Groove. And Groove was just a simple SharePoint platform like Napster. I mean, it was like the first voiceover IP call I'd ever done was on Groove. And I was like, this is amazing. I can talk on my computer. Who would ever think that was possible?
Dr. Sandra Magnus: Fast forward.
Mike Sena: Yeah, fast forward. It's like, that's normal. And I was like in real time, able to connect with folks across the nation sharing information, sharing tips and leads, threats that we saw talking with partners in real time. And it was amazing until we started getting more and more people on it. And it was a computer platform, so everything would have to update from everyone else's computers into the platform.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: Slowed down.
Mike Sena: Oh, man, it was so horrible. You'd be watching the wheel spin forever. I was like, “Man, we have to get some better way to communicate.” And fast forward to that and I'm going to go to a couple of pivotal moments where I was like, we are in bad shape. One was the Newtown, Connecticut massacre. All those kids being murdered. And at that time, the director of the fusion center, the intel center, was there on scene trying to deal with the mess. At the same time, his personnel were dealing with a telephone denial of service. And that telephone denial of service was from law enforcement across the country calling them, going, “Can we help you?”
Sandy Winnefeld: It's called fratricide.
Mike Sena: It was, it was.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: So well intentioned, bad outcome.
Mike Sena: Yeah, it was, it was. But the day before that happened, I was actually at DHS Office of Intelligence Analysis. And I was like hitting at the table, we need a platform where we can communicate with everybody. Groove had gone away. We had gone to a shareport style platform, the Homeland Security Information Network. And at that time they had a fledgling project with Adobe for Adobe Connect, but no one had deployed it. And I was like, “We have to get this thing running. I don't want to come back here after the next mass casualty attack.” As I'm flying back, I'm watching the attack and I am just so irritated and pissed off and angry. And when I landed, I called up two of my friends, Aaron Kustermann , the chief of intel in Illinois. And I called Brian Costigan, a good friend who worked in Montana, worked a lot of information sharing issues with him as a fusion center director. And I said, “I got a plan. We're taking over this platform. What are they going to say? Tell us no?” And so we basically hijacked it. We hijacked it and we had a situational awareness room set up. And that's how we started our HSIN Adobe Connect environment to get information and we could share it. And then we also developed a HSIN request for information in the SharePoint area. And we started developing these things within that HSIN platform.
Jump to January 6th. On January 6th, it was actually my January 6th story that starts on the Saturday before January 6th. I'd gotten a call from the director of the fusion center in Washington D.C. and he called me in a panic and it was well before my waking time in California, but he was so worried that something bad was going to happen. And after he explained why he thought something bad was going to happen, I said, “You sound right to me.” And I go, “We need to do something.” He goes, “Well, what do you think we should do?” I said, “Let's get everyone a call in the country from all the intel fusion centers that we've got and some of our federal partners and talk through what's going on.” We talked through what's going on and part of the discussion was, all right, this is our plan. Sent an email out to everyone, said, “All right. We're going to get the Homeland Security Information Network up, make sure you're in the space,” and on that day we should be prepared for anything. Everyone knows what's going to happen. And then as I'm watching the news, I'm feeling like when I was landing a decade earlier, I was like, “How did this happen? I mean, this is horrible.” I thought we had the information out there. And then I tried seeing what was going on the platform and I saw that only 32 of 80 centers were in the room. And they're like, “Well, we didn't get the other ones in there.” And I'm like, “All right, I need a map up. I need to geospatially see what's going on.” And again, that didn't work. They go, “That's broken. Maybe next week.” Like, “Oh my, goodness. I was frustrated.”
Dr. Sandra Magnus: So your greatest friend and your greatest enemy.
Mike Sena: I think our biggest issue is having that common communications platform. And I have spent the last two years working on a platform that I hope will mitigate some of these issues we've got. But right now our big gap is that of a unified platform. Because although the 911 Commission says that, “Hey, well intentioned people working individually are only going to improve their silos,” as I call them, silos of excellence. But unless we create bridges between them and everyone on the same platform, we're still going to keep running into the same issues. And the same thing for the narcotics threats that we're dealing with, we need that common communications platform. We need that geospatial visibility on the threat. Going back to the admiral's old role, what type of commander would not have a common operating picture of showing where your threats are, where your vulnerabilities are, and where you need to move resources and law enforcement, we often operate that way. We don't have that common operating picture. We don't have that visualization of the vectors and where they're moving, and we need that in real time. So trying to build that platform out and get it deployed, I think is a critical gap that we've got. So that communication is one piece of it.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: We've taken an hour of your time already. We could talk to you for another hour. But respecting your time, we'd like to end on a high note with one last question, if you don't mind, which is any success stories or significant seizures or arrests that you'd like to share that can highlight the impact of the program that you have? I think that would be a wonderful way to present some uplifting news as we end the program.
Mike Sena: When we look at the threats that we have across the country related to fentanyl trafficking especially, ultimately, we are seizing a lot of fentanyl out there. I think the real success story, though, is a combination of partners. It's the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area program that I'm the director of here in San Francisco for Northern California. It's our Organized Crime Drug Enforcement task force partners from the attorney general's office, U.S. attorney's offices that are out there helping us coordinate information. It's the collaboration from our domestic highway enforcement folks. It's the task force personnel that are out there. It's the public health analysts that are helping us out. It's the coroners and the medical examiners that are identifying the trends. It's the drug labs that are doing the lab work. It's this whole combination of partners working together every day to really turn the tide on this. It's a hard, hard tide to turn. People are willing to die for this, unfortunately. There are people that feel that the pain of withdrawal is so severe that there's no way they can give up. And it's really created a situation of hopelessness in communities.
So the one thing, the great success story that I am seeing is that the spark of hope in communities, the community groups getting together and saying, “No more. We have to change this.” The desire to get education out there again. We lost a lot of the Drug Abuse Resistance Education training, that DARE program training. People go, “Is prevention worth it?” Absolutely. Prevention is worth it. Treatment is worth it. The enforcement is worth it. We can't give up on this. We have too many people dying. Until we get the communities together, until we get the children to understand the threat that they're under, that idea that one pill can kill. So the success that I'm seeing every day is that level of collaboration, seeing the seizures that are happening and more importantly, seeing people get the treatment they need and seeing, in many cases, courts helping people get the treatment they need as well. We've got to end the cycle of destruction. To me, the greatest thing I'm seeing out there is the hope in the eyes of the individuals that are in these meetings. Knowing that they can make a difference and then seeing them make a difference.
Sandy Winnefeld: That makes me feel it definitely is ending on a positive note. And as somebody who has a sort of a personal dog in this fight, the good news for me is knowing that we've got people like you, Mike, out there, really dedicated to all elements of this problem, but also in particular the very important interdiction piece of it. So thank you to you and your colleagues for what you do for us every single day.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: Absolutely.
Sandy Winnefeld: We really appreciate it. Thank you.
Mike Sena: I appreciate your time, guys. I mean, I know I'm not your usual subject of an interview for your podcast, but–
Dr. Sandra Magnus: This was fascinating. Absolutely fascinating.
Mike Sena: And if you ever want to hear more about the Fusion Center Network, I'm good for that, too.
Sandy Winnefeld: Okay, sounds good. Thank you.
Mike Sena: Excellent.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: Thank you. That was the Executive Director of Northern California High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area, Mike Sena. I'm Sandra Magnus.
Sandy Winnefeld: And I'm Sandy Winnefeld. We spent some time in this interview talking about the overdose reversing drug Naloxone, also known as Narcan. If you want to know more about how to obtain and use Narcan, check out my nonprofit website, safeproject.us.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: And thanks again to Culligan for sponsoring this episode. Get exceptional water for exceptional performance. Learn more@culligan.com
Sandy Winnefeld: Please pass our podcast around to your friends and we'll see you soon with another episode of The Adrenaline Zone.
