of it through.  Right now they’re doing a lot of backpacking of drugs using illegal aliens.  The drug delivery is the payment for making the trip—part of the cost of getting to America.”^[12]

In an attempt to level the playing field, Oren Fox recently managed to pull off something down here that nobody thought was possible. In a remarkable display of political skill and old-fashioned back-slapping, he somehow got the Drug Enforcement Agency, Customs, and the Border Patrol to let go of each other’s throats for a minute and join with the six southern county sheriffs in a coordinated effort to seal the border.  The inter-agency turf wars were temporarily set aside and the three-week experiment was so successful that the U.S. Attorney General singled it out as an example of how the job should be done.^[13] But Fox himself has no illusion about having any long-term impact on the drug trade.  He’s been at this for 35 years.  “They get more sophisticated all the time—they have our frequencies—we’ve found them with radios that have the Border Patrol frequencies programmed into them.  They have jammers on top of vans to disrupt communications, just like the military.  They’ll set off a series of ground sensors all over the place and you can’t tell where they are. Or sometimes they’ll just climb the antenna tower and cut the power cable so the signals from the sensors aren’t transmitted at all.”

Sitting at his desk beneath a panoramic photo of an old Imperial Valley mining camp, with his legs outstretched and one boot propped on the other, Fox contemplates the mounted head of a longhorn steer on the opposite wall. “There’s no way we can compete with the traffickers. They have hundreds of billions of dollars in resources.  Every time we do something new, so do they.”^[14] 

 In the main channel at the port of Los Angeles, the container ship Ever Right, a state-of-the-art steel monolith nearly as long as an aircraft carrier, rides alongside quay 229 at Terminal Island.