The smuggling was discovered last May, when a Customs Service official in Miami routinely inspected a package Mrs. Hiett had sent to someone in New York City. Opening the brown-paper parcel, which had Mrs. Hiett’s return address neatly written on the outside, the inspector found it contained about 2.7 pounds of cocaine, court documents said. Subsequently, investigators in New York tracked down five packages allegedly sent by Laurie Hiett, starting last April, and a sixth parcel mailed at her request by another American military wife, who was regarded as a witness, not a suspect. In all, authorities said, the packages contained 15.8 pounds of pure cocaine, with a street value of as much as $230,000.
Laurie Hiett surrendered to federal authorities in Brooklyn and was arraigned on a charge of conspiracy to distribute narcotics. After appearing in court, she was released on a $150,000 bond; she still had not been indicted. Two New York residents were charged with receiving the packages. Through her lawyer, Laurie Hiett denied any wrongdoing. The papers filed in court said she told investigators she had sent the parcels as a favor to her husband’s chauffeur, a Colombian named Jorge Alfonso Ayala. And although she had filled out Customs declarations identifying the contents of the packages as books, candy and other innocent items, she insisted she hadn’t actually known what was inside.
Ayala, who was named as a co-conspirator and is still at large in Colombia, told investigators Mrs. Hiett “abused cocaine,” which he helped her to buy in Bogota. She denied that charge. But court documents said that when U.S. Army investigators questioned her at the embassy in Bogota, she became “extremely agitated.” At one point in the interrogation, the documents said, Mrs. Hiett “stated, in substance, ‘I’m afraid they’ll kill me’.”
It wasn’t clear to whom she referred, but her husband’s world was full of drug traffickers who were constantly looking for imaginative ways to get their product past Customs. Now, just when the U.S. presence in Colombia is growing and Washington is thinking about doubling the $250 million a year it spends on the anti-trafficking effort there, the top U.S. soldier on the ground has had to ask for a transfer. Whether the colonel’s wife is a dupe or a doper, the charges against her haven’t done any good to his career, or the war on drugs.
