U.S. kidnap capital eyes underworld rivals

updated 4:58 p.m. ET May 8, 2009

PHOENIX - A 13-year-old girl was grabbed off the street and thrown into a sport utility vehicle by Mexican kidnappers who mistakenly believed she was the niece of a drug dealer who helped steal 55 pounds of marijuana.

The girl pleaded with her kidnappers that they had abducted the wrong person, but they hit her over the head, bound her with duct tape and drove away as relatives watched helplessly.

In the wave of abductions that have gripped the Phoenix area, this case illustrates one of the greatest fears of police: the possibility that kidnappings might expand beyond the underworld of drug and human trafficking to target law-abiding people.

"We get enough problems with just bad-guy-on-bad-guy" abductions, Police Chief Jack Harris said. "If you expand it to where they are going after these regular citizens, we just don't have that kind of personnel to be able to invest in those kinds of cases at that level."

With 368 reported kidnappings in 2008, Phoenix has swiftly become the U.S. kidnapping capital. Abductions have become such a persistent problem that police created a special squad of anti-kidnapping officers.

Mexico ignored gang rivalry
Authorities hope to avoid the mistakes of Mexican police, who ignored kidnappings involving smugglers — a decision that may have encouraged gangs to start snatching ordinary people displaying signs of even modest wealth.

The Mexican government usually disregards the problem "unless it is a high-profile case — a very rich person or a famous person who was kidnapped," said Jose Luis Velasco Cruz, a researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico and an expert in drug crimes.

Over the last several years, many kidnappings in Phoenix have involved drug traffickers abducting rivals, associates or their relatives. The abductions offer a way to collect unpaid debts, steal money from fellow traffickers or retaliate for earlier abductions.

Immigrant smugglers have also been known to do kidnappings, sometimes holding customers hostage to extort money from their families.

The kidnappers typically seek ransoms ranging from $30,000 to $1 million and sometimes demand drugs, too.

Two victims were killed last year. Others have been tortured by having their legs burned with clothing irons, their arms tied to the ceiling or their fingers broken with bricks. Some families have heard victims scream in pain during ransom calls.

In May 2008, kidnappers shot an immigrant smuggler in the head, brought his corpse to an alley and set it on fire in a garbage bin. The victim's girlfriend then got a call telling her to watch the news.

When kidnappings spiked, Phoenix investigators were so overwhelmed at first that they did not spend a lot of time asking in-depth questions to understand the pattern that was emerging.

"We couldn't, because it was common to have a kidnapping, be halfway into it and have another kidnapping come into the door," said Lt. Lauri Brugett, who oversees the special kidnapping squad created last summer.

When a kidnapping victim is located, it takes as many as 60 officers to rescue that person, including a police commando team.

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