St. Croix’s Blue Lightning Marine Unit has a new weapon to use in the war on drugs: a $167,000, 40-foot Midnight Express speedboat.
The new boat was purchased by the Puerto Rico/U.S. Virgin Islands High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area task force for Blue Lightning, a unit of the V.I. Police Department. The "go-fast" boat will be used to counter similar boats used by drug runners who pass through territorial waters.
According to a HIDTA release, the new acquisition is anticipated to reduce drug shipments to, through and around the U.S. Virgin Islands.
Several incidents of drug smuggling have occurred in and around St. Croix over the summer. In the most recent case, police were alerted to a suspicious boat on Aug. 27 off the north shore.
When officers arrived at Salt River Marina to investigate, they found a 34-foot fishing boat equipped with extra-large gas tanks but no crew aboard.
According to witnesses, two men come ashore from the boat carrying a container the size of an ice chest and got into a pickup truck minutes before police arrived. Police said the boat was outfitted for smuggling.
That incident followed two others involving vessels suspected to be drug boats that have turned up at St. Croix in the last two months.
After a 27-foot "go-fast" boat encountered trouble in the waters off St. Croix’s south shore in late July, bales of cocaine totaling more than 500 pounds started washing up on island beaches. The crew members of that boat, all from the Dominican Republic, were picked up by the U.S. Coast Guard and turned over to authorities in St. Maarten, where the boat was registered.
A few weeks later, some 60 pounds of cocaine was found aboard another speedboat that had been abandoned at the seaplane dock in Watergut on the outskirts of Christiansted. Police officials said they have no suspects in that case.
The authorization and purchase of the police department’s Midnight Express was agreed to by the 16-member executive committee that oversees all HIDTA operations in Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. The committee is chaired by Michael Vigil, head of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency’s Caribbean Area Division.
U.S. Attorney for the U.S. Virgin Islands James Hurd Jr.; Franz Christian, V.I. police commissioner; Iver Stridiron, V.I. attorney general and Cleave McBean, adjutant general of the Virgin Islands, are the four members of the committee from the territory.
