First Came the Tip. Then Cops Used Radar To Stalk People-Smuggling Cruiser
Sailor Dude Used a Motoryacht Like a Bus, Faces 10 Years
For us, the tiny tourist island of Bimini is just a convenient place to clear into the Bahamas. One night there, and we’re underway again, enroute to the Exumas before the next cruise ship can pull in. Like the happy campers of Carnival, we come and go, oblivious to the island’s big secret.
Moving contraband is in Bimini’s DNA—rum in 1930s, weed in the 1970s and cocaine ever after. And now this: Haitians (not on vacation) are being crowded into stash houses, waiting for a ride across the Gulf Stream to Miami, just 50 nautical miles away.
Why can’t smuggling be stopped on Bimini, you ask? You say there are only 2,500 people on a tiny island (actually three tiny islands).
(As Loose Cannon used to tell his reporters: When something suspiciously odd cannot be easily explained otherwise, the answer is most always money and who’s getting it. More on this later.)
Back in April, Derek Ryan Campton, 43, was caught coming into the Florida Keys from the Bahamas, piloting a 58-foot motoryacht with 31 migrants hiding down below. Now, court documents are indicating that Bimini was the pick-up point.
Surprise! Someone informed on the white American bus driver. Only the feds know the informant’s motivation, and maybe they only think they know. When you look at the radar images below, you can imagine a second boat—and maybe a third—arriving elsewhere on the Florida coast, Campton’s Sunseeker having been flagged to create a diversion. Maybe Campton was a sacrifice.
Muy “Miami Vice.”
Campton, who lives with his wife on their sailboat, was scheduled to plead guilty today after failing to convince a federal judge to rule the search of his vessel was inadmissible.
Miami-Dade marine patrol had intercepted the 58-footer and searched down below before Customs or Coast Guard personnel had arrived to exercise their blanket authority to search an American vessel anywhere anytime.
U.S. District Court Justice Cecilia M. Altonaga considered a list of suspicious behavior when she ruled that notional officers Sonny Crocket and Rico Tubbs had enough of that good ole “reasonable suspicion” to look around the boat. For one thing, Campton had told police he didn’t have any I.D. He had also told police he was coming down from Fort Lauderdale, when the cops knew he had come from the direction of Bimini.
Authorities had begun tracking Campton’s Sunseeker while she was crossing the Gulf Stream. According to court documents, a U.S. Customs “detection specialist” in California was tasked with remotely analyzing radar returns generated by the Palm Beach Sheriff’s Office high-performance open-array radar. This is what he told the court:
On April 19, 2024, I, Detection Enforcement Officer Gary Vineyard, assigned to the Air and Marine Operations Center, located in Riverside, California was assigned radar monitor duties for South Florida area of operations. At approximately 06:29 (PDT), I detected a vessel while utlizing the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office RADAR array, approximately 15NM offshore from Miami traveling west bound at 18 knots coming from the direction of Bimini, Bahamas. At approximately 06:57 (PDT) I notified Miami Air and Marine Branch (MAMB) of this possible vessel of interest. MAMB reported a CBP Multi-role Enforcement Aircraft (MEA) was about to go on a patrol and would attempt to get a visual identification on the vessel. I continued monitoring the vessel as it entered U.S. waters traveling toward Biscayne Bay, FL. I provided a location for the vessel to the MEA who identified it as a motorized yacht with an enclosed cabin but was unable to determine a number of people on board.
The Customs aircraft to which Vineyard was referring took a picture of the boat from 7,484 feet above sea level, shown at the top of this story.
We all assume we’re being watched by satellites, and maybe so, but Palm Beach is running a so-called fusion intelligence center using a special Danish-made SCANTER radar that can detect targets out to 96 nautical miles away, as long as it’s mounted high enough
"We put up coastal radar out here, we’re the only county in the United States that has coastal radar," Palm Beach County Sheriff Ric Bradshaw told TV news. "If we get information that people are coming this way in boats, our radar detects people who come ashore, also from our aircraft and we try to stop them before they hit the land."
As impressive as it may seem, the Palm Beach “fusion center” is actually a surveillance backwater compared to the stuff federal authorities are doing at Key West.1
Customs & Border Patrol had received the initial tip about Campton’s run in the morning on the day of his arrest. “The vessels trajectory indicated that it was coming from Bimini, Bahamas, and it correlated with intelligence received by CBP earlier that morning about migrants being smuggled into the United States from overcrowded stash houses in Bimini,” prosecutors wrote, opposing a defense motion to suppress evidence.
In a July 27, 2023 story in the Washington Post, headlined “Dreams and Deadly Seas,” reporters Samantha Schmidt, Paulina Villegas and Hannah Dormido described the role of the kind of middlemen on Bimini with whom Campton may have worked:
“I got three people waiting to go,” the smuggler said to his friend. “Do you have any captains ready to go?”
He did, the friend said, but the tide was high. They would have to wait a bit longer.
The smuggler, a scar-faced 51-year-old man who spoke on the condition of anonymity, was working as a kind of middleman in Bimini, connecting migrants from around the world with captains they would pay to take them to Florida.
“I was born into this,” said the smuggler, whose parents first arrived in the Bahamas on an illegal sloop from Haiti. His father was also a smuggler and migrated the family to the United States by boat in the 1980s. After serving time in prison in New York, the smuggler returned to Bimini at 38, upon hearing how much money he could make in the smuggling business—upward of $30,000 a trip. “This stuff just falls in your lap,” he said.
He estimates there are at least 15 other smugglers like him on Bimini. On an island with a population of about 2,500 people, many others are involved in some way—or will at least stay quiet if they hear about it. “Everybody’s in on it,” he said.
The online media outlet VICE World News also wrote an excellent investigative piece by By Maeva Bambuck that was published on October 21, 2022. Bambuck addressed the question at the beginning of this story, asking why authorities cannot stamp out smuggling in such a small place:
It’s difficult to measure the level of collusion between the Bahamian authorities and the traffickers. Smugglers and human rights advocates told VICE that members of the Royal Bahamas Defense Force, Bahamas’ military, are paid to turn a blind eye. One Haitian smuggler operating in Nassau, the capital, who was in charge of shuttling migrants arriving from the airport to different embarkation points on behalf of a Haitian smuggling network, said his organization pays the Defense Force a cut for each migrant.
Two human rights advocates told us that smugglers sometimes conspire with local authorities to abandon migrants on cayes, or small islands, letting the migrants believe they’ve made it to the U.S. Then the defense forces scoop them up...
But there’s another, more deluxe, way to get smuggled out of Bimini: On the boats bringing the American tourists to and from the party island. The route between Bimini and Miami sees hundreds of pleasure boats, yachts and jet-skis on the water during weekends and holidays.
“When you look at the overall volume of boat traffic that’s crossing the Florida Straits from Bimini to the U.S. and back and forth on any given weekend, it’s easy to blend in with that traffic,” said Capt. Benjamin Golightly of the U.S. Coast Guard Seventh District.
That’s where the U.S. government maintains JIATF-S, referred to in conversation as “Giant F South.” Founded in 1989 and located at the Key West Naval Air Station, Giant F is under the wing of the Defense Department, but incorporates personnel from all the “Alphabet” intelligence agencies, federal law enforcement and representatives from 20 nations in the hemisphere. It exists for the detection and monitoring of drug smuggling at sea, and now presumably human trafficking as well. It has a seized drug submersible mounted in front of its building as a trophy.