L.A. fire chief blames slower response times on budget cuts

Los Angeles Fire Chief Brian Cummings turned the tables on City Council members Tuesday, blaming increased 911 response times on budget cuts approved by lawmakers.

"You gave us a budget," Cummings said during a nearly two-hour City Hall hearing. "We're giving you the most effective Fire Department that we can within that budget."

Cummings was summoned to appear before the council after he failed to produce a plan to improve service and response times, which have grown longer since budget cuts were ordered three years ago after the economic downturn.

The council asked for the blueprint in April. On Tuesday, Cummings was given an additional 60 days to submit the plan.

Cummings blamed the delay on the department's data problems, which have been the subject of multiple investigations by city auditors and outside experts. Years of response time data were found to be flawed and the LAFD has accurate data only for the last two to three months, Cummings said.

Reliable performance data from a longer period is needed before changes in the department deployment plan can be recommended, he said. Improvements will require more funding, he added.

"The simple answer is money," Cummings said. "The way we improve response times is by putting more resources in the field."

The department's performance has been under scrutiny since March when fire officials acknowledged producing inaccurate response time data that made it appear rescuers were getting to emergencies faster than they actually were.

Fire officials are dealing with other embarrassments. Federal officials are investigating whether confidential information was obtained illegally on hundreds of patients who rode in Fire Department ambulances, according to a city lawyer. The department also has been criticized by the city's top budget officials for going over its budget by millions of dollars.

On Tuesday morning, The Times reported on a YouTube video titled "Firehouse Burlesque Hula Hooping" showing a woman in high-heels and tight shorts dancing with a hoop at a Venice fire station. The video was a promotion for Hoopnotica, a fitness company. The firm's chief executive said the shoot was unplanned, lasted no more than 30 minutes and that no money changed hands.

Last year, firefighters from the same Venice firehouse and another station were investigated for allowing fire engines to be used in porn shoots. Shortly after those videos surfaced, the controversy spread to Cummings when the chief acknowledged that he once posed for racy photos with a bikini-clad woman when he was stationed in Venice as a captain.

Cummings said the department was investigating the hula hoop video. Councilman Mitchell Englander, who chairs the council's Public Safety Committee, said firehouse antics are "another part of the culture we have to change."

At the council meeting, Cummings and other fire officials reviewed the recent findings of a task force formed to examine the department's various data management troubles.

Councilman Eric Garcetti said he was happy the data problems were being addressed, but said he wanted a detailed plan for service improvements.

He also said the department needs stronger leadership. "I want somebody fighting for this department," he said. "Talk to your firefighters out there. They don't feel that is happening."

After the economic downturn, the council and Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa cut the LAFD's annual budget by $88 million — from $561 million in 2008 to $473 million in 2011.

The cuts led to service "brownouts," which took units out of service on a rotating basis, and which were eventually replaced by a new deployment plan. Cummings, an assistant chief at the time who oversaw development of the redeployment, predicted response times would match pre-recession levels following the changes. But investigations by The Times and City Controller Wendy Greuel found response times for medical emergencies have increased over the last four years.

Councilman Richard Alarcon admonished his colleagues, saying they should have known their budget cuts would lead to slower response times.

"Even Barry Bonds can't hit home runs with a plastic bat," said Alarcon, who voted against the cuts.

This spring, responding to concerns about the department's performance and the controversy over the accuracy of its data, lawmakers added back $40 million to the department budget. Cummings has requested an additional $50 million in next year's budget.

kate.linthicum@latimes.com

robert.lopez@latimes.com

ben.welsh@latimes.com

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A Google-a-Day Puzzle for Dec. 5

Our good friends at Google run a daily puzzle challenge and asked us to help get them out to the geeky masses. Each day’s puzzle will task your googling skills a little more, leading you to Google mastery. Each morning at 12:01 a.m. Eastern time you’ll see a new puzzle posted here.

SPOILER WARNING:
We leave the comments on so people can work together to find the answer. As such, if you want to figure it out all by yourself, DON’T READ THE COMMENTS!

Also, with the knowledge that because others may publish their answers before you do, if you want to be able to search for information without accidentally seeing the answer somewhere, you can use the Google-a-Day site’s search tool, which will automatically filter out published answers, to give you a spoiler-free experience.

And now, without further ado, we give you…

TODAY’S PUZZLE:

Note: Ad-blocking software may prevent display of the puzzle widget.

Ken is a husband and father from the San Francisco Bay Area, where he works as a civil engineer. He also wrote the NYT bestselling book "Geek Dad: Awesomely Geeky Projects for Dads and Kids to Share."

Read more by Ken Denmead

Follow @fitzwillie and @wiredgeekdad on Twitter.

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‘Dr. Phil”s stolen classic Chevy recovered

BURBANK, Calif. (AP) — Los Angeles police say they’ve recovered a stolen 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air Convertible that belongs to talk-show host Phil McGraw.

Detective Jess Corral said Tuesday that investigators recovered McGraw’s classic car, along with 13 others, after law enforcement began targeting auto theft rings.

McGraw is known as television’s “Dr. Phil. His car was stolen from the RODZ shop in Burbank in August, and was found with minor damage.

The car is worth at least $ 80,000.

Entertainment News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Sign Language Researchers Broaden Science Lexicon

Imagine trying to learn biology without ever using the word “organism.” Or studying to become a botanist when the only way of referring to photosynthesis is to spell the word out, letter by painstaking letter.

For deaf students, this game of scientific Password has long been the daily classroom and laboratory experience. Words like “organism” and “photosynthesis” — to say nothing of more obscure and harder-to-spell terms — have no single widely accepted equivalent in sign language. This means that deaf students and their teachers and interpreters must improvise, making it that much harder for the students to excel in science and pursue careers in it.

“Often times, it would involve a lot of finger-spelling and a lot of improvisation,” said Matthew Schwerin, a physicist with the Food and Drug Administration who is deaf, of his years in school. “For the majority of scientific terms,” Mr. Schwerin and his interpreter for the day would “try to find a correct sign for the term, and if nothing was pre-existing, we would come up with a sign that was agreeable with both parties.”

Now thanks to the Internet — particularly the boom in online video — resources for deaf students seeking science-related signs are easier to find and share. Crowdsourcing projects in both American Sign Language and British Sign Language are under way at several universities, enabling people who are deaf to coalesce around signs for commonly used terms.

This year, one of those resources, the Scottish Sensory Centre’s British Sign Language Glossary Project, added 116 new signs for physics and engineering terms, including signs for “light-year,”  (hold one hand up and spread the fingers downward for “light,” then bring both hands together in front of your chest and slowly move them apart for “year”), “mass” and “X-ray” (form an X with your index fingers, then, with the index finger on the right hand, point outward). 

The signs were developed by a team of researchers at the center, a division of the University of Edinburgh in Scotland that develops learning tools for students with visual and auditory impairments. The researchers spent more than a year soliciting ideas from deaf science workers, circulating lists of potential signs and ultimately gathering for “an intense weekend” of final voting, said Audrey Cameron, science adviser for the project. (Dr. Cameron is also deaf, and like all non-hearing people interviewed for this article, answered questions via e-mail.)

Whether the Scottish Sensory Centre’s signs will take hold among its audience remains to be seen. “Some will be adopted, and some will probably never be accepted,” Dr. Cameron said. “We’ll have to wait and see what happens.”

Ideally, the standardization of signs will make it easier for deaf students to keep pace with their hearing classmates during lectures. “I can only choose to look at one thing at a time,” said Mr. Schwerin of the F.D.A., recalling his science education, “and it often meant choosing between the interpreter, the blackboard/screen/material, or taking notes. It was like, pick one, and lose out on the others.”

The problem doesn’t end at graduation. In fact, it only intensifies as new discoveries add unfamiliar terms to the scientific lexicon. “I’ve had numerous meetings where I couldn’t participate properly because the interpreters were not able to understand the jargon and they did not know any scientific signs,” Dr. Cameron said.

One general complaint about efforts to standardize signs for technical terms is the idea that, much like spoken language, sign language should be allowed to develop organically rather than be dictated from above.

“Signs that are developed naturally — i.e., that are tested and refined in everyday conversation — are more likely to be accepted quickly by the community,” said Derek Braun, director of the molecular genetics laboratory at Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., which he said was the first biological laboratory designed and administered by deaf scientists.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: December 4, 2012

An earlier version of this article misstated the origin of the ASL-STEM Forum.  It was developed by researchers at the University of Washington, not Gallaudet University.  Researchers at Gallaudet and the National Technical Institute for the Deaf at Rochester Institute of Technology work with the University of Washington to provide content and help the forum grow.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: December 4, 2012

An earlier version of a correction with this article misstated the name of an institute that works on the ASL-STEM Forum. It is the National Technical Institute for the Deaf at Rochester Institute of Technology not the National Institute for the Deaf. 

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DealBook: HSBC Sells Stake in Chinese Insurer for $9.4 Billion

HONG KONG — HSBC Holdings, one of Europe’s biggest banks, said Wednesday it would sell its entire stake in a leading Chinese insurer to a Thai conglomerate for 72.7 billion Hong Kong dollars ($9.4 billion.)

HSBC said it would sell its 15.6 percent stake in Ping An Insurance, based in Shenzhen, to the Charoen Pokphand Group, controlled by the Thai billionaire Dhanin Chearavanont, in a deal to be financed partly by the China Development Bank, a policy lender wholly owned by the state of China.

HSBC has been shedding assets to cut costs and streamline its business, and at the same time bolstering its balance sheet in the face of tighter global capital requirements for banks. Since Stuart T. Gulliver took over as chief executive at the beginning of 2011, the bank, which is based in London, has sold more than 40 noncore assets and has booked about $4 billion in gains on those sales this year alone.

HSBC disclosed last month that it was in talks over a potential sale of its Ping An stake, which it started building in 2002, and said Wednesday it expected to book a post-tax gain of $2.6 billion on completion of the deal with the Thai company.

‘‘This transaction represents further progress in the execution of the group’s strategy,’’ Mr. Gulliver said in a statement announcing the sale. ‘‘China remains a key market for the group.’’

Founded in Hong Kong and Shanghai almost 150 years ago, HSBC currently operates 133 outlets across 33 branch offices in mainland China. After the Ping An stake sale it will retain minority investments in several Chinese lenders, including a 19.9 percent stake in the Bank of Communications that is worth around $10 billion at current share prices, a stake in Industrial Bank, a midtier institution based in Fujian Province, and an 8 percent stake in the Bank of Shanghai.

The two-part Ping An transaction will see Charoen Pokphand, a conglomerate with businesses ranging from distribution of agricultural products like fresh eggs to operating one of the world’s biggest chains of 7-11 convenience stores, purchase 1.2 billion Ping An shares from HSBC at a price of 59 Hong Kong dollars ($7.61) apiece.

HSBC said it would transfer 21 percent of the shares to the Thai group on Friday. The sale of the remaining 79 percent of the shares at the same price is being financed partly with cash and partly by a loan from the China Development Bank to Charoen Pokphand, and the transfer of those shares is expected to be completed by Jan. 7, contingent on receiving approval from the China Insurance Regulatory Commission.

Shares in Ping An rose 4 percent to 60 Hong Kong dollars in late morning trading in Hong Kong on Wednesday following the announcement — exceeding the stake sale price by 1 dollar in a sign investors are confident the transaction will go ahead. Shares in HSBC rose 1 percent to 79.50 Hong Kong dollars by late morning, and are up around 35 percent in the year to date.

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Fatal incident reflects new boldness among offshore smugglers

The small Coast Guard inflatable vessel was 20 yards from the panga, an open fishing boat that law enforcement officers say has become the craft of choice to ferry untold numbers of marijuana bales and undocumented immigrants from Mexico to Southern California.

Spotted earlier by a Coast Guard cutter, the panga was running without lights, a standard practice in the illicit trade, according to investigators.

The four men on the boat dispatched from the cutter Halibut approached it cautiously, about 200 yards from the shore of Santa Cruz Island, off the Santa Barbara coast. In the darkness, they turned on their blue flashing lights and shouted, in English and Spanish: "Stop! Police! Put your hands up!" according to court documents filed Monday.

In response, the two men aboard the panga throttled their engines and headed straight at the small Coast Guard boat, ignoring shots fired by a crew member, provoking a collision that left a chief petty officer dead and his colleague injured. Then the two men kept going.

One of two men thrown out of the inflatable, Chief Petty Officer Terrell Horne III of Redondo Beach, died of a head injury caused by a propeller, according to the affidavit, which was filed in connection with the murder case against two suspects detained as they tried to flee to Mexico.

Officials say the tragedy underscores the dangers posed by smugglers who have foregone well-policed land routes in favor of the sea. Although more than 500 maritime smuggling incidents have been logged off the Southern California coast since 2010, this was the first violent death, authorities said.

"Most of our interdictions off of California can only be described as benign," Coast Guard spokesman Adam Eggars said. "There may be an attempt to evade, there may be a short pursuit, but we haven't had anything like this."

The men on the panga, Jose Mejia Leyva and Manuel Beltran Higuera, both Mexican nationals, were charged in Horne's death in U.S. District Court. Authorities believe they had been supplying gasoline to other smuggling craft operating off the California coast.

According to the affidavit, military aircraft followed their 30-foot craft as it made its way toward Mexico. With the two men futilely trying to restart their sputtering engine 20 miles north of the border, another Coast Guard vessel overtook them. Crew members demanded their surrender at gunpoint. When the men kept trying to start their engine, the Coast Guard crew doused them with pepper spray.

Encounters with seaborne smuggling have nearly doubled since 2010, with the steepest increases found along the more secluded, less patrolled beaches of Ventura and Santa Barbara counties, according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

In Santa Barbara County, the surge has alarmed local authorities. In an April letter to Rep. Lois Capps (D-Santa Barbara), Sheriff Bill Brown said the county experienced 16 "panga incidents" since the previous July, including the beaching of a four-engine, 45-foot "super-panga" that could easily have outpaced his department's sole vessel.

"It's a direct byproduct of increased pressure at the border and increased maritime enforcement to the south of us," Brown said in an interview Monday. "They're going further out to sea and they're coming further north."

Capps said she is asking federal agencies for additional enforcement funds in Santa Barbara.

The greatest number of coastal smuggling cases still occurs in San Diego, Orange and Los Angeles counties. But intensive interagency efforts based in San Diego and Long Beach have forced some smugglers farther up the coast, officials said.

"It's not so much that efforts are being stepped up as that agencies are pooling knowledge and experience and expertise," Eggars said. "The beautiful thing about Los Angeles is that there's a ton of law enforcement here."

Upgraded technology, such as infrared radar and enhanced video, is being shared among agencies, he said, along with "actionable intelligence."

But smugglers have powerful incentives to take the risk. Dozens of people, paying an average of $6,000 apiece, can cram into each panga. Police say marijuana bales hauled by a typical panga can sell for millions. There's a huge expanse of sea — the Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary is nearly 1,500 square miles — and major roads, including U.S. 101, run right by potential landing areas.

Boat pilots often try to outrun law enforcement and some high-speed chases have ended with U.S. officers shooting out gasoline tanks or performing swerving maneuvers to stop the pangas, said a federal law enforcement officer who spoke on condition of anonymity.

"They aggressively try to get away, but not turn their boat on another boat like they did the other night," the officer said.

On occasion, the rugged terrain of Channel Islands National Park has served as a staging area for smugglers. 

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LeBron James wins Sports Illustrated annual award

(Reuters) – LeBron James of the Miami Heat was named as Sports Illustrated’s Sportsman of the Year for 2012, the U.S. magazine announced on Monday.

In an outstanding year, the 27-year-old James won his first NBA championship, his third league Most Valuable Player (MVP) award, was named MVP of the NBA finals and a won gold medal with the United States at the London Olympics.

He became just the sixth basketballer to win the award, which began in 1954. The most recent was his team-mate Dwyane Wade in 2006.

Two years ago, James became a hate figure for many American sports fans after he announced his decision to sign for Miami live on television after his contract with the Cleveland Cavaliers had expired.

He was booed at courts across the NBA and received intense criticism for his performance as Miami lost the 2011 NBA finals to the Dallas Mavericks.

“Did I think an award like this was possible two years ago? ‘No, I did not,” James said in an interview with the magazine.

“I thought I would be helping a lot of kids and raise $ 3 million by going on TV and saying, ‘Hey, I want to play for the Miami Heat.’ But it affected far more people than I imagined.

“I know it wasn’t on the level of an injury or an addiction, but it was something I had to recover from. I had to become a better person, a better player, a better father, a better friend, a better mentor and a better leader. I’ve changed, and I think people have started to understand who I really am.”

Previous winners of the award include swimmer Michael Phelps (2008), cyclist Lance Armstrong (2002) and golfer Tiger Woods (2000) while the first award was given to British athlete Roger Bannister in 1954 after he became the first person to run a mile in under four minutes.

(Reporting By Simon Evans; Editing by Julian Linden)

Celebrity News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Global Update: GlaxoSmithKline Tops Access to Medicines Index

Sang Tan/Associated Press

GlaxoSmithKline hung on to its perennial top spot in the new Access to Medicines Index released last week, but its competitors are closing in.

Every two years, the index ranks the world’s top 20 pharmaceutical companies based on how readily they get medicines they hold patents on to the world’s poor, how much research they do on tropical diseases, how ethically they conduct clinical trials in poor countries, and similar issues.

Johnson & Johnson shot up to second place, while AstraZeneca fell to 16th from 7th. AstraZeneca has had major management shake-ups. It did not do less, but the industry is improving so rapidly that others outscored it, the report said.

The index was greeted with skepticism by some drugmakers when it was introduced in 2008. But now 19 of the 20 companies have a board member or subcommittee tracking how well they do at what the index measures, said David Sampson, the chief author.

The one exception was a Japanese company. As before, Japanese drugmakers ranked at or near the index’s bottom, and European companies clustered near the top. Generic companies — most of them Indian — that export to poor countries are ranked separately.

Johnson & Johnson moved up because it created an access team, disclosed more and bought Crucell, a vaccine company.

The foundation that creates the index now has enough money to continue for five more years, said its founder, Wim Leereveld, a former pharmaceutical executive.

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Deficit Talks Stumble Over Down Payment

Alex Wong/Getty Images

Senator Kent Conrad in Washington last month. He sees “confusion between the initial down payment and the framework.”

WASHINGTON — For all the growing angst over the state of negotiations to head off a fiscal crisis in January, the parties are farthest apart on a relatively small part of the overall deficit reduction program — the down payment.

President Obama and the House speaker, John A. Boehner, are in general agreement that the relevant Congressional committees must sit down next year and work out changes to the tax code and entitlement programs to save well more than $1 trillion over the next decade.

But before that work begins, both men want Congress to approve a first installment on deficit reduction in the coming weeks. The installment would replace the automatic spending cuts and tax increases that make up the “fiscal cliff,” while signaling Washington’s seriousness about getting its fiscal house in order. That is where the chasm lies in size and scope.

Mr. Obama says the down payment should be large and made up almost completely of tax increases on top incomes, partly because he and Congressional leaders last year agreed on some spending cuts over the next decade but have yet to agree on any tax increases.

Republicans have countered by arguing for a smaller down payment that must include immediate savings from Medicare and other social programs. Republicans, using almost mirror-image language, have said that they do not want to agree to specific tax increases and vague promises of future spending cuts.

Senator Kent Conrad of North Dakota, chairman of the Budget Committee and part of a bipartisan “Gang of Six” senators who devised the two-stage process, said: “I think there’s a lot of confusion between the initial down payment and the framework. That’s for sure.”

The two biggest areas of dispute are tax increases and the big government health insurance programs, Medicare and Medicaid. On the health programs, neither side believes Congress could meaningfully overhaul them in the four weeks that remain before the fiscal deadline.

“Entitlement reform is a big step, and it affects tens of millions of people,” said Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, another architect of the two-stage framework. “It’s not just a matter of cutting spending in an appropriation. It’s changing policy. And that’s why I was reluctant to include it in the down-payment conversation. I want this to be a thoughtful effort on both sides that doesn’t jeopardize this program.”

But Republicans say that it is possible to make some initial changes to the programs in coming weeks. “There are simpler things that can be done,” said Senator Michael D. Crapo, Republican of Idaho and another Gang of Six member. “The real structural changes would come later.”

Mr. Crapo said Congress could agree on some additional cuts to health care providers and change the way inflation is calculated to slow not only automatic increases in Medicare and Social Security benefits, but also the annual rise in tax brackets.

Democrats instead argue that the down payment should consist of a combination of tax increases and cuts to programs outside Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, like farm programs. Mr. Obama has pushed for a return to the top tax rates under President Bill Clinton.

Republican leaders have said that they are willing to raise new tax revenues — albeit not as much as Democrats want — but Republicans want taxes to rise by closing loopholes and curbing tax deductions and credits.

If the two sides are able to come to an agreement on the down payment, it would also likely fix targets for larger savings in the tax code and entitlement programs. The White House and Congress would then spend much of the next year trying to hash out the specific policy changes needed to hit those targets.

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Coast Guard officer is killed after suspected smugglers ram his boat

A veteran U.S. Coast Guard officer was killed Sunday after suspected smugglers rammed his vessel near Santa Cruz Island, casting him into the ocean with a fatal head wound.

Chief Petty Officer Terrell Horne III, 34, of Redondo Beach was second in command of the Halibut, an 87-foot patrol cutter based in Marina del Rey. Authorities said they could not recall a Coast Guard officer being killed in such a manner off the coast of California.

Early Sunday morning, the Halibut was dispatched to investigate a boat operating near Santa Cruz Island, the largest of California's eight Channel Islands. The island is roughly 25 miles southwest of Oxnard.

The boat, first detected by a patrol plane, had fallen under suspicion because it was operating in the middle of the night without lights and was a "panga"-style vessel, an open-hulled boat that has become "the choice of smugglers operating off the coast of California," said Coast Guard spokesman Adam Eggers.

The Coast Guard cutter contains a smaller boat — a rigid-hull inflatable used routinely for search-and-rescue operations and missions that require a nimble approach. When Horne and his team approached in the inflatable, the suspect boat gunned its engine, maneuvered directly toward the Coast Guard inflatable, rammed it and fled.

The impact knocked Horne and another Coast Guard crew member into the water. Both were quickly plucked from the sea. Horne had suffered a traumatic head injury. While receiving medical care, he was raced to shore aboard the Halibut. Paramedics met the Halibut at the pier in Port Hueneme and declared Horne dead at 2:21 a.m.

"We are deeply saddened by the loss of our shipmate," said Adm. Robert J. Papp, the Coast Guard commandant. "Our fallen shipmate stood the watch on the front lines protecting our nation, and we are all indebted to him for his service and sacrifice."

The second crew member knocked into the water suffered minor injuries and was treated and released from a hospital later Sunday. He was not identified.

Using a helicopter and a 45-foot boat stationed in Los Angeles, the Coast Guard later found the panga and stopped it.

Two men were detained. The Coast Guard declined to identify them or say whether drugs were found aboard the boat. A second suspicious vessel was believed to have been traveling alongside the panga before the incident.

"We are actively working to ensure that all of the individuals involved in this illegal activity are brought to justice," said Coast Guard Capt. James Jenkins.

The Coast Guard was unable to provide a detailed account of Horne's service.

He had been heralded by the agency on several occasions.

He appears to have arrived in Southern California last summer after serving for two years as an executive petty officer in Emerald Isle, N.C. There, he received a Coast Guard Commendation Medal for his leadership in 63 search-and-rescue cases, in which 38 lives were saved.

According to an account of the medal ceremony, the most notable of those operations involved a boat that capsized in a North Carolina inlet in 2010. The account said he coached his team through "treacherous" sea conditions to rescue five people.

The Coast Guard also noted Horne's involvements in a January operation in which the Halibut found and stopped two boats operating at midnight with no lights. The boats contained 2,000 pounds of marijuana.

In the last five years, as U.S. authorities have become increasingly successful at blocking traditional land routes, smugglers have taken increasingly to the sea — ferrying both drugs and immigrants. Authorities believe a smuggling vessel is launched toward California every three days; the number of immigrants and smugglers arrested at sea or along the coast more than doubled to 867 in 2010 from the previous year.

Drug runners and human smugglers have run ashore at a dog beach in Del Mar, at Crystal Cove in Orange County and next to the San Onofre nuclear power plant. Border Patrol agents have been diverted from land to sea, and an agency supervisor recently called the ocean "the front line."

The eruption in sea-based smuggling has created the same cat-and-mouse game in the ocean that has long existed along the U.S.-Mexico border. Smuggling boats often travel without lights and at a slow speed to limit their wakes. When U.S. agents began disrupting routes into San Diego beaches, smugglers began conducting counter-surveillance, using radios to direct boat pilots to unguarded beaches.

scott.gold@latimes.com

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