Maritime Vigilantes

Deep inside the claustrophobic warren of offices at the Coast Guard's station at Causeway Island on Miami Beach, Armin Cate is the ideological soul mate of the citizen watchdogs. A burly Coast Guard officer with a long career as a U.S. Customs investigator, he looks like the kind of guy you'd want guarding our borders. His build is a cross between Fifties-era football coach and Marine -- thick arms, mustache, craggy face, deep-set brown eyes, and a military-style blunt haircut with just a touch of gel to spike up the front. A map mounted behind the desk in his small office shows the various sea channels that wrap around Florida, Cuba, the Bahamas, and Jamaica. In bright pink marker, Cate has scribbled the words "Coastline Threats," as well as a series of lines through various routes favored by traffickers to South Florida ports and those in Bimini and Freeport. He says with tighter security in Florida, traffickers of all sorts often stage their shipments from the islands in hard-to-track go-fast boats.

Thus Operation On Guard seemed a good idea. The notion of bringing the citizenry into the antiterror area hit home for him about three months after the New York and Washington terrorist attacks. In December 2001, he relates, a 46-foot boat from Cartagena, Colombia sailed right up the Miami River. Although the crew had no radio communications with the bridges and didn't report to the Coast Guard as required, every bridge tender on the river up to about 22nd Avenue opened up for the boat. No questions asked. The Coast Guard didn't hear about the incident until the next day. "What if they had had weapons of mass destruction?" Cate wonders. "The Miami River is the heart of our city."

Of course eternal vigilance has its drawbacks. One is the potential for overzealous citizens to make mistakes -- or opportunists to seek revenge on their enemies. One example happened recently in Key Biscayne. A personal watercraft concessionaire called the On Guard hotline to report four Pakistani customers who he claimed had made worrying statements concerning the Port of Miami. Local antiterrorism task force members scrambled, locating the men a few hours later at their hotel. The four turned out to be legit -- medical students from England who'd argued with the concessionaire about extra charges on one of the watercraft.

In an appropriately karmic twist, when the feds checked the concessionaire, they found out he was a Frenchman who had overstayed his visa. He was deported. "You're going to risk prank calls," Cate allows, adding that the Coast Guard doesn't encourage well-meaning people to go too far in playing private detective: Don't follow people in your car. "People watch TV and think they are Magnum P.I. The key is to get the tag number and let law enforcement follow it up."