New Jersey (USA) ?-Two weeks ago, Felix Oppong boarded a jetliner in the West African nation of Ghana for a long journey home to New Jersey. Shortly after the flight touched down a half-day later, agent Tim Mahoney of the U.S. Customs Service got a tip: Oppong was back in the country.

Within days, Customs agents had raided several sites in North Jersey, arresting Oppong and two suspects alleged to hold "upper echelon" positions in a unique global drug-trafficking ring based in the Garden State for nearly a decade.

"This is one of the largest, if not the largest, operations ever identified and prosecuted in New Jersey," Mahoney said.

Yet it wasn't the usual type of drug-dealing network: The secret to the ring's success, authorities said, was a home- grown philosophy more common to mom-and-pop stores than to international narcotics traffickers.

Most massive drug-dealing operations, such as the cartels based in Colombia and Mexico, mimic multinational corporations, with accountants, lawyers, and troubleshooters on their payrolls. By contrast, federal authorities said, the North Jersey ring was headed by apparently low-paid working stiffs who had emigrated from Ghana and Liberia and were running a lucrative drug business on the side.

A loosely organized command structure, which allowed associates to freelance their own drug deals independent of the ring's central business, created a large number of targets for federal authorities. With so many "franchises" operating at once, investigators couldn't focus their efforts in one place. But the North Jersey traffickers offered another unique twist: Because they lacked the capital to purchase large quantities of cocaine, they recruited small-time investors who bought shares in different smuggling ventures.

Backyard parties - called "outdoorings" - became prime spots for recruiting investors and couriers. Among those who bought in were a beauty salon operator, several college students, and an electrician from Ridgefield Park who used the money he earned as a drug courier to invest in other smuggling operations, authorities alleged. Many had no previous experience with drug trafficking, but they later told investigators they saw a get-rich-quick opportunity too tempting to ignore. By pooling their small-scale investments, which ranged from $3,000 to $20,000, the ring was able to buy some of the purest cocaine available and dispatch waves of couriers to London and other European cities, authorities said. The technique - common to West African drug groups - also helped limit the ring's financial risk in case a shipment was intercepted, they said.

At its zenith, the Newark-based ring cleared nearly $1 million a year exporting cocaine to the United Kingdom, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Germany, while importing Southeast Asian heroin to be sold on the streets of North Jersey, New York City, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C. To avoid U.S. Customs inspectors at Newark and John F. Kennedy international airports on their way to Glasgow, Amsterdam, and Frankfurt, among other destinations, Mahoney said, the couriers hid up to two pounds of cocaine in packages of new bedsheets. They then covered the packages with fresh plastic, heat-sealed the wrapping, and put them in suitcases along with coffee grounds or fabric softener to throw off drug-sniffing dogs.

"They were killing us," Mahoney said.

The New Jersey organization bought its cocaine from a Dominican-run ring in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan, paying roughly $10,500 to $11,000 per pound, said Stephen J. Taylor, a federal prosecutor who heads the U.S. Attorney's Office Narcotics and Money Laundering Unit in Newark. By shipping it to London, Taylor said, the traffickers nearly doubled their money. Demand for such pure cocaine was especially strong in London, where the crack market began a surge in the late 1990s that reportedly continues today.

Rebecca Atobrah, a Ghanaian woman who lived in Newark, moved to London and ran the operation there, authorities said. She has since been convicted of drug trafficking by a British court and is awaiting sentencing in September. Her sister, Gertrude Orlando, was one of those arrested by Customs agents in Newark on July 10.

Under Atobrah's leadership, the London operation grew into a $1.45-million-a-year business. Couriers from New Jersey arrived at smaller airports in Manchester, Glasgow, and Birmingham, and took trains to London. Atobrah and her associates regularly met the couriers at pre-arranged rendezvous points in train stations or hotels in London and distributed the cocaine to Jamaican street gangs, which converted it to crack sold on street corners in neighborhoods such as Brixton in South London.

"You are talking about a big organization making lots of money, [bringing in] upwards of 4.5 pounds of cocaine a week into the U.K.," said a British law enforcement official involved in the investigation.

Back in North Jersey, Mahoney said, Orlando began as an investor in the operation and recruited people willing to be couriers in return for $5,000. He said Oppong and Joe Mensah, who was also arrested July 10, began as cocaine couriers, became small-scale investors, and eventually worked their way up to become trusted, ranking members of the organization.

The ring needed a way to launder all the money pouring in, and one method was to send tens of thousands of dollars with trusted associates back to Ghana on commercial flights.

There were other connections in Ghana, as well. Southeast Asian heroin flown from Thailand to Accra, the capital of the West African nation, was carried by the gang's couriers on commercial flights to Kennedy Airport, Taylor said.

Like many other newly arrived immigrants from developing countries, most of those who participated lacked advanced educational degrees and took relatively low-wage jobs after settling in New Jersey, authorities said. Some of those convicted said they decided to become involved in order to supplement their incomes. Several admitted to regularly sending some of their illicit earnings back to help family members in Ghana, where the average individual income is $350 a year.

Authorities said the ring operated with impunity for several years. It wasn't until the mid-1990s, they said, that investigators in the United States got their first lead in the case. That came one week before Christmas 1994.

Amid a crush of holiday travelers at Newark Airport, Customs inspectors found a man boarding a jet for Europe carrying several packages of cocaine inside his suitcase. Five months later, German police detained a man as he stepped off a train at a Hamburg rail station. He was carrying 2.6 pounds of cocaine, they said.

The two incidents -separated by half a year and half the world -helped prompt "Operation London Bridge," an ongoing investigation by the U.S. Customs Service's Newark office, assisted by British Customs, the Zurich Kantonspolizei, and the Metropolitan Police in London.

Via paper trails of cellphone records, address book notations, wiretaps, and tips from informants, investigators were led to three North Jersey men identified as the ringleaders.

One of them, 59-year-old Osman Garba, had gone from driving a taxicab to owning a BMW and building a three- bedroom ranch house, paved with interlocking cut stone, in Ghana, authorities said.

Another Ghanaian, Albert Kittoe, had worked on the tarmac at Newark Airport for Continental Airlines. The third ringleader, Raymond Williams -a muscular merchant seaman from Liberia -had been working at an electronics store but quit and bought a BMW, investigators said. After Kittoe and Williams were arrested two years ago, Garba fled to Ghana. But Mahoney and several U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agents, aided by the Ghana National Police, tracked him down, arresting Garba at a cellular telephone shop he had bought in Accra.

All three of the ringleaders have pleaded guilty and are awaiting sentencing in U.S. District Court in Trenton.

They are among 17 people in all who have pleaded guilty in New Jersey to a variety of federal narcotics trafficking charges resulting from the probe.

Seven others in London have been convicted; most are scheduled to be sentenced within weeks. Yet authorities said the organization continues to operate, and investigators expect to make additional arrests.