DRUG WAR NETS SMALLER FISH IN CITY

At Daley's Behest, U.S. Shifts Strategy In Fight With Pushers

Disturbed by statistics showing that federal prosecutors here were bringing
far fewer drug cases than their counterparts in other major cities, Mayor
Richard Daley persuaded the Justice Department in 1998 to designate more
lawyers whose sole focus would be prosecuting narcotics cases in Chicago.

But more than two years into the new effort, a Tribune analysis of those
cases indicates that while prosecutions are up, increasingly the targets of
the new drug war aren't the kingpins who run these operations, but
small-time dealers with the types of cases that previously were relegated
to state court.

And as the debate rages across the country over the effectiveness of the
nation's drug war, some authorities here, including the chief federal judge
and the local head of the FBI, are questioning the wisdom of the strategy.

By putting more emphasis on small drug cases, the officials say, resources
are being siphoned away from the prosecution of fraud, public corruption
and organized crime cases.

"It is disingenuous to think that the federal courts are playing a
significant role in the drug war because of this rise in federal
prosecutions," said U.S. District Judge Marvin Aspen, the chief federal
court judge for the Chicago area. "It's a shallow political solution to a
serious problem that is not addressed at all by moving a few state-level
cases into the federal system."

U.S. Atty. Scott Lassar defends the new strategy, insisting that more
ambitious drug investigations and non-narcotics probes have not suffered.
He said his roughly 100 criminal prosecutors are doing more with less every
day.

By some measures, the new program in Chicago is a success. In fiscal year
1998, the last full year before the new policy, 55 narcotics cases were
filed by the U.S. attorney's office. During fiscal year 2000, the number of
federal narcotics cases had more than tripled to 171.

Those prosecutions included some significant cases. Roy Mosley, the head of
a major wholesale cocaine ring, for instance, was charged and ultimately
pleaded guilty to distributing more than 330 pounds of cocaine, although
prosecutors alleged he was connected to the seizure of another 2,500 pounds.

In addition, prosecutors charged more than 30 gang members and leaders of
running a cocaine and crack operation in three West Side neighborhoods,
though that investigation began before the new policy was implemented.

But at least 70 of the 171 cases brought last year involved small
quantities of drugs totaling less than 2 kilograms, about 4* pounds. And
the vast majority of them contained no allegation that the defendants
played a noteworthy role in major drug organizations, the kinds of cases
that before the policy change were the hallmark of federal prosecutions in
Chicago.

Of the 70 smaller cases, 56 involved a single kilogram or less of hard
drugs-cocaine, crack or heroin, an amount that stands in stark contrast to
the tons of drugs involved in kingpin cases.

They included small seizures made by local police. They also included cases
where authorities arrested people after arranging undercover sales and the
prosecutions of couriers-often immigrants-who were paid a small sum to move
drugs.

The heightened drug effort had its origins in 1998 when Daley, armed with a
U.S. Conference of Mayors report showing the number of federal drug cases
in Chicago had declined by 64 percent over five years, lobbied then-Atty.
Gen. Janet Reno for a bigger local push.

Under orders from Washington, the U.S. attorney's office established a new
narcotics unit and assigned about 18 prosecutors whose sole job was to
pursue drug cases.

The new unit also was accompanied by a policy change. No longer would
federal prosecutors be limited to only those cases that held the promise of
getting to the heart of a drug organization.

That kingpin strategy, in effect for five years, had produced prosecutions
that law enforcement officials credited with wiping out the upper ranks of
some of Chicago's top drug organizations, especially street gangs, which
control an estimated 90 percent of the area's retail drug trade.

Lassar staffed the unit by reassigning lawyers from the special
prosecutions division, a section that had handled drug cases as well as
public corruption and white collar crime. He said the shift hasn't been a
detriment.

"Other cases have not suffered; we're just doing more work," Lassar said.

But Kathleen McChesney, the head of the FBI office in Chicago, isn't so
sure. Because the emphasis on drug cases came with no new prosecutors, she
said other areas have suffered.

She said the new focus has detracted from federal fights against fraud,
corruption, organized crime and the like, because the U.S. attorney's
office, in her mind, is already understaffed.

"The cases here in Chicago are wide-ranging and they're complex, and some
require multiple" prosecutors, she said. "If you have to rob Peter to pay
Paul, something has got to suffer."

Since the reorganization, the number of prosecutors in the special
prosecutions unit has dropped from roughly 32 to 16.

Lassar's office, however, said those numbers may not tell the whole story.
Officials said the people removed from that unit under the new plan were
doing drug cases before the change, though they were also doing a mix of
white-collar and public corruption cases.

According to Randall Samborn, Lassar's spokesman, the focus for those
prosecutors now is strictly drugs.

Thomas Needham, who was the mayor's special adviser for law enforcement
when Daley complained to Reno, said drug prosecutions should always be a
top priority.

"We can't do everything in this world," said Needham, who is chief of staff
to Chicago Police Supt. Terry Hillard. "They [federal authorities] have a
unique responsibility going after those public corruption cases, but from
where we sit here at the Chicago Police Department, this is all we hear
about from those neighborhoods, the fear that grips them from narcotics
trafficking."

The new strategy also has the backing of the Drug Enforcement
Administration. It was so difficult for DEA agents working under the old
system to get federal prosecutors interested in their cases that they were,
by habit, turning first to state prosecutors, said Don Sturn, the current
special-agent-in-charge for the DEA in Chicago. The problem with having
cases in state court, he said, was that agents had a harder time developing
informants through those prosecutions.

Officials in the U.S. attorney's office agree they are doing more smaller
cases than in the past. But after initially disputing that the small cases
failed to lead them up the chain of command, Lassar's office acknowledged
that so far those cases have rarely led them to drug bosses.

"We may be starting farther down on the chain, and they may not get us to
the top, but we are still pursuing cases where there is a federal
interest-and that is a broader net," Samborn said.

Typical of those prosecutions is the case of Elsa Moreno, 33, the divorced
mother of three who was charged and pleaded guilty last year to receiving
$100 to keep 200 grams of heroin, the equivalent weight of about 200 paper
clips, in her Uptown apartment for a week.

They also include the case of Diane Oliver, a 39-year-old without a
criminal record who lived in a South Side public housing unit. She was
charged in federal court with two counts of intentionally distributing
crack cocaine after allegedly selling a total of 10 grams, about the same
weight as two dimes and a nickel, to an undercover police officer,
authorities said. She has pleaded not guilty and her case is still pending.

"Those are the people the drug organizations, big or small, put out there
for you to take down. They understand that's a risk of business," said
Ronald Safer, a former federal prosecutor in Chicago now in private
practice. Safer was the lead prosecutor in what authorities have called one
of the largest narcotics cases in the nation, the prosecution of the
Gangster Disciples street gang that controlled a $100-million-a-year drug
empire.

"You could prosecute a thousand of those crimes every day," Safer said,
referring to the small cases, "but what would you accomplish?"

Aspen and others say cases such as these are better left in state court
where there is a vast infrastructure dedicated to dealing quickly with
small and mid-level drug cases. Unhampered by notoriously tough federal
drug sentencing laws, state judges also have more leeway in the sentences
they impose.

Critics also say that while small drug cases can be handled in state court,
complex fraud and corruption cases are handled almost exclusively by
federal prosecutors.

Safer said making kingpin cases from the types of busts now filling federal
courts here is nearly impossible because drug leaders are, by design, well
insulated from the small-time pushers and couriers being prosecuted.

According to Safer and other top drug prosecutors, one critical hallmark of
kingpin cases is the use of court-authorized wiretaps, because secretly
listening to the conversations of drug bosses is the best way authorities
can infiltrate their well-insulated upper ranks.

Just as the number of small drug cases has skyrocketed under the new
strategy in Chicago, the number of narcotics wiretaps essential in bringing
down big-time dealers has plummeted.

Records detailing those wiretaps-contained in reports sent to Congress each
year by federal judges-also provide a window into major cases still brewing
behind the scenes.

In 1997, the last full calendar year before the new strategy, prosecutors
here reported using 27 federal wiretaps in narcotics cases. The manpower
dedicated to them cost $2.11 million, records show.

By 1999, the first full calendar year after the new strategy was in effect,
prosecutors reported using just 15 narcotics-related wiretaps, with the
manpower tab dropping to less than $1.5 million, records show. The steep
decline in narcotics wiretaps here, roughly 45 percent, came at the same
time that their use grew nationally by 12.4 percent. Statistics for last
year have not yet been released.

While Lassar and others in his office acknowledge it is nearly impossible
to target kingpins without wiretaps, they say they cannot explain the
decline documented in the reports to Congress, though they maintain kingpin
investigations have not suffered.

But Samborn also predicted a "significant spike" in kingpin cases in the
coming years because of probes still in the works. He also said more probes
involving drug organizations have been initiated under the new strategy.

If the quality or quantity of kingpin cases have slipped, Samborn said, it
is because federal prosecutors here are the "victims of our own success."
He said Friday that the massive kingpin prosecutions of the past have
splintered the leadership ranks of Chicago's major drug organizations.

But the drug war being waged by federal prosecutors represents only a small
segment of Chicago narcotics cases. In Cook County alone last year there
were 38,000 felony drug cases, said John Gorman, a spokesman for Cook
County State's Atty. Dick Devine.

A small rise or fall in the number of federal drug cases, he said, "really
wouldn't affect us one way or another."