LAKE COUNTY POLICE FIND DRUGS IN CARS' HIDDEN COMPARTMENTS

GARY, Ind. -- Oscar Martinez and his fellow Lake County detectives know how
to find drugs -- just look for hidden compartments in cars.

Last year they and other members of the county's drug-interdiction team
confiscated $1 million in cash and drugs, much of it hidden in drug
dealers' cars.

On Tuesday, Martinez and Detective Dan Bajda found $12,710 in a 1998
Chevrolet Lumina that they had stopped at the Indiana Toll Road interchange
with Interstate 65.

The detectives said the driver, Cedar Carrera-Turjillo, 22, of Chicago, and
an unidentified passenger gave suspicious accounts about what they were doing.

Martinez said they gave him permission to search the car. He said he was
amazed to find, after a brief search, the money and a digital scale in a
compartment sealed within the body of the car.

A police dog alerted on the car, indicating that narcotics could be
present. The car and its contents were seized.

That scenario has been repeated many times on the Toll Road, the Borman
Expressway, U.S. 41 and I-65, where the county police drug-interdiction
program patrols.

Martinez typically searches for hollows within a car's body sealed off by
metal doors that cannot be pried open because they are held closed by a
hydraulic system. That system works only when dashboard switches are turned
on in the right sequence.

Last month Martinez and other drug-team members confiscated $145,000 from
two Chicago men in a brown Buick Riviera speeding north on Interstate 65 in
Lowell.

And on April 8 they arrested two men after seizing more than 100 rounds of
ammunition and four handguns found in a hidden compartment in their
Chevrolet Lumina after stopping it on the Toll Road.