EX-METHAMPHETAMINE COOK SEES BIG FUTURE FOR "POOR MAN'S COCAINE"

By Matthew Hathaway Of The Post-Dispatch

* James Benito Silva said he was a perfectionist when he made meth in
Missouri's Ozarks and took in about $20,000 a month. He says meth
production will overtake the cocaine business.

James Benito Silva was a methamphetamine cook, and just about everyone
agrees that the drugs he made were the purest around. His jailer says he's
a "perfect gentleman," and the county sheriff says that, in some quarters,
he is a virtual folk hero. Silva prefers to call himself a perfectionist.

Phelps County Sheriff Don Blankenship says Silva, 43, was one of the
Ozarks' first major meth cooks. The former electrician played a
cat-and-mouse game with police and prosecutors, who to date have been able
to convict Silva of only one charge - selling an imitation controlled
substance - about 10 years ago.

Today, Silva is in the Phelps County Jail in Rolla awaiting trial for
allegedly assaulting a police officer. Blankenship said that Silva cooked
meth until last February, when he was taken into custody. Silva was
cautiously vague about when he last made meth and whether he could imagine
himself making it again.

Although Silva said he never made meth in the Mark Twain National Forest,
his meteoric rise in rural Missouri's drug world might explain why so many
have turned to making meth in the Ozarks, in and out of the forest.

Silva said he first got involved in the drug trade in the late 1970s, when
he sold kilograms of cocaine in California.

He said that he was always attracted to the excitement of the drug trade
and that in Missouri, he realized meth, unlike cocaine, could let him be
both a manufacturer and a seller. He said he also saw the drug's potential
at a time when most police thought the stimulant was on its way out.

"If you could drink a whole pot of espresso in a single cup, then multiply
that by 100, that's what meth feels like," Silva said. "It's poor man's
cocaine."

Silva said that he tried cooking meth from different recipes - including
some that he says he developed himself - in order to make the highest-grade
meth in the area.

Silva proudly noted that once he threw away about a half-pound of the drug,
though cooks with less exacting standards might have sold the especially
toxic batch.

"If you're going to do something, you should do it to the best of your
abilities. Otherwise, why do it?" Silva said.

His reputation for quality caught on, though Silva contends that he only
sold to a handful of trustworthy customers and that he never dealt to children.

Silva said that in his heyday, he could make $20,000 in a month. He bought
expensive cars and guns, which he said he kept to defend himself from rival
cooks, and became the boss of a ragtag trafficking organization, Silva said.

He said he wouldn't make drugs in Mark Twain because, he said, it was next
to impossible to make high-grade meth outdoors. Cooks today, Silva says,
are much more willing to make their drugs in the forest, where they stand
little chance of getting caught.

Silva said that police and lawmakers have their work cut out for them. He
thinks they should make it more difficult to obtain meth ingredients
legally, but he said that even tighter controls would slow the drug's
spread only temporarily.

"Cocaine is going to be out. I guarantee that methamphetamine is going to
take over the cocaine business," Silva said.