VALLEY OF METH

Across the back window of Paul Wheeler's pickup hangs a 12-gauge shotgun.
Across the bench seat sits a rifle. He's one of several southern Cayuga
County farmers armed for an unlikely war on drugs in their fields of corn,
wheat and soybeans. The farmers are sick and tired of drug-addicted punks
from Pennsylvania coming onto their land in the middle of the night.
They're tired of cleaning up the mess of busted valves, sliced hoses and
dangerous spills the thieves leave behind.

They're tired of worrying about their families just because a bunch of drug
dealers across the state line figured out that their farms use a fertilizer
that just happens to be perfect for making methamphetamine, a cheap version
of crack cocaine.

They're tired of chasing down these guys, tackling them, grilling them,
banging cars with them. And - after 18 months, more than 200 thefts and
more than two dozen arrests - it's not getting any better. So the guns in
Wheeler's truck are for the turkeys when they're in season, and the
woodchucks when they're in the way. But they're also there just in case.

"It might not be the right thing to do. The sheriff tells you it's not the
right thing to do," Wheeler said, "but I'm willing to grab one of these
guys and take care of things." The thieves tormenting southern Cayuga
County are an unorganized group of modern-day bootleggers. They've made
state Route 34 their pipeline for anhydrous ammonia - a fertilizer that can
burn, choke and kill when mishandled but, when cooked with a handful of
easy-to-get grocery items, makes you wickedly high.

Route 34, and that fertilizer, have linked Cayuga County with Bradford
County, Pa., where meth is made to feed addicts in eastern Pennsylvania and
the Southern Tier of New York, authorities say. In Bradford County, police
have made about three dozen felony arrests, and both sides are bulking up:
The drug makers have automatic weapons, and the police borrowed a Humvee
from the Pentagon for raiding meth labs.

Bradford County authorities have seized labs as small as a Bunsen burner
and Pyrex pan in the woods and as big as a complex network of plastic
tubes, glass cylinders and metal piping that resembles a high school
chemistry lab.

In Cayuga County, where meth making was unheard of in years past, at least
four labs have been discovered in the last year.

The average homeowner would probably find most of the ingredients for
cooking meth - lithium batteries, matches, cold medication and liquid
solvents - in a kitchen junk drawer and a medicine cabinet. An Internet
search provides the recipe.

That easy availability is what sets meth apart from more expensive,
imported drugs such as cocaine and heroin. Meth can be cooked in bathrooms,
basements, sheds, wooded areas or the bed of a pickup. "We've seen a large
increase in the number of 'mom and pop' labs set up in double-wides and
campers - even hotel rooms," said Mark Nemier, a special agent with U.S.
Drug Enforcement Administration office in Syracuse.

'That was easy enough' When Rob Ricci tried to steal anhydrous ammonia from
Dale Parmley's farm for the first time last September, he was arrested -
but not deterred, he said. Four months later, the allure of easy money and
free drugs put Ricci, free on bail, behind the wheel of a 1990 Cougar -
unregistered, uninspected and uninsured - heading north, he said.

Equipped with a propane tank and a 6-foot stretch of hose, he said, he and
a friend were on their way to steal a few gallons of the fertilizer for a
meth dealer in Towanda, Pa., who would pay them $200 for it. "I was going
to go back to hit the same tank, you know? That was easy enough: Just go
back and do the same thing over again," Ricci said. "We left about 1:30
a.m. ... and I was in a police car by 4 a.m." Ricci was charged with petit
larceny and trespassing, accused of being a "runner" - someone hired by
Pennsylvania drug dealers to steal the fertilizer and to buy
over-the-counter ingredients needed to make meth.

More than 30 runners - nearly all of them from that small region in
northern Pennsylvania - have been arrested in southern Cayuga County since
May 2001. From police reports and interviews with the accused, a profile
emerges of a runner - a drug-addicted, tattooed white man with at least a
brief criminal history. "I'm an addict - I have been for 25 years," Ricci
said. "I lost my house, my land, my dog died. I'm a country song gone bad."

Ricci's case is pending. He missed his most recent court appearance, and
his family in Vestal and lawyer say they have not heard from him since he
spoke to The Post-Standard more than a month ago. Welcome to Meth Valley
About 90 minutes south of the Cayuga County farms, past the Pennsylvania
border, is a region called "The Valley." New nicknames have emerged lately:
"the hot spot," "the meth capital of the Northeast" and "Meth Valley."

It is a quiet area of small communities such as Sayre, Towanda and Athens
at the foot of the wooded and winding Endless Mountains.

"Imagine how many places you can go in a county like ours and make meth,"
said Bradford County Sheriff Steven Evans. "If you want to be someplace
private, you can pull your car into the woods, up in the hills. You can
cook a batch on the hood of your car and be gone in 20 minutes."

For 20 years, meth use has been oozing out from the West Coast, where it's
particularly rampant. It spread into the rural South and, in the last few
years, into the Northeast, drug experts say. Federal narcotics officials
call meth the No. 1 drug problem in rural America. In Meth Valley, one
dealer used a recipe from the Internet, and "It just spider-webbed from
there," said Athens Police Chief Larry Hurley.

Hurley's evidence closet overflows with thousands of cold pills, a dozen
long guns, police scanners in brown paper bags, and bongs. In the "tactical
room," an overhead projector holds the layout of a nearby meth house police
raided. That house is boarded up now, a brown tooth decaying on one of the
town's short and narrow, garden-filled streets.

"We don't see coke anymore," Evans said. "We don't see pot, we don't see
heroin. We see meth." He recalled an episode when a local couple asked his
office to arrest their out-of-contol son. "I watched this 19-year-old kid
rear his head back as hard as he could and slam his head repeatedly into
the concrete wall as he's coming down from this stuff," Evans said. "It was
horrible."

The anhydrous (literally "without water") properties of the fertilizer
dehydrate the body to the point where the skin is pulled tight across the
ribs, hands and face. Eyes appear sunken and sallow. Hair thins and grows
brittle, the gums pull back, teeth brown and rot. When those effects are
combined with the resulting loss of appetite, a full-blown meth user looks
like a decaying corpse.

"I've been in trouble all my life - I ain't no stranger to it - but there
are so many guys out there right now," said John McKay, 39, who lives in
Meth Valley and was charged with possession of drug paraphernalia.

"It used to be a small town, and you knew everybody who did this kind of
stuff and who was a partyer and whatnot," he said. "It spread so fast, you
can't tell anymore." Drug counselors and law enforcement officials in
Central New York say a rise in meth use here has begun.

"We fully expect that what has happened in other parts of the country will
happen here," said Nemier, of the DEA. In a year ending October 2000, the
DEA's Syracuse office started one meth investigation. In the next year, it
investigated three cases. So far this year, it's been five cases.

Three meth users in the past six months have sought help from Confidential
Help for Alcohol and Drugs, a drug-counseling group in Auburn. In most
years, said CHAD Executive Director Kevin Hares, there weren't any.

"This tells us that it is coming, but we really start to see people coming
in here a year, year and a half after the drug takes hold in a community,"
Hares said. "Check back three months from now."

Rural block watch As the problem grows, farmers act to protect their
property. Sue Wheeler was on her way to work just before dawn in September.
She saw a van parked on the road near the farm her husband manages, and she
knew. She called her husband, Paul, who found a collection of milk jugs
filled with anhydrous ammonia on a trail by their house.

Deputies arrived with a police dog, and they found Rikki Spencer, 27,
hiding in a hedgerow, reports said. Paul Wheeler held Spencer facedown in
the dirt while the other deputies tracked down two alleged accomplices
walking on Route 34. That gave Wheeler a chance to share a moment with
Spencer. "He didn't know much at first," Wheeler recalled with a smile,
"but his memory came back to him after a while."

The three are awaiting trial. Their arrests were the first of about a dozen
run-ins farmers and police have had with suspected bootleggers, including
at least two high-speed chases. Wheeler tangled with suspected thieves
another time. In October, he and a friend intercepted a suspicious
Pennsylvania car that had been parked near Wheeler's farm. In a tactic
worthy of an action movie, Wheeler got his car in front and the friend got
his in back, and they guided the reluctant stranger into a convenience
store parking lot.

Wheeler's friend held the man while Wheeler returned to the farm with
deputies and found the tanks damaged. Minutes later, a police dog found an
accomplice in the weeds several hundred feet from the barns. A loaded 9mm
rifle was found a few feet away from the trespasser, according to sheriff's
deputies. "You just don't know if these guys are wired up on this stuff, or
if they have knives and guns on them," Wheeler said.

Supply and Demand

The economics of meth and anhydrous ammonia work like this: Farmers buy
anhydrous ammonia for less than $1 a gallon. In the beginning, a runner
could get $100 for bringing a gallon jug of the stuff back to Pennsylvania.
But the risk of arrest has grown, and so has the return: Now a runner can
get $250. With that gallon, a meth maker can cook a few ounces of the drug,
worth about $2,000. Most farmers say the cost of the anhydrous ammonia is
not the issue for them. It's the damage the thieves do.

Brothers Robert and Rodney Donald, who farm together in Venice, in southern
Cayuga County, have reinforced their valve coverings with steel and
installed heavy-duty locks that can't be broken with bolt cutters.

Other farmers have mislabeled their anhydrous ammonia tanks as propane,
installed barbed-wire fencing and moved their tanks closer to their barns
and homes. Nothing has worked.

"All we're doing is chasing them around the scale," Rodney Donald said. "If
these new covers don't work, we're going to have to do something more
drastic." The runners run other risks, too. Even the farmers who work with
anhydrous ammonia say they dislike handling the noxious substance, which
can produce more than 200 pounds of pressure per square inch and feels like
minus 160 degrees on the skin.

"Even when you're using it correctly, the wind can change it can come
around and get you in the face a little bit," Wheeler said. Ricci, the
Vestal man awaiting trial, said he has a "sunburn-type" blemish that runs
from his right bicep down to his wrist - a reminder of when the chemical
splashed up and blistered his skin as he was carrying a tank across a
cornfield.

This volatile stuff ends up spilled and abandoned by amateurs who are
either reckless or looking to hide evidence, authorities said. "They are
dumping their waste in their back yards, along the side of the road,
wherever they feel they need to," the DEA's Nemier said.

Around Bradford County, farmers don't bother with the stuff. Their farms
are too small to take on the hazard and costly equipment needed. Cayuga
County's sprawling corn farms make anhydrous ammonia worth the bother.

Cayuga County Deputy Corey Colton got his introduction to the meth
connection in May 2001 when he lifted the lid off an orange Rubbermaid
cooler in the back of a car. "Like a dummy, I just stuck my head over it to
see what was in there, and it hit me right in the face," Colton said. "I
couldn't see for a minute. I was choking on it, and meanwhile I have two
guys out of the truck, and I have to arrest them."

Night Stakeouts

Colton and Deputy John Nedza have a personal stake in the thefts: They live
in the area, and many of the farmers are friends and neighbors. Colton, 29,
is a former border patrol officer in South Texas, where he tackled drug
smugglers and illegal aliens. He requests assignments such as lying on a
grain elevator in the rain and snow for hours just a few feet from a tank.

Wearing Gore-Tex and Army fatigues, he lies motionless, peering through a
palm-held night-vision scope, waiting for bootleggers. Sometimes they don't
come, but he is not discouraged. "I used to get to do this in my old job,"
Colton said with a smile. "I actually enjoy it." He has been part of about
half of the 20 stakeouts conducted by the department's small team that is
focused on thefts. He sometimes acts alone - a move that his supervisors
say is risky but which has brought the respect of some farmers.

The thieves they chase are generally an unorganized and intoxicated bunch.
When stopped, the Pennsylvanians usually don't have a ready excuse for
being in rural Cayuga County. One farmer chased down and confronted a
trespasser who explained his interstate trip as "grocery shopping in
Ithaca." When pressed, he produced his proof: a Twix candy bar and a soda.
Colton tells the story of a woman who stood watch outside a barn while
three men stole anhydrous ammonia. The men fled; she got left behind.

When Colton processed her, he asked for a driver's license. She wasn't
allowed to have one, she answered. Their lookout, it turns out, was blind.

'Open season' Besides the sheriff's department, federal and state agencies
such as the DEA and the state police C-Net drug enforcement bureau have
been working in counties such as Chemung, Tioga and Tompkins, focusing
primarily on the meth manufacturing. Several of those agencies have sought
the help of pharmacies and groceries, which carry the other ingredients of
methamphetamines.

Wal-Marts in Auburn and other rural areas follow company policies of
limiting the purchase of cold medications containing ephedrine and
pseudoephedrine to three packs. The 15 Pit Stop stores in Cayuga County
have a policy of selling no more than two packs of cold medication and five
packs of batteries to any customer.

Police, store owners and the farmers say their efforts can't stop the flow
of runners, however, and the problem appears to be spreading. In the past
month, there have been anhydrous ammonia thefts in the middle and northern
parts of Cayuga County as well as at the Wheeler Agway in Jordan, Onondaga
County. And as planting continues this spring, thieves won't need to target
the 30,000-gallon tanks that sit close to the farmers' barns and homes.
They can just tap the 1,000-gallon "wagon" tanks that farmers leave in the
fields overnight.

"It will be open season, there's no doubt about it," said Deputy Nedza.
U.S. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., has asked FBI Director Robert
Mueller III to provide local agencies with support, but local police and
farmers are doubtful of getting any help, given the war on terrorism.

That leaves a few deputies and the farmers to solve the problems
themselves. "Something bad'll happen before it's done, I'm sure of it,"
said Wheeler, his shotgun looming just over his shoulder in the window of
the pickup. "Somebody's going to get hurt. It may be a farmer, it may not.
But we've got to try to do something about it."