NARCOTICS BUREAU CHIEF HIGHLY RATED FOR LEADERSHIP

At 22 years old, with the easy graceful manner of a Southern
gentlemen, long sideburns and hippie hair, Don Strange Jr. hardly fit
the stereotype of a narc.

But that's where Strange, now 53, traces his roots in a professional
lifetime battle against illegal drugs. It sets him apart from his
predecessors as head of the Mississippi Bureau of Narcotics.

Strange, appointed by Gov. Ronnie Musgrove March 1, 2000, began his
law enforcement career as a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration
special agent. He worked the streets of Los Angeles for 12 years. He
is a former chief of intelligence for the DEA.

As a new agent, Strange said he watched a partner paralyzed by a
bullet in a drug deal gone awry. Strange chased the shooters into an
east Los Angeles housing project. He cautiously crouched in an open
doorway. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a shadow move near him.
He brought his gun around.

"Something told me not to shoot," Strange said. "It was a toddler
running across his crib. He couldn't have been more than 1 1/2 years
old. I've never forgotten that. Because my life and everybody else's
life associated with me would have been changed forever."

Strange has two sons from his first marriage: Chris, 29, an
investigator with the state attorney general's office, and Alexander,
27, a University of Southern Mississippi police officer. Strange and
his second wife, Sherri, 44, assistant director in charge of DEA
enforcement operations in Atlanta, celebrated a 10th wedding
anniversary in March.

"They believe in public service," said Gisele Jarecki, 37, section
chief for the technical support section out of the special
intelligence office at DEA's headquarters in Washington.

Strange's altar boy looks and idiosyncrasies belie a James Bond-like
resume of adventure and stealth. He has a habit of rocking back and
forth and compulsively places everything at a right angle on his desk.
His bureau aides make up a near Arthurian court of veteran Mississippi
agents; all with decorated careers in law enforcement.

"He's truly one of the greatest visionaries I've ever seen," said
Jarecki, who worked with Strange five years. "His big saying has
always been 'I just don't want to get to first base. I want to hit a
home run.'"

Ernest Donald "Don" Strange Jr. was born in Meridian, the eldest of
three children. The family moved to Jackson when Strange was 12. With
a D average, Strange, a high school golf champion, graduated Murrah
High in 1965. After a year at Hinds Community College, he transferred
to USM, where he studied political science, making B's and C's.

Most of the time, Strange ran an on-campus pool hall that closed seven
days a week at midnight and sold cars, an experience, one colleague
suspects, left Strange hard to offend.

"In my senior year, I saw so many people getting their lives screwed
up on drugs," he said. "I wanted to do something about it."

In 1969, the heyday of Vietnam, he heard the DEA was hiring people.
Strange graduated June 22, 1970, said classmate Doug Kuehl, 56, who
worked with him in California.

"He speaks his mind," Kuehl said. "Way back, Don testified at a Senate
subcommittee hearing. A DEA administrator kept passing Don notes
telling him to talk less. Don forged forward. He was totally right.
And Don knew the Mississippi senators from his childhood."

Strange's father, who died in 1984, was a first assistant U.S.
attorney in Mississippi, who at times, in private practice, accepted
old cars in trade for legal services. That's why a fleet of six
junkers once sat outside the family's three-bedroom house on Robinhood
Road in Jackson, Strange said.

"My dad was highly regarded in legal circles," Strange said. "But he
related better to the common man. His best friends were plumbers,
carpenters and electricians."

Early on, Strange showed a talent for ingenuity. In the 70s, the DEA
struggled to stop the smuggling of a brand of LSD known as "Orange
Sunshine." Strange suggested teaming local, federal and state law
enforcement, but the DEA and prosecutors weren't interested, Kuehl
said.

"But Don fires up this task force," Kuehl said. "We arrested people in
Honduras, Costa Rica and Timothy Leary in Afghanistan."

In 1973, a Los Angeles Times photographer captured Strange escorting
Leary, 51, at L.A. International Airport. Leary, an ousted Harvard
professor who espoused the use of LSD, had escaped a minimum security
prison in California and was on the FBI's Most Wanted List.

"We totally shut down the operation," Kuehl said. "It has never come
back. The DEA developed their mobile task forces patterned after
Don's. He's the one who invented the darn thing."

In 1976, Strange and a U.S. customs agent put on scuba gear to dive
under a 500-foot freighter docked for three days at the Port of Los
Angeles in San Pedro to look for underwater compartments where
smugglers might have hidden cocaine, Strange said.

In murky water, Strange pushed past a propeller as big as a
house.

"I could hear the 'Boom, Boom, Boom' sound of the ship breathing," he
said. "There was no dope. We came out of the water at 12 noon. That
boat started up 45 minutes later. We could have been killed."

Strange was appointed a DEA enforcement group supervisor in 1982 in
San Diego and later, an assistant special agent in charge in New
Orleans. He was also the DEA liaison to the Executive Office of the
President in the Office of National Drug Control Policy.

In 1999, six months after he retired, Strange headed home to run the
Mississippi Bureau of Narcotics for a salary of $60,000. "I found out
Mike Moore recommended me," said Strange, who met Moore in the early
'90s. "He knew me from when I worked in New Orleans."

Strange had written Moore about the attorney general's 1994 landmark
tobacco lawsuit. "Both my parents died of lung cancer," said Strange,
who never smoked. "I told him how much I appreciated what he was doing."

Strange was a credible choice to right years of fiscal mismanagement,
low morale and "instability at the top," said Stephen Mallory,
chairman of USM's Criminal Justice department.

"One of the biggest changes Don has made in the bureau is giving it
vision," said Mallory, who worked at the bureau 25 years. "It has
improved under his leadership. It makes me proud."