ELITE DRUG UNIT'S TACTICS, STRUCTURE UNDER SCRUTINY

Prosecutors Tout Forces Arrest Record As A Success, But Two Botched Raids
Raise Liability And Civil Rights Concerns

Armed with a warrant and prompted by an informant's tip, the Lake Winnebago
area undercover officers fighting the war on drugs often dispense with
subtlety.

After loudly announcing themselves at the door of a suspect, they allow the
occupants a brief opportunity to answer.

If there is no reply, they crash through the door with a battering ram.

It's a direct tactic that often pays off for the Metropolitan Enforcement
Group (MEG), a secretive corps of officers drawn from 10 area agencies. The
group, founded in 1988, was responsible for 403 trafficking-level arrests
in 1999, the second-best tally in the state.

Winnebago County Dist. Atty. Joe Paulus said the MEG's aggressive methods
and reliance on confidential informants - often recruited from the drug
culture it seeks to defeat - set it apart from typical police on patrol.

"The MEG unit deals with the lowest forms of society, so they have to be
much more resourceful and assertive than the typical police officer,"
Paulus said.

Yet this high-intensity approach has led some lawyers to brand the effort
as heavy-handed at best. Nearly $100,000 has been paid in civil claims
stemming from two botched raids, in 1991 and 1998, where MEG officers broke
down the wrong doors and held people under arrest without cause.

Assistant Public Defender David Keck of Oshkosh said he questions whether
the unit's surprise search methods justify the risks of endangering
innocent people.

"When they break down somebody's door like that in the middle of the night,
and it's the wrong address, I think they present a greater danger to the
public than the drug dealers do," Keck said.

And officials in Neenah, stinging from the city's $50,000 share of a court
settlement payment from the 1998 failed raid, are pondering the city's
withdrawal from the group, saying it lacks proper accountability and oversight.

Winnebago County Sheriff Mike Brooks, who heads the MEG advisory board made
up of the police chiefs and sheriffs of the agencies that fund the unit,
cited a growing workload and a hazy chain of command as potential
contributors to the embarrassing misfires.

"To me, the MEG unit has been very, very successful in its work," Brooks
said. "But there are issues that need to be addressed.

"Unless you have a (centralized) hierarchy, or chain of command, there is
always going to be the potential that details get missed."

The MEG, which serves Winnebago, Outagamie, Calumet and Fond du Lac
counties, was one of 32 multi-jurisdictional task forces in Wisconsin
sparked by the federal Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988.

The idea behind it was simple: Create an elite group of officers that could
easily cross jurisdictions, work with state justice officials and make a
bigger dent in the drug trade.

"I think we've had the luxury of an agency that allows law enforcement to
share information across jurisdictional lines," said Outagamie County Dist.
Atty. Vince Biskupic.

About $600,000 of the MEG's nearly $1 million budget comes from the four
county sheriff's departments and the police departments in Appleton,
Oshkosh, Neenah, Kaukauna, Fond du Lac and the Town of Menasha. State and
federal grants make up the rest. Ten of the MEG's 13 investigators are
drawn from the 10 agencies, which continue to pay their salaries.

As undercover officers, they shy away from media attention, fearing public
exposure will hamper their effectiveness in drug arrests.

Supervisors, including Brooks, characterize a stint in the MEG as hard
duty. Officers often must plunge into the shadowy subculture of illegal
narcotics, developing a network of informants who help guide the unit in
making arrests.

Yet statistics from 1999, the latest year such figures were available, rank
the MEG as one of the most effective units in the state.

The Wisconsin Office of Justice Assistance credited the unit with 524
criminal referrals and 601 criminal charges in 1999. More than two-thirds
of the charges referred to prosecutors by the MEG in 1999 were for
dealing-level crimes, rather than minor possession offenses. That towers
above the state average of 42 percent.

"The value of the MEG unit to the community is overwhelming," said Paulus,
who has prosecuted some 1,000 MEG cases. "It has done more to fight illegal
drug trafficking in the Fox Valley than any other investigative unit we have."

Biskupic, who has posted similar numbers to Paulus on MEG prosecutions,
said the vast majority of the MEG's cases stem from the use of informants.
Reliance on them reflects a fundamental shift in drug enforcement strategy
that took hold nationally about a decade ago, he said.

Earlier, undercover drug officers more typically made the buys themselves.

"This was done because law enforcement realized that in order to get closer
to the major drug traffickers, you needed to roll the lower-level dealers
into becoming informants," Biskupic said.

"Now they go after the small dealers to make them informants," he said.
"They're not the real targets, but you have to work up the food chain."

Some of the MEG's informants receive cash payments from a pool of money
filled from the seized assets and cash forfeitures of convicted dealers.
The group's "confidential fund" expenses amounted to $50,437 last year.

"Sometimes, if a defendant agrees to cooperate, they might get money to pay
off a fine or something of that nature," Biskupic said, "but they aren't
getting large amounts of cash."

Neenah attorney Robert Bellin, who as a public defender has defended
clients arrested by MEG officers, said the practice has its risks.

"The problem is they have to rely on people who are inherently unreliable,"
Bellin said. "I respect the work the MEG unit does, but don't tell me
people can't get screwed over by a lying defendant."

Bellin recalled one case he defended in 1999, when the evidence against his
client, arrested in a sweep of Oshkosh area cocaine and heroin dealers,
didn't add up.

The star witness, a MEG informant, came up short of either drugs or money
more than once after completing a series of controlled drug buys. MEG
investigators supervising the informant were unable to account for the
missing goods, allowing Bellin to deal for a reduced sentence for his
client in a plea agreement.

"It seemed like she was actually setting up deals for the money, making
$100 or that amount of drugs each time she set someone up," Bellin said.

Bellin said that by becoming a confidential informant, a first-time
drug-dealing defendant can be considered for leniency, up to a complete
avoidance of felony charges. They are typically expected to wear a wire and
to complete six drug buys, he said.

Brooks said MEG officers view the use of informants as an unsavory, but
often necessary, tool.

"When you go to the dance with the devil, you know you are not going to be
escorted by an angel," he said.

A poor tip from an informant allegedly led to the first of the unit's
problem raids.

Four MEG officers broke into the Menasha apartment of Russell Hoelzel and
Carla Reed at 2:30 a.m., seeking to arrest a drug suspect, according to the
civil complaint. Police held the partially clothed couple face-down and at
gunpoint on their bed while officers searched the apartment but found no drugs.

The couple accepted $30,000 as settlement of a lawsuit against the state
for the raid, led by then-MEG Project Director Randy Gibas, who was an
employee of the state Department of Justice.

Gibas, who later was charged and cleared in a separate incident of aiming a
gun at another officer, ultimately was dismissed by the state.

In the 1998 incident, Daniel and Cindy Cuervo said five officers charged
into their Neenah apartment with guns drawn after Cindy heard shouting and
opened her door. Police had been authorized to search the adjacent apartment.

A civil complaint said the first officer through the door was a uniformed
Neenah police officer who had received little or no formal training with
the MEG unit. Daniel Cuervo was ordered to the floor at gunpoint before
officers realized they were in the wrong apartment and left.

"They didn't say they were sorry. They didn't say anything," Cindy Cuervo
said. "They just went back out the door. My husband was stunned. They just
left us there."

MEG unit Project Director Roger Price eventually got the Cuervos' consent
for a second search, but found no drugs.

Two months later, Daniel Cuervo was busted for being involved in a
marijuana sale set up by a MEG informant. His trial ended with a hung jury.

Civil claims against the Neenah officer, Jim Plymire, and Price resulted in
cash settlements - $50,000 by Neenah and $17,500 by Outagamie County - this
year.

"Once (MEG officers) realized they were in the wrong apartment, they did
everything they should have done to minimize the impact of the mistake,"
Biskupic said.

The civil settlements prompted some officials to question whether the MEG,
now loosely run by an advisory board, needs a more clear chain of command.

"From our perspective, there is no organization to the MEG," said Neenah
City Atty. Jim Gunz. "The MEG is not a legal entity and, therefore, it
cannot be sued. That means everybody runs for cover when something goes wrong."

Gunz said such was the case with the botched 1998 raid. Neenah officials
paid the city's $50,000 share of the settlement to the Cuervo family, then
complained that the city was left to fend for itself in court over an
agency not under its control.

Neenah Mayor Ken Harwood said his city must be protected from future suits
if it is to remain a financial contributor to the group. Gunz went further,
saying MEG must do much more to ensure accountability and oversight at all
levels.

All but three of the 13 investigators supervised by Price, a sergeant in
the Outagamie County Sheriff's Department, answer to the respective
agencies that pay their salaries - not the advisory board.

The advisory board handles budgetary matters and policy decisions, but
holds no direct authority over most of the unit's officers.

Brooks, the Winnebago County sheriff and head of the MEG board, said a
change in the group's management structure is on the horizon - and may be
overdue.

"The time has come - and maybe that time came awhile ago - for us to make
some changes ... to prevent or minimize the possibility of future mistakes ...

"You can't supervise detectives and hold them responsible for their actions
when they're answering to supervisors who are five, 10, 25, 35 miles away
(from each other)."

Brooks said the board, motivated by recent media coverage of the
settlements, has discussed turning the MEG into an independent unit rather
than a cooperative, volunteer effort among the 10 departments.

"The workload and the staffing has grown so much over the years that you
need more supervisors to know what everyone else is doing," he said.

"When you've got overworked detectives, it increases the likelihood that
details get missed - and that's what happened in both of those cases."

Appleton civil attorney John Peterson, who represented the Cuervos, said
the board should have come to that realization long ago.

"In my opinion, these (undercover) units don't have the same level of
oversight or leadership that we see at regular police agencies in this part
of Wisconsin," he said.

"There's something about the nature of these units that seems to lead
officers to do things that would never happen in most of the police
departments I've worked with."

But Biskupic rejected Peterson's assessment of the MEG.

"Due to the nature of the job, there is a level of increased independence
for the officers of the MEG unit," Biskupic said. "It's not like they have
carte blanche where they can do whatever they feel like doing."