THE PUZZLING PATH FROM PROFESSOR TO DRUG MULE

Maybe the professor used vegetable oil to ease the balloons of cocaine
down his gagging throat. Maybe he chased them with a glass or two of
water. That's what the drug mules do.

It was Easter in Amsterdam. Gennady M. Danilenko was thousands of
miles from either of his homes -- the house he owns here, and an
apartment in Moscow. The Russian law professor at Wayne State
University, a widely published international law scholar, had flown to
the Netherlands for a long weekend. Just before he left, he swallowed
at least a dozen tightly wrapped balloons of cocaine.

That afternoon, he boarded a DC-10 for the nine-hour flight to
Detroit. After landing, he could expect to wait perhaps a day or two
for all of the balloons to pass through his body. Maybe, like the
professional mules who smuggle drugs in this way, he planned to gulp
down a laxative. Afterward, he would again hold in his hands the dozen
or so packets -- each one containing almost four grams of cocaine --
worth a total of about $5,000.

His students wouldn't have known. His fellow professors wouldn't have
known. He would have kept the secret that would later shock the
university. Instead, something went horribly wrong, and now everyone
knows what happened. But no one knows why.

Mr. Danilenko's life was, to say the least, unlike most professors'.
He was an international law professor who taught in Russia,
California, the Netherlands, and Michigan, and he was watching his
life unravel. He was in the middle of a divorce. He was depressed.
Something made him risk death in a most puzzling way.

Most professors at Wayne State decline to talk about Mr. Danilenko;
others offer variations on a theme: "We're shocked," says Joan
Mahoney, dean of the Wayne State Law School. "What else can you be?
We're still shaking our heads." She knew that he was facing some
stress; he had asked for and been granted a leave for the fall
semester. She knew that his marriage was breaking up. "But 50 percent
of us go through that," she says.

Mr. Danilenko earned $126,000 last year, yet his Ann Arbor home was
barely furnished. He, his wife, and their teenage daughter slept on
mattresses on the floor, and the living room held "not one stick of
furniture," according to a neighbor. Court documents filed in the
couple's divorce proceedings hint at a man living in their Moscow
apartment unbeknownst to the professor. In the legal papers, Mr.
Danilenko suggested that this man may have been involved in the
illegal smuggling of nuclear materials from Russia. Even the way the
professor smuggled the cocaine makes little sense. Agents with the
U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency say a 50-gram quantity of cocaine
probably wasn't just for personal use. Authorities in Canada, where
the plane first landed, say no, it probably was just for personal use.

Regardless, why fly to Amsterdam for the weekend, swallow 13 packets
of cocaine, and risk your life for $5,000 worth of drugs?

This isn't what law professors do. It isn't even what drug smugglers
usually do. According to U.S. Customs Service officials, they spend
hours swallowing hundreds of packets, and get a few thousand dollars
for risking their lives as drug ferries. Susan Feld, a D.E.A.
spokeswoman, sums up what nearly everyone says about Mr. Danilenko's
story: "He's not the typical drug courier."

A Russian native, Mr. Danilenko earned an advanced degree in law at
the Academy of Sciences in Moscow in 1982 and took a position as a
researcher there, at the Institute of State and Law, where he met and
married a fellow lawyer, Olga V. Zaitseva. In 1985, the couple had
their only child, a girl.

Mikhail Galyatin, another researcher and later Mr. Danilenko's law
partner in Moscow, describes him as a "joyful," hard worker with a
good sense of humor.

For more than a decade, Mr. Danilenko worked as a researcher and then
as director of the Center for International Law, in Moscow, advising
government officials and contributing to Russia's new constitution in
the early 1990's.

He flew regularly across the Atlantic, teaching as a visiting
professor at the University of California at Berkeley, the University
of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and the University of San Diego. Fluent in
English and German as well as Russian, he lectured across Europe. He
came to Wayne State in 1996, and the family bought a modest home in
Ann Arbor, away from the bustling core of the city and close to
Interstate 94. Olga Danilenko worked as a homemaker. Their daughter
excelled in school and dreamed of becoming a doctor.

In Detroit, his students didn't see any indication of trouble. Priya
Marwah, a former student of Mr. Danilenko's, describes him as "hyper."
Then, realizing how that might be taken given the now-discovered
secret, she quickly adds that it was never in a drug-addled way. He
was simply excited and passionate about the law, she says. He advised
student leaders of the International Law Society; he joined others for
a cigarette during class breaks.

Justin Petruski, a second-year student, thought so highly of Mr.
Danilenko that he encouraged several friends to take the professor's
international law course. He, too, remembers Mr. Danilenko as an
energetic man: "You could tell that his whole life was international
law." The circumstances of the professor's plane flight, though, can't
help but change the way his students view him. "The fact that he was
so desperate and empty inside is just tragic," Mr. Petruski says.

Even those in Michigan who knew that Mr. Danilenko was struggling with
depression don't see that as sufficient explanation. "If he had been
found drunk or overdosed on prescription drugs, that would have been
something else," says James Evashevski, his former divorce lawyer.
"But this was totally bizarre."

Last fall, Mr. Danilenko taught as a visiting professor at Utrecht
University, in the Netherlands. Apparently his guard was down, as
faculty members soon realized how troubled he was.

Initially, professors in Utrecht were excited that Mr. Danilenko, with
his reputation in international law, would be coming. But from the
start, his visit didn't go well, according to Michiel van de
Kasteelen, the professor who coordinated the visit. Problems with his
residence papers and housing arrangements plagued the stay. University
officials agreed to cut his class a month short, and student
evaluations show that it was poorly received. During the visit, almost
none of the other faculty members had any social contact with him,
says Mr. van de Kasteelen, and Mr. Danilenko never used the campus
office set up for him.

"I can say that I have met in Professor Danilenko a genuinely unhappy
man," Mr. Van de Kasteelen writes in an e-mail message. That
unhappiness made the professor a hard person to be around, he adds.

But Mr. Danilenko's final gesture in Utrecht was generous: In
November, just before he left, the professor gave away his remaining
hashish, Mr. van de Kasteelen says. Thought of as a "soft drug" in the
Netherlands, hashish can be used legally there. Professors didn't
suspect that their colleague may also have been involved with hard
drugs, like cocaine.

After giving away his hash, Mr. Danilenko traveled to Hungary and then
home to Ann Arbor -- where his wife of almost 19 years had filed for
divorce just the week before.

He was shocked, according to Mr. Galyatin, his former law partner in
Moscow. "I believe he might have found a hide-out in drugs under the
circumstances," says Mr. Galyatin in an e-mail message, adding that
Mr. Danilenko had never been a drug user in Russia. Mr. Galyatin is
certain about something else, too: Mr. Danilenko was a despondent
husband, but not an international cocaine trafficker. "Those drugs he
carried on the plane were for his personal use. I refuse to accept any
other story."

With Ms. Danilenko declining requests to talk about her husband, and
his colleagues at Wayne State remaining generally silent, the stack of
papers in Washtenaw County Courthouse here offer most of the scant
clues about what went wrong for the professor.

He already had been granted a medical leave for the fall semester,
with the possibility that it could be extended. In Mr. Danilenko's
official request for leave, Dennis Cherin, a physician, described him
as an "emotionally incapacitated" man, with a long history of depression.

Despite his six-figure salary, Mr. Danilenko seems to have been
weighed down by money problems. He taught as an adjunct at the
University of Michigan and took on consulting work as well. He argued
that his wife, who was trained as a lawyer, could have had a
good-paying job in America or even done long-distance work for her
brother's law firm, in Moscow. "Because of plaintiff's refusal to work
the defendant had to take all kinds of additional jobs," wrote Mr.
Danilenko, who was representing himself in the lawsuit. "Overwork was
one of the major causes of his serious illness, grave depression.
Plaintiff knows this quite well."

In the papers, Mr. Danilenko asked his wife whether she thought his
working additional jobs in Michigan was "out of necessity or fun."

This spring, the professor taught two courses at Wayne State but found
time in mid-April to leave Detroit for the trip to the Netherlands. On
the return flight, as the Northwest Airlines jet cruised at about
30,000 feet above the Atlantic, something went awry inside Gennady
Danilenko.

As the 50 grams of cocaine were swashing around in his system, he
became ill. Authorities speculate he may have tried to vomit the
balloons out. Flight attendants, who suspected a heart attack, used a
defibrillator, an airline spokeswoman says. A physician on the flight
urged the crew to make an emergency landing.

The plane touched down in Goose Bay, Labrador, a town of 9,000 with a
military airstrip. Emergency surgery revealed the drugs, though just
six of the packets were intact.

Cpl. Trudy McCabe of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police says remnants
of six more were inside -- just knots of plastic, the cocaine already
flowing through Mr. Danilenko's bloodstream. He slipped into a coma.

Two days later, shortly after 8 a.m., he died. An autopsy, the
D.E.A.'s Ms. Feld says, found another packet of cocaine lodged in his
esophagus.

The morning of his death, Mr. Danilenko was scheduled to be in court
for a final-settlement meeting regarding his divorce. Instead, armed
federal agents were swarming over his brick house, searching for cash,
phone numbers, the things drug dealers keep around. They didn't find
anything.

By that night, television reporters were knocking on neighbors'
doors.

A week later, the police and their guns are long gone. So are the
television reporters and their cameras. Inside, Olga Danilenko is
cleaning up the mess made by the federal agents. Outside, daffodils
bloom near the front steps. The grass -- courtesy of a next-door
neighbor -- has been neatly trimmed. Somewhere, another family, with a
sales contract in hand, prepares to move in.

Nothing looks amiss at the law professor's house. The neighbors know
his secret, they know what happened. Still, no one knows why.