A DRUG DEALER'S WORST NIGHTMARE

Van Straten's Unit Is There When Education And Prevention Don't Work

Gary Van Straten is a Green Bay native whose daily duty is getting
drugs and drug users out of Brown County.

As supervisor of the Green Bay/Brown County Drug Task Force, Lt. Van
Straten of the Sheriff's Department has his binoculars on the
channels that make Green Bay a distribution point for drugs to
northern Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.

"Ninety-nine percent of our cases never make the newspapers," he
said. Patience, persistence and, ultimately, timing are what Van
Straten said leads to drug arrests. The task force recently helped
deal a fatal blow to an international chain, seizing 36 pounds of
methamphetamines in possibly the state's largest drug arrest ever.

Van Straten does not go undercover himself but works as a silent
observer with the six officers, two investigators and two
intelligence analysts.

"Right now there's Sheriff's Department officers, Green Bay Police
Department officers and Oneida Tribal Police officers working out of
our office," he said. "They're all deputized as sheriff's deputies,
so they have jurisdiction countywide."

The task force, he said, is organized under the sheriff's department,
which feeds them county funds and federal grants. Lt. Tom Molitor of
the Green Bay department is the director, and he is answerable to a
board of directors.

Both men are graduates of the federal Drug Enforcement Agency Drug
Unit Commander's Academy.

That agency and the Wisconsin Division of Narcotics work closely with
the task force, Van Straten said, as do units from surrounding
counties. The district attorney assigns a full-time attorney to
process only the task force's cases.

Police work runs in the family. Van Straten's father was a Green Bay
policeman for 30 years.

"I had an uncle who was an investigative captain with the sheriff's
department," he said.

He lives barely one block from the house he grew up in.

After graduating in 1968 from Green Bay East High School, where he
said he never saw a narcotic, Van Straten served four years in the
U.S. Coast Guard. He found work back home at the Green Bay
Correctional Institution. That was a brief stay, though, and he
quickly took to being a sheriff's deputy.

He and his wife, Barbara, have raised three daughters after nearly 30
years of marriage, and Van Straten said that each gentleman caller to
his daughters is given a healthy interrogation.

Van Straten took time off from the drug war to chat with
News-Chronicle reporter Jeff Decker about the ongoing effort.

News-Chronicle: What sort of work did you do before starting with the
task force in 1999?

Gary Van Straten: I started out my career as a patrol officer, I was
a K-9 officer for 11 years. Promoted to sergeant, promoted to
lieutenant, spent seven years as the shift commander on 11-7 and 3-11
shifts.

You seem to like what you do.

This is probably the best job I've ever had. It comes really close to
being a dog handler.

The job is never the same, I never work the same hours. I try to work
the hours that my agents do, and they work more at night than during
the day.

We have to have a supervisor with them when they serve warrants or do
controlled buys.

I do surveillance for them, watch them to make sure nothing happens
to them. I do pre-surveillance, follow drug dealers around. It can be
fun. There's a lot of people-watching.

Is it ever boring?

It's very boring. Say we put a guy to bed. We follow him home at
midnight, and you want to do 24-hour watch on him. You sit there
until he leaves in the morning.

You've always got another agent with you, either in his car or in
your car, and we can talk.

They're the guys this article should be on. I'd love to drag all
eight of my people out here, and say, "Hey, these are the guys who
are doing it!" Y'know, to put their names and faces in the paper and
get some recognition, but I can't.

How divided is the staff's work?

Thirty percent of our stuff is undercover, 70 percent might be
surveillance. We do electronic surveillance, aerial surveillance.

Like with an infrared camera?

Well, we'll just say that we're using electronic surveillance. Some
of the stuff we've used is almost out of James Bond.

Last year around this time, we were working a federal wiretap. It
started right here in Brown County. At the end of it, we made arrests
in Long Beach, Calif., Chicago. We know where it was coming in from
Mexico.

We've got one guy that's ... still gathering stuff together for the
rest of this wiretap case. Even though the main players are in a
federal facility right now, there are still a lot of people who need
to be charged.

Is there a sense of achievement after a really big bust?

If we make a really big bust, the supply kind of dries up here in
Green Bay until you get more people coming in. We make a big bust,
and three weeks later, they've got more people in place bringing in
the same things.

I haven't got a message for them. They'll know who we are when we
start knocking on their doors.

Have you ever had to bust a family member or friend?

One of the largest money seizures we had came from somebody I went to
high school with. He recognized me right away. He wouldn't talk to me.

Do you ever feel for the addicts you arrest or their family?

I feel sorry for the people who are close to them, because they're
the ones who are suffering. The dad takes his paycheck and buys $500
worth of crack, that's $500 worth of food that the kids aren't going
to get.

Yeah, you feel sorry for the kids. We do search warrants at these
houses and it's unbelievable the way these people live. I mean,
sometimes we'll call the city inspector and he'll condemn the house
on the spot.

Don't get me wrong ... drugs affect all the way from very influential
people here in Green Bay that we know of all the way down to the
lower income brackets. $100,000 a year people to people on welfare.
There's drugs at every middle school and high school in town.

With three daughters, do you ever worry for them?

My youngest daughter is 20. Yeah, we had a father-daughter talk.
There's got to be an effort to educate people about it.

But, personally, I don't think we're ever going to stop it. I mean,
we've had a war on drugs since the 1920s.

I'm sure that my kids were offered dope, and they said "No." How many
kids do you have out there, drinking underage? They know it's wrong.

You mentioned the billions in costs of the drug war. Do you think
financial resources are distributed correctly?

Yes, I do. There's all kinds of treatment programs and things
available, but, it's like smoking: People have to decide not to do
these things.

When I was a kid, drugs were around, but that wasn't the thing, we
made our own stuff to do.

But you can't force them to go to the library, you can't force them
to go to the Boys & Girls Club where there are structured things to
do.

Just as more treatment and rehabilitation programs have come up over
the years, have there been changes on the officer side?

The trend is education. In the early and mid-1970s, you came out of
the military and went into the police department. Now we've got young
officers coming out who've got master's degrees.

In the early '70s, you'd see tragedy and you'd just shrug it's off,
y'know, ho-hum, that's life. And you didn't show compassion, because
basically, it wasn't a manly thing to do. Now, they've got counselors
available, and you get debriefings, and critical incident debriefings.

Gary Van Straten Job title: Lieutenant at the Brown County Sheriff's
Department, supervisor of the Green Bay/Brown County Drug Task Force
Age: around 50 Community in which he lives: Green Bay What makes him
unique: He devotes his days and nights to keeping Brown County a
drug-free community