A Madness Called Meth: Chapter Twelve

SQUEEZING THE BALLOON

Law Enforcement Vs. The Meth Traffickers

It cost U.S. taxpayers more than $2 million to put Pablo Cervantes and five
of his colleagues behind bars for making meth.

Les Weidman will tell you it's worth every penny.

"If you add up the number of years they are going to spend in prison," he
says, after pondering the amount for a moment, "and then you add up the
number and kinds of things they would be doing on the street during that
time, their drug trafficking and the poisoning of our children and our
waterways and our health system and all the things that go along with
methamphetamine's impact . . . $2 million to put meth people away for a
long period of time? Absolutely."

Weidman is the sheriff of Stanislaus County and has been for 10 years. He
grew up in the county -- "I can take a rock and throw it out my office
window and just about hit my grandfather's ranch, where I grew up" -- and
his only real job as an adult has been with the Sheriff's Department,
starting three decades ago.

That makes him a veteran in the Central Valley meth war. And if you ask him
or most any other Central Valley cop or prosecutor about that war, they'll
tell you it's going to cost a lot of money to win.

Take U.S. vs. Cervantes, what Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Shipley calls "a
very typical case." It involved two meth labs, one between Fresno and
Sanger and one in Southern California's Orange County. Law enforcement
agents confiscated about 40 pounds of meth and about 80 pounds of
pseudoephedrine (which can make about 75 more pounds of meth), three
firearms and 10 suspects, eight of them Mexican citizens. Ultimately, six
suspects were convicted or pleaded guilty.

Based on figures and estimates provided by various local, state and federal
agencies, law enforcement spent $2.08 million to bring Cervantes and his
band of meth makers to justice, most of that for their prison time.

"It's a war," Weidman says, "and wars cost money."

About 2,300 inmates are in state prisons for making drugs, most of them for
making meth. It costs a little more than $21,000 a year to keep each there,
or about $49.7 million per year. The Bureau of Nar- cotics Enforcement, the
Department of Justice division that is the state's main drug-fighting
force, had a $77.9 million budget last year.

Most of that pays for 380 agents. More than one-third of those agents
devote almost all their time to fighting meth.

The cops say it's not enough.

"We could always use more money and more people," says Ron Gravitt, chief
of the BNE clandestine labs unit. "But narcotic enforcement, contrary to
what most people believe, is not that high a priority in this country."

Or in this state.

The BNE's budget has grown at about the same rate as the overall state
budget during the past decade, but the percentage provided by the federal
government has increased from less than 2 percent of its total budget to
more than 28 percent.

Two years ago, the BNE got an $18 mil-lion federal grant to fight meth
production in California and used most of it to hire 79 agents who work
full time on meth crimes. "It's year to year," Gravitt says, "so we could
get cut off at any time."

The state did chip in an extra $300,000 in the 1998-99 fiscal year budget
specifically for Central Valley meth-fighting efforts, but despite the
handsome state budget surplus, the grant was not included in either the
1999-2000 or 2000-2001 budget years.

"Quite frankly," Weidman says, "it's not the federal government's
responsibility to protect the inland areas of the state of California. But
it is the state's. They need to recognize their responsibility, but to this
point there has been very little attention given to the problem by the
state Legislature."

A bill that would have provided $6 million to local police and sheriff
departments in nine Central Valley counties to fight meth was introduced
last year. The proposed spending gradually was whittled down to $300,000
before the bill was killed by a Senate committee because the funding was
"redundant" to other crime-fighting programs.

The reasons for the legislative inertia range from philosophical opposition
by some legislators to the war on drugs, to inefficient lobbying efforts by
law enforcement. But the most pragmatic explanation may be that of a
longtime legislative staffer: "Why should we pay for something that the
feds will take care of?"

One of the more innovative federal drug-fighting programs, Central Valley
law enforcement officials say, is the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area
(HIDTA) program. Created by Congress in 1988, it is run by the White House
Office of National Drug Control Policy, better known as the office of the
White House drug czar.

The program helps local and state crime fighters coordinate drug-control
efforts and eliminates embarrassing snafus, such as undercover cops from
one agency busting undercover cops from another. Regions and states can
apply for HIDTA status, and it is granted based on the area's drug problems
and its potential impact on other parts of the country.

"It helps make people more efficient; it gets people reading off the same
page in terms of targets, so you're not chasing the same people at the same
time and duplicating efforts," Weidman says.

Since its inception, the HIDTA budget has grown from $25 million to $190
million and from five areas to 31. But the Central Valley HIDTA,
encompassing nine counties from Sacramento to Kern, was created only last
year, despite the Valley's indisputable meth problems and its equally
indisputable impact on the rest of the nation's meth problems.

One of the reasons for the delay, according to Weidman, vice chairman of
the Central Valley HIDTA, was sort of a "meth myopia": Congressional
members in other parts of the country didn't care about meth because it
wasn't yet a problem in their area. As a result, Valley cops were turned down.

"So we restarted our efforts and this time made a lot of political hay
about it," he says.

"We got together from Sacramento to Kern County and beat on every . . .
door we had to, stormed Capitol Hill and really put out a message that we
are in dire straits."

The message got through. The designation was announced in June 1999, and
the group -- representatives from 42 federal, state and local agencies --
began operations in January. It appears to have paid immediate dividends.
Through the first five months of the year, HIDTA closed down more than 60
labs, made 126 arrests, and seized 130 pounds of finished meth, a hefty
22,000 liters of meth solution and more than $500,000 in cash.

"My team was able to expand to 16 people," says Bob Pennal, a BNE agent who
supervises the Fresno Meth Task Force. "You have a team of six, and then
you have two in court and one sick, and you're down to two or three people.
With 16, you can go on offense."

And all for what amounts to chump change, in government circles.

The Central Valley HIDTA's budget for the current year is $1.5 million, the
smallest budget of any in the country. By comparison, the Lake County,
Ind., HIDTA gets $3 million; the Milwaukee HIDTA gets $4.5 million. The
other three California HIDTAs, based in San Francisco, Los Angeles and San
Diego, get $2.5 million, $13.9 million and $10 million, respectively.

The Valley HIDTA money pays for a director, a small staff, some
ill-furnished offices, a little equipment and some overtime pay for agents.
Otherwise, local agencies foot the bill for their officers to take part.
Weidman, for example, spends $130,000 of his budget to provide two officers
to the program.

There isn't likely to be a flood of new HIDTA funds any time soon. Valley
officials and elected representatives have lobbied hard to increase HIDTA
funding to $2.5 million, but sources indicate the chances are no better
than 50-50 that the current budget level will almost certainly be frozen.

That's a bitter pill for locals to swallow, especially when they read that
more than $1 billion in U.S. drug-fighting aid in the new federal budget is
likely to be sent to Colombia. Says a frustrated Valley cop: "We are
fighting the wrong war in the wrong place."

But when it comes to fighting for federal funds, some of the Valley's
opponents are a lot closer than South America. Congressmen from Washington
and Oregon, seeing the results of the program, have announced they will
push to more than double their HIDTAs' budgets from $5.1 million to $12
million. States in the Midwest are clamoring for some of California's $18
million federal grant, citing the growing number of meth labs in Iowa and
Missouri.

California cops argue the number of labs, by itself, is a specious measurement.

"There are literally thousands of little bitty labs springing up all over
the Midwest," says Bill Ruzzamenti, a DEA special agent and director of the
Central Valley HIDTA. ". . . but of the labs we seize, many of them are
capable of producing 100 pounds of methamphetamine at a whack . . . it
really isn't the same scenario as out here, where they are producing meth
for the entire country."

Outside California, that argument finds little sympathy, even among DEA
colleagues.

"That's only one side of the question," says DEA special agent Guy
Hargreaves, a Washington, D.C.-based national meth expert. "Sure, there is
more production, but you have to remember it takes almost as much time to
raid and guard and clean up a small lab as a big lab. You seize a lab in
Missouri that is only making an ounce, the officer there still has to stand
guard over the place for X number of hours until the cleanup crew comes in."

There's an old saying: To kill a snake, you cut off its head, not its tail.
Valley meth hunters are working that strategy.

"Four years ago, we sat down with DEA and we talked through a strategy
about what we were going to be able to do about this because we saw it was
an ever-expanding problem and it was starting to move East," Gravitt says.
"The strategy was that the primary thing to concentrate on was suppliers
and the secondary thing was to go after the Mexican national organizations."

The suppliers Gravitt refers to are the people and companies who supply
ephedrine and pseudoephedrine -- the key ingredients in meth -- to those
who actually make it.

"It's like there is this war, and there is this supply line, and if you cut
the supply line, you win," says U.S. Attorney Paul Seave, the top federal
cop in a district that covers 34 California counties between Bakersfield
and the Oregon border.

The problem, he says, is determining who is using the legal products illegally.

"I think the DEA in Washington has the feeling that most ephedrine and
pseudoephedrine is not being smuggled in," he says. "Most of it is coming
in through a legal source."

Seave points to a chart showing that the legal importation of meth
ingredients has jumped from about 614 metric tons in 1994 to about 1,100
metric tons in 1998, a 79 percent increase.

"Unless the amount of allergies and colds suffered in this country has
doubled in the past 10 years," he deadpans, "something else is going on."

That was precisely what happened in the case of Danny Rosen. In 1996, Rosen
was the 35-year-old owner of Danco Distributing Inc., a struggling company
in Redding that sold products such as beef jerky and shampoo to mom-and-pop
stores up and down the Valley. Then, according to federal court documents,
he and his wife, Bette Ann, discovered the profits to be made in selling
ephedrine and pseudoephedrine.

Between late 1996 and early 1998, Danco distributed more than 12,000 cases,
or more than 100 million tablets. That's enough to supply more than 45,000
asthma or allergy sufferers daily medication for a year or to make roughly
8,000 pounds of meth. Danco's annual sales went from $825,000 to more than
$5 million.

Of course, little of it was going to customers with stuffy noses. Most of
it was going to people who served as go-betweens to meth makers. One of
them later told police he was buying cases of chemicals from Danco for
$1,500 each, then selling it to meth makers for $2,500 each.

They used an elaborate system: Pills were shipped to phony business
addresses, or real businesses acting as fronts, in neighboring states (one
was a Las Vegas shoe store).

Danco's customers tried to cover their tracks by exchanging cash from the
meth makers for cashier's checks from a bank in Malibu. They used the
cashier's checks to pay Danco. The checks always were for amounts less than
$10,000, the threshold that must be reported to the Internal Revenue
Service. They hedged their bets further by paying a bank official to help
cover the paper trail.

In the end, the ring was tripped up by a tip from IRS agents who got
suspicious about the bank transactions. "It was like peeling back the
layers of an onion," says Assistant U.S. Attorney Samantha Spangler, who
prosecuted the case. "The more they investigated, the more they found."

The Rosens and four confederates were convicted in federal court in late
April on 23 counts associated with the conspiracy. They are awaiting
sentencing.

Seave and Spangler say the strategy of targeting meth ingredients appears
to be working, at least to a degree. The price of pseudoephedrine has gone
up 400 percent to 500 percent, and meth makers are diluting their product
to less than 20 per-cent pure to make it stretch and maintain their profits.

"So in that sense," Seave says, "our focus is having some success. But our
strategy has to keep evolving. The crooks are always ahead of us."

Adopting new strategies means adopting new tools or adapting old ones. In
Sutter County, for example, Sheriff Jim Denney successfully asked Sutter
County Supervisors last June to pony up $5,000 to buy a drug-sniffing dog
for interdiction on Highway 99.

"The CHP has done a great job knocking them down on I-5," he said. "The
dealers take the product up to Washington and Oregon and then to the
Midwest, and they bring the money back the same way . . . but as they put
the squeeze on them over there, I know this product has got to be coming up
99, and the dog will really help us deal with that."

In the Legislature, Assemblyman Dennis Cardoza, D-Merced, successfully
proposed spending $500,000 to buy Valley meth fighters a machine called the
Standoff Chemical Agent Detector. Developed by the military for battlefield
use, it takes in air and analyzes it for chemical content. The device,
about the size of a small X-ray machine, uses infrared technology to look
at a building and measure the air content and energy emanations from it. It
would allow cops to determine not only if a building contained a meth lab,
but what kind of chemicals were present.

"Is it going to be something that will totally solve our methamphetamine
problem?" Cardoza says. "Probably not. But I believe it will be a useful
tool and maybe give some drug dealers pause when they start to manufacture
meth that there is this machine that can drive down the street and detect
the chemicals and give police a lead as to where to start looking."

Fixing the Valley's meth problem, from a cop's point of view, won't be easy
- -- and may be impossible. "We're never going to totally win the war on
drugs, not the way it's going now," says Denney, a 25-year veteran who was
elected Sutter County sheriff in 1998, "but we have to make them work for it."

Chapter 12b, http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00/n1504/a05.html