LUCAS JOINS 5-COUNTY WAR AGAINST DRUGS

BROOKLYN HEIGHTS, O. - This clearinghouse is designed to clean house.

Using $1.3 million in federal funds, federal, state, and local
law-enforcement authorities are preparing to attack big-time drug
trafficking, money laundering, and violent crimes related to drugs by
focusing on Lucas and four other northern Ohio counties.

Today, authorities plan to break ground in Brooklyn Heights, south of
Cleveland, for a 1,200-square-foot building that will be headquarters for
the law-enforcement initiative.

The goal is to cooperate on a large scale and tap into drug cartels by
sharing information rather than competing for it.

"We don't have a lot of information that the FBI, the DEA, and the ATF
has," Capt. Ron Spann, head of the Toledo police department's special
enforcement division, said yesterday. "This brings it all together so we
can pump it out . . . If everyone is feeding this thing, it should do
well."

At full strength, about two dozen people will work from the Investigative
Support Center, most of them assigned from various agencies.

Along with Lucas County, authorities in June, 1999, designated Cuyahoga,
Summit, Stark, and Mahoning counties as "high-intensity" drug-trafficking
areas, with Toledo, Cleveland, Akron, Canton, and Youngstown listed as the
major metropolitan areas in those counties.

Lucas County qualified because the Ohio Turnpike and I-75 connect it to
larger cities and because it is a middle ground between New York City and
Chicago. The other areas qualified because of the turnpike and interstate
highways in their areas.

The five counties have hundreds of airfields and unattended airstrips,
officials said.

Federal officials interviewed police, city officials, and checked drug
arrests and drug-related crimes before making their decision on which areas
to include.

"The idea is to combine resources from local, federal, and state
enforcement to identify, attack, and dismantle drug-traffic organizations,"
said John B. Sommer, executive director of Ohio's High Intensity Drug
Trafficking Area.

The facility is scheduled for operation in early 2001.

"[The areas selected are] like a crossroad with Detroit, Cincinnati, New
York, and Chicago," Mr. Sommer said. "There was already good cooperation
between law-enforcement officials. We would not go into an area without
that cooperation."

The Ohio project, funded by the federal Office of Drug Control Policy, is
one of 31 such projects in the country.

"We'll put information in computers" and assist in case analysis, said Jim
Votypka, the manager of Ohio's investigative support center. "For
intelligence files, we'll have numerous databases we can check for names
and subjects."

And there's the "deconfliction center," Mr. Votupka said, geared toward
preventing agencies from unknowingly overlapping investigations or from
running into each other unexpectedly on raids.

For Toledo, the Metro Drug Task Force, which deals with large-scale drug
rings and conspiracy operations, made 366 drug arrests in 1999 and seized
nearly $2.4 million in drugs, Toledo police Lt. Dan Schultz, head of the
unit, said. For the first six months of 2000, the task force has made 151
drug-related arrests and seized $700,000 in drugs.

With the lower level dealers, Toledo's vice-narcotics unit made 2,046
arrests in 1999 and recovered $2 million in drugs. And for the first six
months of 2000, the unit made 1,173 arrests and confiscated $1.1 million in
drugs, Lieutenant Schultz said.

The numbers do not include the arrests made by Toledo police uniformed
patrol officers.

"Heroin is alive and well in Toledo," Mark E. Murtha, the head of the
Toledo DEA office, said. "And things that are not uncommon are marijuana
and cocaine."

The clearinghouse has a lot of potential, Mr. Murtha said. "I think it's
going to definitely help."