POLICE WITH NO LIMITS

While battling drugs, CenTac's focus blurs

Thirteen years ago, a new kind of drug-fighting unit was unleashed on
Summit County.

Supported by a new kind of federal drug-fighting money, the unit was
designed to be independent of the constraints that had hampered the
government's "war on drugs."

Like money. Or politics. Or turf.

That ultra-independent unit was called the CenTac drug and organized
crime task force -- free to roam wherever it wanted in search of drugs
and criminals, and capable of paying for itself.

It seemed like a good idea at the time.

Now growing numbers of players in county law enforcement are concerned
about that community's most independent member: They're asking if
CenTac is out of control.

The concerns follow last year's tangled Summit County escorts case,
and they come from prosecutors, judges, former CenTac board members
and cops, in addition to the defense attorneys who have been
complaining for years.

The escorts case hit a nerve in the county's law enforcement and
judicial community.

The details were ugly: CenTac agents listened through motel walls
while stakeout subjects had sex. Informants bought sex with hundreds
of dollars in CenTac drug-buy money. An informant alleged he'd been
given drug-buy money to pay for another informant's abortion.

The questions were pointed: Why did Summit County's elite drug squad
spend 18 months investigating hookers? Why were the hookers being
charged with racketeering, as if they were mobsters?

The backlash left CenTac's reputation tarnished, its future uncertain,
its assigned prosecutor out of a job and the county's law enforcement
community at war with itself.

It became painfully apparent that CenTac had quietly grown powerful
while remaining almost entirely unaccountable.

A review of CenTac operations shows that its supervision was so
splintered, in the name of secrecy, that it effectively answered to no
one at all.

Left largely to its own devices, CenTac strayed from its mission while
piling up income from seizing criminals' assets. Its cases appeared to
be governed as much by the assets they yielded as by the gravity of
criminal activity they stopped.

Proponents say CenTac made a big dent in the county's ongoing drug
trade.

Critics say CenTac trampled on justice and distorted the county's
legal system.

Some accuse CenTac of abusing its power by investigating its enemies
and conducting vendettas. Some told the Akron Beacon Journal they
would not comment publicly on CenTac because they were afraid of being
investigated.

CenTac has investigated its foes before.

Ambitious mission

CenTac -- or Central Tactical Unit -- opened for business in 1987. It
was one of hundreds of new drug task forces formed in the late 1980s
and early 1990s, fueled by newly available federal grants.

The new task forces -- 22 in Ohio alone -- were to be
"multijurisdictional," independent of taxpayer support and able to run
on revenues from the criminal assets they seized.

The independence that is being criticized now was built into CenTac
from the start.

CenTac's mission was both ambitious and clear.

It would pursue "targeted, major organized crime or narcotic type
criminal investigations," according to its policy manual.

It would use new state racketeering laws -- nicknamed Little RICO --
to bring down "high-level violators and organizations who have been
able to insulate themselves from traditional law enforcement methods,"
it said.

In many ways, it worked.

Armed with money, expertise and freedom, the task force was
responsible for 968 arrests and the removal of $14 million in drugs
from the streets over 13 years, according to its annual report.

CenTac also closed down 15 methamphetamine labs and a
diet-pill-peddling doctor, and arrested one of America's Most Wanted
- -- the head of a crack cocaine trading gang.

The police chiefs on CenTac's board say the organization has done good
work and slowed drug trafficking in the area, and that recent negative
publicity misrepresents its record.

"It's an extremely worthwhile organization," says Cuyahoga Falls
Police Chief Louis Dirker.

"They were doing a very good service for Summit County with a high
degree of integrity," Twinsburg Police Chief Anthony Frank says.

"I think that CenTac's record speaks for itself," says Stow Police
Chief Robert Tilton.

Only using the big guns

Over the years, CenTac earned a reputation for investigatory and
prosecutorial zeal bordering on obsession, for using its high-powered
arsenal of tactics and charges against all criminals, big and small.

The method became clear: Arrest as many people as possible, on as many
and as serious charges as possible.

Then let the judicial system and plea negotiations straighten it
out.

Former CenTac Prosecutor Judie Bandy says the goal was to get the
prosecution's ducks in a row at the outset, to avoid having to come
back with new indictments or charges later on.

To defendants and defense attorneys, it was a nightmare.

The multidefendant, multiindictment cases came with heavyweight
charges such as racketeering. Plea deals were compromised with demands
for seized assets as part of the bargaining.

The cases befuddled judges and were almost impossible to defend, says
defense attorney Jim Burdon, who believes the county's lawyers and
judges should have revolted years ago.

"We corrupted the system," he says. "Everybody in the prosecutor's
office. The judges. Everybody."

Fractured oversight

CenTac's staff and board members came from three to eight
participating local police departments, depending on the year; from
the state attorney general's office; and from federal agencies such as
the FBI, IRS and DEA.

Oversight was fractured by design.

On paper, CenTac answered to a governing board of participating police
chiefs, which conducted its meetings in private.

But that board was never told much, according to former CenTac board
members and retired chiefs Ron Fuchs of Summit County's Franklin
Township police and Walt Markowski of Copley police.

The individual police departments handled most of their assigned
officers' salaries. The sheriff's office handled the rest of CenTac's
money.

According to its report, CenTac also seized $16 million in assets from
criminals over the years -- a puffed-up figure that deflates when the
assets sell. For example, the $11 million in assets CenTac seized in
the past five years produced $1.9 million in actual income.

That's on top of the $2.3 million in federal grants CenTac has
received in its lifetime.

CenTac's board decided in the mid-1990s to squirrel away much of its
forfeiture money, banking it against the possible end of federal
funding. If its grant money were cut off tomorrow, CenTac could
survive without assistance for at least two more years.

Outside oversight of CenTac was minimal. Only in the wake of the
escorts case did its board request a state audit. That audit, not yet
complete, will be CenTac's first.

Prior to that, the task force's only outside reviews came from the
state Office of Criminal Justice Services, which handled its grant
applications. They weren't always favorable.

"Arrests and assets seized, compared to other urban areas and given
the level of funding, are low," said a 1993 report.

Other reviews said CenTac's salaries were higher than those paid by
other task forces and that CenTac paid too much money to too many
people and had too little to show for it.

That was before CenTac sprang into action with some of its biggest
cases -- most only tangentially related to drugs.

Focus shifts to assets

The escorts case wasn't the first time CenTac strayed from its
assigned territory. CenTac went after convenience stores trafficking
in food stamps in 1994, and went after massage parlor prostitutes in
1990.

The earlier prostitution case didn't impress the state.

In 1991, state officials refused to approve a requested $100,000 boost
in funding for CenTac, on the grounds that the Spa 77 massage parlor
investigation was outside the scope of its grant.

The massage parlor, CenTac argued unsuccessfully, was involved in
organized crime. (CenTac, incidentally, cried all the way to the bank:
Four years after the state's chiding, IRS prosecutors who took over
the massage parlor case handed almost $700,000 in asset seizure income
to CenTac.)

Liberal use of racketeering laws against alleged organized crime
figures was vintage CenTac, in large part because of Prosecutor Bandy
- -- the county's resident expert on RICO laws.

RICO laws are intended to catch kingpins.

But CenTac and Bandy democratized them. "If two guys sold marijuana on
two separate occasions" and CenTac was involved, Burdon says, it would
become a RICO case.

Bandy went out of her way to find grounds to add racketeering charges
to the food stamp case -- and she got them, along with asset seizures
for CenTac that a racketeering case allowed.

Bandy makes no apologies. She says her critics may have philosophical
or political arguments against her liberal use of RICO statutes. But
they don't have any legal argument, she says.

"Those folks ought to be talking to the legislators who passed the
law," she says.

Bandy argues that CenTac's full court press on food stamp trafficking
hurt "people who were making millions of dollars by taking the food
out of the mouths of children. Well, I'm sorry."

But racketeering charges against escorts?

Might have been good for them, Bandy says, better than continuing the
routine of charging them with misdemeanors.

"I'd hoped they'd change their ways," she says.

Lacking leadership

The escorts case exposed cracks in oversight of CenTac.

CenTac's official boss -- Summit County Sheriff Richard Warren -- says
he was surprised and "very, very upset" when he found out CenTac paid
informants to have sex, for instance.

"I told them . . . You guys can't just go around doing whatever you
want. No wonder we get punched in the nose."

Housed with the rest of the task force in CenTac's various secret
headquarters, Sgt. Larry Limbert was supposed to report on CenTac's
doings to Warren, through a chief deputy.

Warren now claims that line of communication broke down. He blames a
former chief deputy, Lance Belka -- although Belka is widely
considered a scapegoat for Warren's CenTac problems.

"Belka betrayed me and Belka betrayed the county," Warren
said.

A request to interview Limbert, submitted through Warren's office, was
declined.

Investigations were also directed by Bandy, who answered to her boss
in the prosecutor's office. CenTac's assigned prosecutor since 1994,
Bandy retired under pressure early this spring.

Critics who agree that there are problems with CenTac disagree on
who's to blame.

Former CenTac detective Jimmy Tomsho also blames Limbert. He called
Limbert a "wild cannon" in print this spring and a few weeks later,
under pressure from CenTac, lost his job with Norton police.

Defense attorney Burdon blames Bandy because, he says, she became too
close to CenTac detectives.

"It's just common sense," he says. "When you assign a prosecutor to
work as closely as she did with a secret operation like that, they
will lose their objectivity, lose their independence as an attorney.

"Judie became a policeman," he says. "She should have been directing
those investigations. She did not."

CenTac targets critics

The most chilling rap on CenTac is that it investigates its enemies
and silences its critics. Bandy denies it, but fear of CenTac is there
- -- deserved or not.

It appears to spring from a combination of some well-known CenTac
stings on opponents and the task force's penchant -- in the tradition
of police organizations everywhere -- for dealing in the worst kinds
of gossip.

The task force has a reputation for going fishing: According to
defense attorneys, CenTac for years has been asking suspects about one
particular township police officer, without success.

CenTac's Limbert was known for collecting dirt and then holding it.
(Defense attorney Tom Adgate calls him "the J. Edgar Hoover of Summit
County.")

One example was last fall, when allegations that Summit County
Prosecutor Michael Callahan had shared drugs and sex with a prostitute
in his former courtroom became public.

Those allegations were first made to a CenTac officer more than a year
earlier, by a prostitute who was murdered a short while later.

CenTac didn't investigate it and didn't share it during the subsequent
murder investigation -- although CenTac talked about it in house.

The allegation against the Republican prosecutor was burbling in the
Democratic sheriff's office long before it burst into public view.

Bandy says dirt comes to CenTac by virtue of the job CenTac does. It
can be about criminals, politicians or cops, she says.

Or defense attorneys.

Matt Fortado was a prominent drug lawyer and well-known cocaine user
- -- and had beaten Bandy and CenTac six out of seven times in court --
when he became a CenTac target in 1994.

CenTac tried to entrap Fortado a number of times, he says: "They'd
send people to me offering to pay half in cash and half in drugs."

They put him under surveillance. Fortado said he'd see the ponytailed
CenTac guys outside his office or apartment, and wave.

CenTac eventually got him for using drugs, after wiring his partner.
He pleaded guilty to drug abuse in exchange for being sentenced to a
drug treatment program and for a promise that his record would be expunged.

Two months later, CenTac piled on, indicting Fortado over a ring his
girlfriend wore. A jury acquitted him. More recently, CenTac allegedly
went after Larry Smith, one of CenTac's fiercest opponents in the
escorts case.

It was Smith who dug up the embarrassing allegation that a CenTac
detective had impregnated an escort, then used drug-buy money to help
pay for her abortion.

Jack Porter, the former Akron vice commander whose alleged protection
of an escort is what started CenTac's investigation into escort
services, says a well-known CenTac informant told him he was being
coerced into participating in an undercover sting of Smith early this
year.

The informant was to pretend he needed legal help and then offer to
pay with drugs or drug money. Attorneys who accept drug cash in
amounts of $10,000 or more have to report that to the IRS.

Porter says the informant told him CenTac "threatened to throw a bag
of dope in his car if he didn't help out."

Smith couldn't comment on Porter's tale, other than to say that he'd
also heard the story. "Nothing surprises me about CenTac," he says,
"and I'm very angry."

Warren says he had heard nothing about CenTac's reputed investigations
of enemies until this winter, when Adgate threw out his J. Edgar
Hoover comments during a radio interview.

He said the allegation is one of the things he and the CenTac board
are now looking into.

"If we have a loose cannon, we'll deal with it," he
says.

Fighting to stay alive

The escorts case spelled the end of Bandy.

Stung politically, and with serious concerns about Bandy's charges,
Callahan shut the case down in January, offering generous plea deals
to all involved -- a decision Bandy calls pure politics.

He then demoted Bandy, forcing her retirement; demoted several of her
key allies, including the man in charge of forfeitures; and withdrew
the prosecutor's office from the CenTac board for the first time in 13
years -- washed his hands of it, in other words.

Warren's office, while looking at possible changes, is working to keep
CenTac afloat.

CenTac, meanwhile, keeps fighting.

Even as the escorts case collapsed, according to Porter, he was
approached by a woman who described herself as one of his fellow defendants.

She asked him if he could help her score some crystal
meth.

"I felt like leaning into her blouse and saying, 'Sure. It's in my
pocket. Got a thousand dollars?' " Porter says.

Bandy says the escorts case isn't over. The IRS -- which also has a
spot on CenTac's board -- is still investigating.

The implication is that CenTac is bigger than Callahan or Warren or
its member police agencies.

That's the beauty of CenTac, Bandy says. "They have that
independence."