COP OPERATION OF 'MADNESS'

"The last time I worked arraignments," Robin Levinson was saying, "I had
four kids on one joint." Four nice young people arrested by undercover
police officers and dragged through the Seventh Circle of Hell, aka the New
York City Criminal Court booking-and-arraignment process - for passing a
single marijuana cigarette.

"That's Operation Condor for you," Levinson said.

Robin Levinson is a Legal Aid lawyer in Queens. She and her colleagues have
an eye-opening view of what passes for criminal justice in New York. Lately,
they've been seeing an avalanche of youth arrests - packing the dreary
holding cells, clogging the arraignment parts, tarring thousands of young
New Yorkers with criminal records for the very first time.

"Ninety percent of these cases are just junk," Levinson said. "Trespass.
Beer drinking. Lots and lots of marijuana. Most of them never even get
beyond arraignment." Which isn't to say they don't wreak damage just the
same.

What exactly is being achieved here? Has Rudy Giuliani's quality-of-life
policing gone off the deep end? Is this really how precious law-enforcement
dollars should be spent - giving rap sheets to otherwise law-abiding kids?
Smart people all across the city are beginning to ask questions like these.

This indefensible campaign was launched Jan. 17. Five hundred extra
undercover cops are being called to duty every night at a cost of $24
million and counting in police overtime alone.

And what has that money bought? So far, Operation Condor has produced 21,445
arrests, the vast majority for minor, nonviolent crimes.

"These are not traditional buy-and-bust cases," said Ethan Nadelmann, who
runs The Lindesmith Center, a Manhattan think tank that studies America's
so-called War on Drugs. "These are sell-and-bust. You have undercover people
offering to sell marijuana - and then busting people for simple possession.
It's a highly questionable approach to policing, inducing law-abiding people
to commit crimes." Levinson's clients in Queens, like all Operation Condor
defendants, were cuffed, arrested, searched, printed, booked and charged -
then kept for many hours in a holding cell for their few seconds before a
criminal court judge, who, after the tiniest little hearing, finally sent
all four of the teenagers home.

"They're sitting in jail overnight with people who have serious records,"
the lawyer said. "That's not a good thing." The police and prosecutors don't
even bother with interrogations. "They are not interested," Levinson said.
"They made their collar." Time for them to go home.

"A lot of the time, I'm not even sure anyone has done anything criminal,"
said Susan Hendricks, a citywide supervisor at the Legal Aid Society's
Criminal Defense Division. "We have seen an awful lot of arrests - primarily
of young black men, teenaged boys - for trespassing when they are going to
visit their grandma, their relatives, their girlfriends. These are young men
who are in school. Now they are in the criminal-justice system, and we're
starting in on them." Ten days ago, an Operation Condor bust went dreadfully
wrong.

Undercover cops approached two off-duty security guards in front of the
Wakamba Cocktail Lounge on Eighth Avenue.

The first undercover asked about marijuana.

The two young civilians just said go away.

Under circumstances still hotly debated, a police officer's gun was fired,
and 22-year-old Patrick Dorismond was swiftly dead.

You already know the rest of that story.

But about the operation that got us here? The Lindesmith Center, funded by
financier George Soros, is doing some of the freshest thinking anywhere on
drug policy in America. This week, Ethan Nadelmann and his associates turned
their attention to Operation Condor.

Marijuana arrests, Nadelmann noted, are up across the country, more than
doubling from 300,000 in 1992 to 700,000 in the past two years.

But in New York, marijuana arrests increased by 10 times those before the
Giuliani years. And in recent surveys, 86 percent of those marijuana arrests
are for simple possession.

"It is a way to establish the first-ever criminal record for tens of
thousands of young New Yorkers, mostly black, but not entirely. It is a form
of hyper-aggressive policing that has really gone over the edge," Nadelmann
said.

"This is Giuliani's 'Reefer Madness.' It's 'Reefer Madness' that has left an
innocent man dead. The Dorismond thing is a clincher, the pinnacle of the
campaign." But that's the way of Operation Condor.

Day to day, on it goes.