INMATE DEATH SPOTLIGHTS PRISON DRUG TRADE

Clever inmates who crave drugs are infinitely creative in how they
obtain them.

They swallow balloons filled with narcotics before their arrests and,
once behind bars, pass them while going to the bathroom. They have
girlfriends transfer contraband packets mouth to mouth during kisses
while at magistrates' offices. They shove anything from drugs to
syringes to sets for picking locks into body cavities, hoping they
won't be discovered.

No one is sure how convicted drug smuggler and federal informant John
Regis "Re Re" King Jr. got his hands on the blood-filled hypodermic
syringe found with his corpse Wednesday in an Allegheny County Jail
cell.

But it's no surprise to veteran jail employees that such paraphernalia
circulates among the cell blocks, even under their watchful eyes.

"In a jail, it's the same all over the United States. Inmates have 24
hours a day to find ways to get contraband into facilities," said
Deputy Warden Ed Urban, a 29-year veteran of the county jail. "There's
just millions of ways."

Investigators are continuing their efforts to uncover just what took
place in the case of King, 36, who left a note behind indicating that
he had paid another inmate $200 for what King thought was heroin.
Hours later, King apparently injected himself with the substance and
went into cardiac arrest. His body was found in his cell during a
morning inmate count.

It will be weeks before toxicology test results show whether King had
drugs in his system, what type they were, and if he might have either
overdosed or shot up a substance that had been poisoned.

Detectives have already conducted about 25 interviews with inmates and
jail staff. In the 56-cell pod where King was confined, inmates are
restricted to their cells for 23 hours a day.

Warden Calvin Lightfoot had little to say about the circumstances of
King's death, refusing to answer questions about the involvement of
illegal drugs.

Paul Brysh, chief counsel for the U.S. attorney's office, which used
King as a witness in a large Texas-to-Pittsburgh drug-ring case, said
he was confident that jail security had not been compromised.

"It is one of those situations where no one's really happy about what
happened, but unfortunately, those things do occur in rare instances,"
Brysh said. "I think we have every confidence in the jail
administration."

Brysh said King was not being used as an informant in any cases at the
time of his death. King had been in the jail since July, when he was
arrested on federal charges of selling cocaine and steroids to an
undercover agent.

Kenneth Fulton, assistant superintendent of the county police, said
King could have gotten the syringe from medical facilities at the jail.

"You have medical staff there, so it's possible that something could
have been stolen," he said."I'm sure there are people who are
diabetics over there, so I'm sure there are syringes that are
available over there."

But Urban said that did not seem likely, given the security
precautions that are in place. Needles are strictly controlled in the
jail, and no inmates work at the infirmary, he said.

"They count and monitor the count of all syringes: When they're
received they're logged in, who used it, and then they go into
receptacles, and they're counted again," Urban said.

Urban painted the struggle between inmates and jail guards as a game
of one-upmanship. Guards foil inmates' latest attempts to smuggle in
drugs, then the convicts invent new ways.

"The inmates find a hole, and we seal it up and think we have the
problem licked, and they find another avenue," Urban said. "It's never
ending."

Take the U.S. mail. Urban said he's aware that people can sprinkle
particles of narcotics between two pages of a magazine, glue the pages
together and drop it off at the post office and have it sent to an
inmate.

Just as jail guards don't go through every page of every magazine
inmates receive, they also don't typically monitor the bathroom habits
of inmates who conceivably could have swallowed drugs, unless there's
good reason.

"Most of the people who come into our jail are pre-trial detainees. We
have to preserve their rights. We're not permitted to do X-rays," Urban said.

"If we have a suspicion that that person may have contraband concealed
in a body cavity, we can take steps to monitor them more closely. But
to do that to every person who comes into the jail, that would be
impossible."

Urban recalled that when he began his job, he attended a training
course in detecting smuggled contraband. He was amazed by what he
found. One inmate, whose story was related at the seminar, packed a
lock-picking set and parts of a hacksaw into a container and inserted
it into his rectum.

Female inmates are known to insert contraband into their vaginas,
Urban said. Sharp objects can be wrapped in cellophane, the finger of
a rubber glove or other packing materials to blunt the points.

Pittsburgh police Cmdr. William Joyce, who oversees the narcotics
squad, said detectives have investigated accounts of people who've
been arrested as part of a plot to smuggle drugs to others in the jail.

After swallowing balloon-sheathed packets of drugs, those people then
deliberately commit a minor crime in order to be arrested and sent
into the jail. Once inside the lockup, the people then pass the
balloons and retrieve the drugs to be delivered or sold to other
inmates, Joyce said.

"We've heard of people who will get themselves arrested for disorderly
conduct," Joyce said. "They know they'll get out fairly quickly, and
they've swallowed drugs deliberately before they've gone in."

Although the county jail does not typically permit physical contact
between inmates and visitors, sometimes contraband is left under
visitors' seats, above a doorway or beneath the desk where the
meetings occur. Inmates in a cleaning crew could pick up the materials
and pass them along.

Urban acknowledged that sometimes things can slip by vigilant guards.
And, he said, there have been cases of guards bringing contraband to
work.