RITUAL DANCE OF HEROIN TRADE MAKES BIG STRIDES IN EUGENE

Police Find Few Penalties Will Deter Street-Level Dealers As The Drug Flows
From Mexico Into The Liberal City

EUGENE -- International drug traffickers reach far, from the poppy fields
of western Mexico to Fifth Avenue in Eugene, where a man in a baggy
sweatshirt swings his bicycle into a U-turn and makes his way back to a
younger man lounging at a bus stop.

Eye contact, a barely perceptible nod. Now the man on the bicycle slows and
coasts. It's a sleepy midsummer afternoon in the Whiteaker neighborhood.

From the back of a nondescript van parked nearby, undercover police officer
Doug Mozan watches the encounter unfold. He speaks softly into a hand-held
radio.

"I've got the eye," he says, telling the other team members that he can see
the undercover officer on the bike. Two patrol cars and three other
plainclothes officers lurk nearby.

The bicyclist eases to a stop. The long, dark hair streaming from beneath
his cap is a wig. The baggy sweatshirt hides a 9 mm pistol. The headset
he's wearing looks as if it's plugged into a Walkman, but instead it's
connected to a police radio.

As in most buys, the conversation is limited. "Chiva?" The Spanish
translation is "nanny goat," but it's street slang for black tar heroin. A
half-gram goes for as little as $25 in Eugene, well below the price in
larger cities. The street dealers carry heroin in their mouths, tied into
small balloons or in sandwich bags that have been cut at the corner and
heat-sealed with a match.

If the cops jump them, they swallow the balloons and retrieve them later by
hacking them up or waiting for a bowel movement. That is, if the balloons
don't leak. Without medical treatment, chunks of heroin dissolving in the
stomach would mean certain death.

The deal is done, and the undercover officer pedals away. When he's safely
out of sight, the rest of the team springs into action.

A patrol car careens around a corner and screeches to a halt. A uniformed
officer pops out and sprints to the dealer, grabbing his throat to keep him
from swallowing the balloons.

He's quickly cuffed, searched and hustled off to jail. The trap is reset.

But the men arrested are out of jail the next day, released to make room
for more violent offenders.

"It's sort of maintenance down here," Mozan said. "We keep things at a dull
roar."

In 1998, Eugene police made 475 arrests for heroin sales or possession, far
more than for any other drug. Through July 1999, they made 254 heroin arrests.

Violent crime a priority Oregon's criminal justice system is geared to
dealing first with violent crimes such as murder, rape, robbery and child
abuse. In Lane County, minor drug cases are typically settled by
negotiation, rolled up in plea agreements.

It reflects the reality of limited jail and prison beds and the need to
devote resources to violent crime, said Steven Skelton, chief deputy in the
Lane County district attorney's office.

"Right now the criminal justice system has pretty much thrown up the white
flag when it comes to drug cases," Skelton said.

The standard sentence for possession of less than 5 grams of heroin is 30
days in the county jail. But the jail is so crowded that inmates serving
drug sentences often are released after a couple of days.

"It's not a deterrent," Skelton said. "They don't believe they'll get
caught. And if they do get caught, 30 days in jail with food and a warm bed
is not too bad."

Police and prosecutors pursue cases against large-scale drug traffickers,
Skelton said, but street-level dealers and users are low on the priority
list. And in a liberal city such as Eugene, with its history of tolerating
casual drug use, many have no problem with that, he said.

At the top are at least three Mexican organizations with links to
international narcotics cartels, according to police and court records.

The Mexican groups have taken advantage of a shift in U.S. drug tastes.
Between 1985 and 1996, the number of cocaine users in the United States
dropped by 70 percent, according to U.S. State Department figures.

The demand for heroin hasn't risen proportionally, but it's increasing
rapidly and "is a warning sign we ignore at our peril," according to the
report.

Mexican crime groups that previously distributed cocaine for Colombian
cartels have split off from the Colombians and now produce, smuggle and
distribute drugs on their own.

A family of heroin dealers Brought into Oregon by legal and illegal Mexican
immigrants, heroin typically is divided and sold by groups of relatives and
friends, police say.

Much of the heroin trade in Eugene and Springfield, for example, is
controlled by members of what police call the Davila crime family.

Family members also operate in Salem and in Long Beach, Wash., according to
a search warrant affidavit filed by Eugene police Detective Kevin McCormick
of the Interagency Narcotics Enforcement Team.

The language barrier hampers investigations. Dealers also protect
themselves by obtaining multiple driver's licenses and identification
cards. They use numerous cars and switch registrations to throw police off
the track.

Midlevel dealers, a step up from the street sellers who plague Whiteaker,
make deliveries by car. They use pagers and cellular phones; addicts punch
in an assigned code number to identify themselves. The dealer calls them
back and names a meeting place, sometimes using code for that, too.

An 18-year-old Eugene girl who smoked a half a gram a day before quitting
this fall said she and her dealer used a simple code in which "Meet me at
the P" meant "park," and "S" meant "Safeway."

Cash from drug sales is laundered by shipping it to Mexico by wire
transfer. Dealers wire money using different names or have other people do
it for them.

But police have a few tricks of their own. In addition to wearing wigs and
wires, they're not above putting dummy video cameras on utility poles to
make street dealers and addicts think an area is under surveillance.