NARCS ON THE STREET

On Duty And Off, Officers' Lives Are Fraught With Danger

The narcotics agent is a fireplug of a man who likes his job. "There's no
sense being a cop if you're going to hide from the criminals," he's fond of
saying.

He lives in Northern New Mexico, close to the homes of drug dealers. After
someone shot at his house, he took home a bulletproof vest and hung it over
his child's crib.

Soon after that, it was time for the baby's christening. When he got to the
church, there was another family there for a baptism with two men the agent
had set up on a drug bust just weeks before - they were out on bond.

"My heart started pounding real fast," he recalls. "I thought 'Oh God --
we're going to have a rumble, right here in the church.' But they acted
respectfully. You know, some of these guys aren't bad people at heart. A lot
of people I grew up with are drug users."

The phone rings. The agent stacks and restacks boxes of bullets on his desk
as he talks with an informant.

A buy-and-bust deal he hoped to do that afternoon has been delayed because
the target, a cocaine dealer, has to take her 12-year-old son to the doctor.

"Can you believe this?" says the agent, rolling his eyes. "Life is
beautiful."

The agent looks out the narrow window of his office. "Is it me, or are drugs
everywhere? ... It seems to me they're everywhere. ... But maybe it's just
me."

He takes his latest seizure out of a safe and places it on his desk. The
black-tar heroin is encased in bits of colorful balloons, each the size of a
gumball. They look like primitive toys. A handful of the heroin balls roll
around on the desktop. "That's $30,000 worth right there," he says.

He takes out a letter agents confiscated on a recent search. The letter is
in a combination of English and Spanish. It reads "te quiero mucho (I love
you very much) but I can't be with you, because my family knows you sell
drugs."

The agent holds up the letter laughing. "Isn't that beautiful," he says. The
letter will be good evidence, he hopes.

In the first three months of this year, the Region III Drug Task Force,
which gets federal funding for drug cases in four Northern New Mexico
counties, has seized a little more than three ounces of heroin. That's down
compared to the same period last year, when the take was six ounces. An
ounce of heroin sells for about $3,500 in bulk. If the dealer breaks it up
into individual doses or caps, the value rises to about $28,000, according
to the agent.

Santa Fe County Undersheriff Benjie Montaño says the seizure figure is lower
this year because agents are working on investigations that take longer.

Montaño admits the task force is still working to restore its credibility
after an embarrassing series of incidents in the early 1990s. On two
occasions, agents holding search warrants went into the wrong homes. In one
case, agents burst into a Santa Cruz home where a woman was cleaning her
bathroom. They pointed a gun at her head, made her lie on the ground and
handcuffed her before realizing agents had read the address wrong on the
warrant.

Agency cooperation wasn't what it should have been, either, Montaño said. In
one case, deputies conducting surveillance on a reputed dealer's property
spotted agents from a different agency peering back at them through their
binoculars.

"It turned out both were doing surveillance on the same guy from different
ends of the property," Montaño recalled.

But Montaño says a lot has changed. State, city and county agencies are
stressing cooperation. A bill by U.S. Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., designates
Rio Arriba County as a High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area - which
qualifies it for about $250,000 in federal funds.

N.M. 76 between Santa Cruz and Chimayó is the stronghold of heroin dealers.
The agent points out the houses. "That one there, we had to rebuild the gate
because we broke it during a search warrant."

The agent, like a lot a people around town, knows where the dealers live. He
knows the signals they use to let customers know they're open for business -
the porch light on all day, or the front gate left in a certain position.

"People think we don't know," he says. "We know."

But the agent says catching dealers isn't as easy as one might think. Some
dealers live on remote back roads, have two-way radios and do their own
surveillance. Going undercover in Chimayó, population 4,100, is difficult,
and in any case some dealers use a tried-and-true narc-detecting technique:
Before they will accept a new customer, they make him or her inject the drug
in front of them.

"If we tried to put someone undercover in here, they'd end up dead or a
junkie within a year," the agent says.

Plus, he says, the narcs are understaffed. The Region III task force has
only five agents for Santa Fe, Los Alamos, Taos and Rio Arriba counties. Rio
Arriba County alone is the size of Connecticut.

The agent turns onto a deeply rutted dirt road. He drives over an arroyo and
back into the woods to a trailer - the home, he says, of a family of dealers
who have been in business for more than 20 years.

"There's one way in and one way out," he says, noting the dealers have
two-way radios. "They know we're coming way before we're coming."

Back in town, the agent recognizes the car of an informant, an addict who
trades information for cash. Nearby in the street stands a man who the agent
says is a well-known dealer. The agent waves down the informant, who pulls
over and rolls down his window. The informant doesn't appear too happy to be
talking to the agent.

The informant is shaking and sweating, although it's unclear whether from
drugs or fear. He tells the agent about a man selling heroin out of a nearby
motel room. Then he peels away, his tires squealing.

What would happen if a dealer spotted an informant talking to the agent? "I
dunno; I guess they could kill him," the agent says.

The agent says the heroin trade in Northern New Mexico is an unorganized
assortment of locals who are being increasingly dominated by a more
organized Mexican faction.

"The locals are taking a back seat to the Mexicans," he says.

In some cases, he says Mexican dealers have moved in with women who provide
them with a base of operations in exchange for drugs.

Another agent says, "The local people used to have the drug trade in their
pockets." Now, he says, the majority of the traffickers are Mexicans who are
better organized.

There aren't any visible drug kingpins in the Española Valley. Instead of
narco-palaces, the dealers tend to live in modest houses or double-wides.
And, in general, the drug trade in Rio Arriba hasn't been marked by the
shoot-outs and street killings that have characterized trafficking in urban
areas and border cities.

The route of the drugs traditionally has been across the border at El Paso,
with the drugs carried in private vehicles and sometimes on passenger trains
to Albuquerque. But an agent who has worked in narcotics for 17 years says
that in the past year he and his colleagues have been seeing drugs routed
into Northern New Mexico from Denver and other points north.

The narcotics agent likes his job. But in some ways he sees it as ultimately
futile.

"We really can't be too proud," he says. "We're out here busting people, and
the heroin problem is getting worse and worse."

So while spending his days sifting tips, trying to manipulate informants,
arguing with the prosecutors about whom he can turn for a bigger fish, the
agent would like to see himself as a quasi-social worker.

"If an addict comes to me for help, I'm going to do everything I can to get
him into a program," he says. "These people have a sickness. I want them to
know, I'm not here to make their lives more miserable."