NEW JERSEY POLICE ENLIST HOTEL WORKERS IN WAR ON DRUGS

TRENTON -- In an aggressive effort to catch drug smugglers, New Jersey
state troopers have quietly enlisted workers at dozens of hotels along the
New Jersey Turnpike to tip them off about suspicious guests who, among
other things, pay for their their rooms in cash or receive a flurry of
phone calls, according to people who have participated in the program.

The Hotel-Motel Program, operated out of the state police special
projects unit since the early 1990's and modeled on a similar
initiative in Los Angeles and by some Federal agencies, has recruited
managers and employees at an undisclosed number of hotels to act as
confidential informers about people who fit the profile of drug smugglers.

Hotel managers who participate in the program say they routinely allow
troopers, without a warrant, to leaf through the credit card receipts
and registration forms of all guests at the hotel and to offer $1,000
rewards to hotel workers whose tips lead to successful arrests.

In return, the hotel and motel managers say, they are assured that any
searches or arrests will occur after the suspect drives off the hotel
premises and that their workers will never be required to testify or
have their names revealed in court documents.

At the heart of the program are the troopers' surveillance seminars,
which train front desk clerks, bellhops and porters to scrutinize
guests who fit the profile of drug traffickers by asking for corner
rooms, hauling trailers behind their cars or frequently moving from
room to room. Several hotel employees and union leaders said troopers
have also trained them to take racial characteristics into account and
pay particular attention to guests who speak Spanish.

State police officials, who have been besieged for years by charges
that troopers illegally single out black and Hispanic motorists on New
Jersey highways, acknowledge that hotel personnel have been enlisted
as informers.

But they would not say how many people had been searched, questioned
or arrested in the program, and they denied that race played any role
in it.

Lieut. Bruce Geleta, who commands the unit, declined to discuss what
factors troopers teach hotel employees to look for, saying that he did
not want to alert the drug traffickers to his tactics. But he insisted
that race was not among them.

"Believe me, these days, we're very careful not to do anything like
that," he said in an interview.

But Clo Smith, a front desk clerk at the Holiday Inn near Newark
Airport, said she sat through the hourlong seminar three years ago and
was offended that the state police detective suggested that
Spanish-speaking guests should be treated with more suspicion than
those who speak English.

"Let's just say I found it somewhat insensitive," said Ms. Smith, the
union steward for Local 819 of the International Brotherhood of
Teamsters, which represents front desk employees at the hotel.

David Feeback, president of Hotel and Restaurant Employees Local 69 in
Secaucus, said some of his members have also complained that troopers
have pressured them to participate and report any patrons at hotel
restaurants who speak Spanish and pay with large sums of cash.

"It's racial profiling, plain and simple," Feeback said. "They
shouldn't be discriminating against people that way. And if any of my
members ask, I tell them to have nothing to do with it."

Lieutenant Geleta said he would not provide a racial breakdown of
those people stopped, searched or arrested as part of the Hotel-Motel
Program. John R. Hagerty, a spokesman for the state police, also
declined to release the names or court case numbers of individuals who
were prosecuted after being arrested by troopers in the Hotel-Motel
unit.

Although it is a common, and widely accepted, investigative technique
for detectives to develop a network of sources within the community
they police, the state troopers' Hotel-Motel Program is particularly
aggressive because in some cases it uses the entire staff of a hotel
to keep guests under the watchful eyes of police informers throughout
their stay.

That has made the program very effective, Lieutenant Geleta
said.

And although the practice of using such informers is legal as long as
their participation is voluntary, civil rights advocates and members
of the tourism and hospitality industry say it raises privacy concerns.

"For the state police to be looking through people's credit card
receipts and registration forms, and from what I understand,
conducting surveillance on some of them, is just a gross invasion of
privacy," said Lenora Lapidus, legal director for the New Jersey
chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Jan Larsen, president of the New Jersey Hotel and Motel Association,
said that he had not heard of the program and that the organization
had never been asked to take a formal position on it.

But Larsen, who runs the East Brunswick Hilton, said he would not
allow his staff to participate.

"We wouldn't allow the police to look through our records without a
subpoena, period," Larsen said. "We have an obligation to protect
people's privacy. I would think there's a civil liability if we start
giving out information."

Robert Fields, owner of the Days Inn near Newark Airport, said he
refused to participate in the program because he thought it violated
his guests' right to privacy. Fields said that in 1997, his general
manager was asked by the state police to join the program, but Fields
and his manager both decided it would be intrusive to grant the
troopers' requests to search arbitrarily through "the bucket" where
registration cards and credit card imprints are stored.

"It's like a tactic out of some dictatorship," Fields said. "When a
person checks into a hotel, he or she has a reasonable assumption that
the place of business will protect their privacy, not treat them like
a criminal."

Days Inn is part of national chain, as are some of the participating
motels; the national owners or managers in some cases allow each
individual manager to decide independently whether to participate. The
Hilton chain, for instance, forbids managers to allow the police to
inspect the records of its guests without a subpoena.

The existence of the program came to light after some hotel workers,
offended by what they perceived to be discrimination, began to
complain to lawyers who in turn notified some reporters.

Ms. Lapidus said that among the questions raised by the disclosure of
the informer program was whether troopers testified truthfully in
court hearings about arrests that were initiated by hotel employees.

"There are certainly search and seizure issues here," Ms. Lapidus
said. "The Constitution guarantees that every defendant knows all the
evidence against them and all the witnesses against them, so if we
find that that hasn't been happening, it's certainly something we'd be
interested in pursuing."

But Lieutenant Geleta said that his detectives were savvy enough to
conceal their informers' identities without violating either the law
or police procedure.

"We have ways of handling that," he said, but declined to
elaborate.

Moreover, he said, the vast majority of the arrests made by the
Hotel-Motel unit ended with guilty pleas long before trial.

Hotel managers who participated in the program differed in their
assessments of whether race played a role in it.

Fred Hartman, manager of the Ramada Inn near Newark Airport, said he
was convinced that guests were scrutinized only on their behavior, and
not on their race.

"There's no profiling whatsoever," said Hartman, who acknowledged that
he never attended one of the troopers' training sessions. Hartman said
he had no qualms about allowing troopers to check through the credit
card receipts and registration forms of guests on a weekly basis
because "they're good guys, and we want to cooperate with them
whenever we can." But even some hotel managers who support the program
say that state troopers have told them that the intent is to catch
West Indians or Hispanic people, particularly South and Central
Americans, involved in the drug trade. Chip Woodell, general manager
of the Hampton Inn near Newark Airport, said he agreed to let the
state police address his employees last month because troopers
convinced him they were interested only in catching international drug
smugglers rather than guests who may use narcotics themselves.

"They told me they weren't interested in catching someone smoking a
joint in their room," said Woodell, who said he allows troopers to
check through his guests' registration records an average of twice a
week. "What they want is some guy from Colombia, who swallowed a kilo
of cocaine wrapped in balloons, who was trying to sneak it through the
airport."