SUITS ALLEGE U.S. FAILED TO STANCH `CRACK' EPIDEMIC

Inner-city residents who claim the government did nothing to stop ``crack''
cocaine sales in their neighborhoods in the 1980s sued the CIA and Justice
Department on Monday.

The federal civil-rights lawsuits, filed in Oakland and Los Angeles, were
partially prompted by last year's disclosure of a 1982 agreement between
the late CIA Director William Casey and former Attorney General William
French Smith that the spy agency had no duty to report drug crimes to the
Justice Department.

Justice Department officials had not reviewed the lawsuit and will not
comment on it until today, spokesman David Slade said. The CIA did not
return a telephone message left by the Associated Press on Monday evening.

The class-action complaints were filed on behalf of mostly black residents
whose babies were born addicted to crack, whose relatives died in
drug-related drive-by shootings and whose communities were affected by
crowded emergency rooms and gutted business districts, the lawsuit said.

A 1996 Mercury News series, ``Dark Alliance,'' asserted that profits from
cocaine sold to Los Angeles street gangs in the '80s were funneled to
CIA-supported Nicaraguan Contras and that those sales sparked the crack
cocaine epidemic in the city. The Mercury News later said the series was
flawed.

Last summer, an 800-page internal Justice Department report exonerated the
department and the CIA.