SMALL TOWN SEEKS RESPITE FROM BIG-CITY DRUGS

NEWPORT, N.H. - Welcome to Newport, the ``Sunshine Town!'' where the Main
Street luncheon special offers all-you-can-eat for $5.95, the major
employer makes guns and golf clubs, the local weekly bills itself as ``a
good newspaper in a good community,'' and, in a typical year, the 12-member
police force registered 105 bicycles and chased down 526 complaints
involving dogs.

Heroin was but a whisper in the wilderness. That is, authorities say, until
Lidia Nunez, a convicted drug dealer from Massachusetts, and her three sons
came to town, relocating from the competitive streets of Lawrence to this
rural whistle-stop community of 6,110 in the Upper Connecticut River
Valley. Branching out into a new market with the help of locals, the group
flooded Sullivan County with their ``Kool Kat'' brand of heroin,
authorities say.

The change was immediate: A county that prosecuted only two cases involving
heroin charges for more than a decade before the Nunezes allegedly began
selling in 1995 brought some 20 heroin-dealing cases in 1997 alone. Three
people have died of heroin overdoses in Newport during the past three
years. In nearby Claremont, police this month investigated three nonfatal
heroin overdoses in five days.

Now, the Nunez organization has been run out of this textile-mill town near
the Vermont border - and into the arms of jailers and federal prosecutors,
who are preparing to try Nunez as a drug-conspirator in October.

But as Nunez and one son await trial and two others await sentencing,
residents say scars remain.

The legacy of the case, they say, is in the shattering of small-town lives
- - and small-town life.

Businesspeople and blue-collar workers got hooked on heroin and hocked
their possessions. Addicts blitzed the area with burglaries, break-ins, and
bad checks - a cycle of neighbor ripping off neighbor that robbed a small
town of its innocence.

On Main Street, residents say, the pulse of small-town life has become
disoriented. Motorists now lock their cars while strolling downtown.
Shopkeepers sheepishly ask for telephone numbers when being paid by check.
Pharmacists keep a sharp eye for stolen pain-killer prescriptions.

``Drugs have a corrosive effect on the soul of a community,'' said Marc
Hathaway, the Sullivan County attorney who helped drive out the group.
``People live here because they don't want problems associated with big
cities - and we have them. It hurts. It hurts people's sense of community

It's just a different world.''

Peter Wiggins was a classic small-town guy, a hard-working, hard-drinking
man in a hard-working, hard-drinking town. In the summer of 1995, the
34-year-old carpenter, machinist, and father was found slumped in a car off
a dirt road, after he suffocated from too many drinks and drugs.

His death, and the heroin found in his body, exposed an underground group
of townspeople using the drug, which still carried the reputation of a
big-city vice.

``When someone dies in a small community, it's like a whole web, and
everyone has a thread to the family or person it's affecting,''said Patryc
Wiggins, 44, Peter's sister and an artist and civic activist.

Authorities say the Nunez clan may have been invited here by local contacts
who had bought drugs from them in Lawrence. The same locals allegedly
joined the gang, serving as guides, runners and dealers to supply and
broaden the circle. Two of Nunez's three adult sons already have pleaded
guilty, one earlier this month, to conspiring to sell drugs. Nunez, 47, has
pleaded not guilty. Her lawyer did not return phone calls seeking comment.
In Lawrence, police say, the Nunez family had long worn out their welcome.
Records show Nunez was convicted of dealing drugs in 1992 and of
fraudulently obtaining $10,000 in welfare benefits in 1993.

``You don't think there's any mother-son relationship like you see in `The
Waltons,' do you?'' said Lawrence Police Lieutenant Calvin Deyermond.
``This is pure and simple for the money.''

So, police and prosecutors say, the Nunez group moved from the alleys to
the backwoods. Several times a week, they allegedly shuttled heroin and
cocaine from the teeming streets of Lawrence to rustic Newport, driving two
hours through a corridor lined with pine trees, moose-crossing signs,
bait-and-tackle shops, and white church steeples that rise above the
verdant valley.

In the Newport area, police say, the out-of-town organization set up shop
in local homes, ordering in fast food and delivering takeout drug orders,
shunning sidewalk sales to avoid being spotted as strangers.

They drummed up sales by passing out free heroin samples at local parties,
like marketers testing a new brand of pigs-in-a-blanket. They hopped from
one house to another, authorities said, dropping local members of the
organization when they became drug-addicted and cut into the profits.

``They were on a mission,'' said Detective Lieutenant James Brown, of the
Newport Police Department. Prosecutors contend the Nunez group brought in
$10,000 a week in heroin and cocaine sales, offering heroin at $10 to $20 a
bag to a county customer base of more than 100 people. The users included a
husband, a housewife, and a former high school sports star.

``It was like a convenience store,'' the onetime three-letter man said of
the operation.

Heroin became so easily available in town, he said, he felt like he was
running in circles, kiting checks and moving money between bank accounts
like a three-card monte dealer; borrowing cash with one hand while scoring
heroin with the other, running up a $15,000 debt; buzzing on an hours-long
heroin high only to crave more when it ended to chase away the drug
sickness that struck him like a relentless flu, causing him to drop 30
pounds.

``Heroin is evil,'' said the 26-year-old man, who did not want his name
used. ``It'll ruin everything.''

Prosecutors say the range of users was staggering. One local man propped
his car up on blocks and sold the tires to feed his heroin habit. He sold
the car jack and tools, too. A Newport nurse lost her job and moved out of
town. Her husband lost his landscaping business, and his home. He was
sentenced to 7 1/2 to 20 years after he was caught running drugs for the
organization. He used to play basketball with the local prosecutor in games
at the recreation center.

``Many of the people we put in jail were friends and neighbors,'' said
Hathaway, the Sullivan County attorney. The Nunez case sparked a blaze of
anger around town because Newport, townspeople say, has a long history of
being tough on crime. In 1945, town officials offered a $25 war bond as a
reward information leading to the capture of the yeggs who stole three
gumball machines.

So in December 1996, when word seeped out that heroin was in town, police
began infiltrating the network and, a year later, rounded up the alleged
ringleaders.

There is an increased threat of AIDS, officials say, with nearly 100
discarded drug needles being discovered last year. A Newport drug counselor
says she worries for the future of children traumatized by strung-out
parents. The influx of heroin came at a time when Newport was remaking
itself from a rough-and-tumble mill town into a quaint cultural center,
with an opera house, bandstand concerts on the common, and a machine-tool
museum.

``We have no heroin problem - after we got rid of the `flatlanders' from
your part of the country,'' said Arnold ``Spunky'' Dodge, 63, who has been
waxing flattops and philosophy from his Newport barber shop for almost 40
years. But he admits ``it changed everybody's way of life.''

Dodge can see the changes through customers like Harley Cheney, 62, a
retired Navy man. Cheney now locks the doors of his home to keep out
burglars looking for drug money. And he worries about heroin getting too
close to children like his 9-year-old grandson, Jeremy. Now this
grandfather watches anxiously as the boy bounds off the barber's chair and
into a new day, with a buzz cut and a piece of Bazooka bubble gum.

Checked-by: Joel W. Johnson