POLICE CRACK DOWN ON SUBURBAN HEROIN

PLANO, Texas - Motivated by greed, 29 people smuggled black tar heroin and
cocaine from Mexico and exploited an untapped suburban market outside
Dallas with sometimes deadly consequences, a federal indictment alleges.

The indictment, released Wednesday, painted well-to-do Plano as a haven for
heroin pushers who often brought the drugs to Texas by stuffing them into
secret compartments in their shoes.

The suspects - mostly men in their 20s - are charged with conspiring to
distribute cocaine and heroin to the young adults and juveniles in this
city of 188,000.

Two dozen of the accused are charged with pushing the very drugs that led
to deadly overdoses of four people, ages 16 to 20, in a five-month span.
The offenses are punishable by 20 years to life in prison if the sellers
are convicted.

The dangerously high levels of purity in the smuggled heroin contributed to
the overdoses, said Julio Mercado, who heads the Dallas office of the
federal Drug Enforcement Administration.

"We were finding heroin up there that was 37 to 70% pure," Mercado said.
"Normal heroin on the street is 3 to 7% pure."

Plano has seen 20 overdoses - 17 of them deadly - since September 1994. The
deaths prompted the formation of a task force to investigate.

The task force was "able to tease out the distribution of the drugs that
caused the deaths," said Paul Villaescusa, a spokesman for the DEA.

He said the 15-month investigation pursued dealers as if they were murder
suspects.

"This is definitely a new twist from dealing with an overdose death as 'too
bad, so sad, you shouldn't have been doing drugs' to treating it as almost
a homicide and running a full-blown homicide investigation," Villaescusa
said.

Twenty-seven of the suspects were in custody, one was still at large and
another will be arrested upon his release from a rehabilitation facility,
police said.

Copyright 1998 Associated Press

Checked-by: (Joel W. Johnson)