METH USERS, ATTUNED TO DETAIL, ADD ID THEFT HABIT

Joe Morales, a prosecutor in Denver, can remember when crack came to
his city in the 1980's. Gangs set up on Colfax Avenue and in the Five
Points neighborhood, and street crime -- murders and holdups -- grew.

When methamphetamine proliferated more recently, the police and
prosecutors at first did not associate it with a rise in other
crimes. There were break-ins at mailboxes and people stealing
documents from garbage, Mr. Morales said, but those were handled by
different parts of the Police Department.

But finally they connected the two. Meth users -- awake for days at a
time and able to fixate on small details -- were looking for checks
or credit card numbers, then converting the stolen identities to
money, drugs or ingredients to make more methamphetamine. For these
drug users, Mr. Morales said, identity theft was the perfect support system.

While public concern about identity theft has largely focused on
elaborate computer schemes, for law enforcement officials in Denver
and other Western areas, meth users have become the everyday face of
identity theft. Like crack cocaine in the 1980's, officials say, the
rise of methamphetamine has been accompanied by a specific set of
crimes and skills that are shared among users and dealers.

"The knowledge of how to violate the law comes contemporaneously with
the meth epidemic," said Sheriff Paul A. Pastor of Pierce County,
Wash., who said the majority of identity theft cases his officers
investigated involved methamphetamine.

Tammie Carroll, a mother of four in Denver who was indicted in 2003
in an identity theft ring, described her social circle succinctly.

"Anybody I knew that did meth was also doing fraud, identity theft or
stealing mail," Ms. Carroll said. "We helped each other out, whatever
we needed to do that day. They all had their own little role."

Mr. Morales, director of the Denver district attorney's economic
crime unit, said 60 percent to 70 percent of his office's identity
theft cases involved methamphetamine users or dealers, often in rings
of 10 or more.

"Look at the states that have the highest rates of identity theft --
Arizona, Nevada, California, Texas and Colorado," Mr. Morales said.
"The two things they all have in common are illegal immigration and meth."

But identity thieves are difficult to generalize about because most
crimes are never solved. The prevalence of meth use among identity
theft suspects may say more about the state of law enforcement than
about the habits of lawbreakers. In other words, meth users may
simply be the easiest to catch.

In Denver, Mr. Morales said his office and the local police lacked
the resources to pursue more sophisticated identity thieves who
crossed jurisdictions or bought and sold identities over the
Internet. On the other hand, he said, "it's easy to get a meth addict
to flip" and testify against others.

Nonetheless, prosecutors, police officers, drug treatment
professionals, former identity thieves and recovering addicts
describe a connection between meth use and identity theft that is
fluid and complementary, involving the hours that addicts keep, the
nature of a methamphetamine high and the social patterns of meth
production and use, which differ from those of other illegal drugs.

For example, crack cocaine or heroin dealers usually set up in
well-defined urban strips run by armed gangs, which stimulates gun
traffic and crimes that are suited to densely populated
neighborhoods, including mugging, prostitution, carjacking and
robbery. Because cocaine creates a rapid craving for more, addicts
commit crimes that pay off instantly, even at high risk.

Methamphetamine, by contrast, can be manufactured in small
laboratories that move about suburban or rural areas, where addicts
are more likely to steal mail from unlocked boxes. Small
manufacturers, in turn, use stolen identities to buy ingredients or
pay rent without arousing suspicion. And because the drug has a long
high, addicts have patience and energy for crimes that take several
steps to pay off.

In a survey of 500 county sheriffs, 27 percent said methamphetamine
had contributed to a rise in identity theft in their areas. Even more
- -- 62 percent and 68 percent, respectively -- noted that it
contributed to increases in domestic abuse or robberies and burglaries.

"I think identity theft is a big deal; there's a lot of it going on,"
said Terree Schmidt-Whelan, executive director of the Pierce County
Alliance in Washington, which provides court-mandated drug treatment
to addicts. "But I don't think it's going on to the extent we read
about because we're not seeing it to that extent here."

The circumstances of methamphetamine arrests, Dr. Schmidt-Whelan
said, can exaggerate the connection with identity theft. "If a
sheriff does a bust and there are 10 people in a room, are they all
doing it?" she asked.

After law enforcement officers in Washington reported that high
percentages of their identity theft cases involved methamphetamine,
including 100 percent in Spokane County, Senator Maria Cantwell,
Democrat of Washington, proposed a bill to study the connection.

Richard Rawson, a researcher at the University of California, Los
Angeles, who has been studying methamphetamine since the 1980's,
agrees that meth use is compatible with the kind of concentration
needed to be an identity thief.

"Crack users and heroin users are so disorganized and get in these
frantic binges, they're not going to sit still and do anything in an
organized way for very long," Dr. Rawson said. "Meth users, on the
other hand, that's all they have, is time. The drug stimulates the
part of the brain that perseverates on things. So you get people
perseverating on things, and if you sit down at a computer terminal
you can go for hours and hours."

But Dr. Rawson said he had not seen a connection with identity theft
in his research, and had not heard of one until law enforcement
officials started bringing it up in conferences in the last year.

"If it is a major event, it's a relatively new one," he said. "How
widespread it is, I don't know."

In Phoenix, which has the nation's highest rate of identity theft
complaints, officials first became aware of the connection when
laboratory raids uncovered stolen mail and checks that had been
washed with acetone, a chemical used to make methamphetamine.

"We thought for a while that that was the connection," said Todd C.
Lawson, a state prosecutor who specializes in identity theft. "But we
learned there was much more to it."

Often identity theft rings organize like meth labs, where one person
has the technical skills and others gather the raw materials. In an
identity theft ring, one person might work the computer and the
others steal identities or use the fraudulent checks or credit cards
to get cash.

In Minnesota, meth laboratories and users developed a barter economy
of washed checks, stolen checkbooks, drugs, ingredients and
equipment, said Carol Falkowski, a spokeswoman for Hazelden, a drug
treatment center in Center City.

In rural parts of Salt Lake County, Utah, meth addicts take their
stolen identities onto the Internet because it has more targets than
the local area, said Pat Fleming, director of county substance abuse
services. "Meth is one of the major things driving identity theft in
Utah," Mr. Fleming said.

Cocaine and heroin bypassed these areas because importers took the
drugs directly to Salt Lake City, where addicts commit different
crimes to pay for them.

For D., a 22-year-old woman in Missoula, Mont., meth and identity
theft just came together.

"It's always suggested if you're around people that are high," she
said, agreeing to be identified only by her first initial because she
said she was afraid of a past associate. "They know that this is an
easy way to get money. That's the only way we ever found out about
it, here anyway."

With advice from a fellow user, D. and her husband at the time stole
a checkbook and wrote $5,600 worth of checks, using the money to buy
drugs, gamble at Montana casinos and pay for hotel rooms, where she
stayed up all night doing crossword puzzles. She never considered
more traditional forms of crime, she said.

"Going and stealing money from people is too risky," D. said. "With
this, I was sitting in my car at a bank, I could drive away if I
wanted to. That's the only way I would have ever considered because I
felt it was more safe. Now I think it was the stupidest thing I've ever done."

She was caught, finally, when she misspelled the signature of one of
her victims.

For Ms. Carroll, the end came when one of her accomplices took an
identity out of Ms. Carroll's trash and tried to use it. Ms. Carroll
discarded identities every few days to avoid detection. When the
police arrested her, the accomplice pointed them to Ms. Carroll.

Ms. Carroll said she had not used methamphetamine since Jan. 7, 2003.
She has also regained custody of her three children, who were placed
in foster care after her arrest; a fourth, an infant at the time, was adopted.

Ms. Carroll said she planned to start college in August.

"I still see people put the little red flags up on their mailboxes
when they're mailing their bills," she said. "It amazes me. They
still put their checks in their own mailboxes, and that was one of
the biggest things we did was watch for red flags on mailboxes.
You're sending your electricity bill, you have a check in there,
that's all the information we needed."

People underestimate the resourcefulness of thieves, she said.

"Five days a week we did it," Ms. Carroll said. "It was like a job."