A BUSINESS THAT KNOWS NO BOUNDARIES

In March 1995, a confidential informant told agents from the Treasury
Department's Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms about something that
seemed out of place — a crack house in McLean, doing tens of thousands of
dollars in business near the Madeira School's 376acre wooded campus on
Georgetown Pike.

Nine months later, agents had documented the dealing and something more: Of
the 100 regular customers they saw coming and going, 10 to 12 were teenagers.

In July, federal agents closed out a Northern Virginia marijuana conspiracy
launched in the 1970s by five friends who joined forces while in Fairfax
County high schools. By the time the friends were indicted, agents had
learned that they had a distribution ring of more than 100 associates,
including at least one who was dealing drugs to W.T. Woodson High School
students.

In the realm of drug dealing, the two cases show where the worlds of adults
and teenagers meet.

In McLean, the drugs flowed from New York to the District to McLean. The
ring of high schools friends was homegrown, joining ranks here, making a
connection to a drug supplier in the Southwest after one of the original
group went to school there, and then shipping marijuana back to Northern
Virginia for years.

"It's like Amway," said Capt. Gary Ball, who supervised the county's
narcotics division for nearly four years. "It's a trickledown, and the
bottom rung is the kids."

Flip through county search warrants, and it quickly becomes apparent that
there is a steady supply of drugs coming into the region's largest and most
affluent suburb.

Last year alone, police took out search warrants — and ultimately found
drugs — in more than 100 apartments, town houses, singlefamily homes,
motel rooms and cars, where the supplies were stashed in all sorts of
containers: cleanser cans, tennisracket covers, refrigerator freezers.

Sometimes they found drugs when they weren't even looking, as they did when
a carbon monoxide alarm sent rescue workers racing to an empty house.
Looking for tape to post a note to the absent homeowner, a police officer
pulled out a kitchen drawer — and discovered bags of marijuana.

The dealing surprises even veteran investigators, including the supervisor
who oversaw the case of the crack house in McLean.

"I live in Fairfax County," said Raymond G. Rowley, special agent with the
ATF. "I had no idea of the level of drug activity."

Crack House in McLean The informant who told agents about the crack house
offered to introduce an undercover officer to one of the home's residents,
a 42yearold man named Jeffrey Johnson.

Within weeks, the officer and Johnson had become fast friends, an affidavit
shows, the relationship sealed through numerous drug buys.

During his ninemonth operation, the officer made at least 30 drug
purchases totaling $10,000 at the Bellview Road house and counted at last
100 regular customers, including as many as 12 teenagers. "When that house
was jumping, it was attracting people from all over Northern Virginia and
the District to buy crack," Rowley said.

The siting of the house, in an affluent neighborhood and by chance close to
a school, wasn't lost on its regulars. At one point, a nervous customer
spotted a surveillance van and offered the opinion that "the guy [police
officer] who gets his name in the paper" for breaking up a crack house in
this neighborhood was headed for a promotion to "captain or major." He was
reassured — falsely — by the undercover agent that he was wrong about the
van.

In time, the federal agents identified two District men as the house's main
suppliers — and a New York City connection as the source for the District
men.

One of those D.C. suppliers detailed the business arrangements after being
arrested in January 1996 on a crack cocaine charge at a motel in Vienna.

But Rowley never got the chance to move against Johnson. A month before the
D.C. supplier told all, agents found Johnson lying face up on a dirty
mattress of the McLean house, dead from a heroin and crack overdose.

'Operation Class Reunion' Stephen Sawyer's cleaning service was set up to
clean houses all over Northern Virginia. It also laundered his drug money,
investigators said.

Sawyer and four buddies attended two Fairfax County high schools in the
1970s. They were sons of middleclass government and whitecollar
professionals, and they smoked and sold a little marijuana to friends in
the Mount Vernon area.

Like many other parents, theirs bought them cars, which they then used "to
buy and sell drugs," according to James Rodio, then an assistant U.S.
attorney who ultimately prosecuted some of the partners in what federal
agents came to call "Operation Class Reunion."

"They were middleclass kids. That was what was so surprising about this
case," Rodio said. But after their graduation, those average kids turned
their drug dalliance into a multimilliondollar drug enterprise that sold
to hundreds of customers in Fairfax and elsewhere in Northern Virginia,
including a teenage associate who dealt directly to Woodson High School
students. So successful were the old friends, an affidavit shows, that they
started the cleaning service and a cable repair service, all to hide their
drug profits.

As widespread and successful as the drug ring was, it was not the criminal
enterprise as seen on television. There was no crime boss or drug lord. In
fact, the conspiracy had little or no hierarchy.

Instead, what evolved was a loosely knit system, as detailed by the
government, in which Sawyer and others orchestrated the shipment of
marijuana from the Southwest, where one of the group had gone on to
college. The drugs then were sold to entrepreneurs — more than 100 of them,
according to indictments — who sold in their own networks in Fairfax,
Arlington, Alexandria and other Washington suburbs. As the drugs filtered
down the ladder, those at the end had no knowledge of suppliers several
steps back.

By the time Operation Class Reunion concluded in July, federal and state
prosecutors had arrested and convicted more than 40 people.

Most of the sellers were not charged, because they dealt in small
quantities that would not have assured a mandatory minimum jail term if the
sellers were convicted.

Just that sort of calculation — pitting the costs of pursuing a case
against the benefits of drying up drug supplies — helps explain how the
conspiracy operated so freely for so long.

Many of the Class Reunion suspects had been arrested on marijuana charges
earlier but got little or no jail time because they were caught with small
amounts, said Glenn Alexander, an assistant commonwealth's attorney for the
City of Alexandria.

As a consequence, "they never thought they would be thoroughly investigated
to determine the full extent of their operations," Alexander said. "In most
states, even if you have 10 or 20 pounds of marijuana, you are not going to
get large amounts of jail time."

Sawyer was arrested twice for trying to smuggle marijuana into Northern
Virginia, including once in 1987 in El Paso for possessing 24 pounds, and
once in Bradenton, Fla., in May 1991.

The group also escaped much notice because it was "a closed society. They
sold to people they knew and trusted," Rodio said. "These kind of guys
operate years before they get busted."

Arlington and Alexandria police first heard about the group through
informants developed in Old Town in the early 1990s and assembled a task
force that included the federal Drug Enforcement Administration.

As more snitches were developed, it became clear "these guys were moving
multiton quantities of drugs," DEA agent Douglas Kahn said in a recent
interview.

In November 1991, one informant told Kahn that every two weeks the group
was importing 500 pounds of marijuana from Texas, and a driver who helped
bring it to Virginia said he was paid $2,500 a trip, court records show.

By the time the conspiracy was fully exposed, it had amassed more than $1
million in assets that the government seized. Sawyer was sentenced in
January 1995 to 135 months for distributing 1,500 to 2,200 pounds of
marijuana.

He currently is serving a sentence in a federal prison. He did not respond
to requests made through his attorney for an interview for this article.