AS DRUG LAWS RELAX, THIS PROSECUTOR TENSES UP

THE air-conditioner is on overdrive in Bridget G. Brennan's regal
office, formally known as the Office of the New York City Special
Narcotics Prosecutor, at 80 Centre Street: it's positively glacial in
here. Even the furniture has the chills; that skimpily attired lady
tennis player atop the three-foot-high trophy she won at a tournament
in Prospect Park -- too big, she explains, for her apartment, but
perfect for this high-ceiling space -- must be frozen solid.

Maybe this is how prosecutors get their reputation for being
cold-blooded. Especially special narcotics prosecutors. This is the
unusual niche that Ms. Brennan has held since 1998. Her bio says she
is the first woman to head the only agency in the nation solely
dedicated to the investigation and prosecution of major league
narcotics crimes. Mercy is not her metier.

Case in point: In the matter of Ms. Brennan versus dozens of
not-so-ingenuous drug dealers who have taken advantage of the Drug Law
Reform Act of 2004, the State Legislature's revision of the admittedly
stringent Rockefeller drug laws, to abbreviate their prison stays, it
has to be said that Ms. Brennan is locked into overdrive as well. She
can't help it. She says the reform is helping the wrong people and
says she has the facts to prove her theory. (Besides being a
self-labeled perfectionist, Ms. Brennan is a stickler for facts.) Yes,
she knows she does not come across as liberal or progressive; yes, she
knows this is a polarizing issue and that hers is not a popular view
with reform advocates.

"Legislation by public relations doesn't result in good law," she
says. "I don't view drugs as benign." And she is not, she says, aiming
at the odd flower child.

Eighty-four inmates prosecuted by her office for significant offenses,
and sentenced to 15 years to life in prison, applied for sentence
reductions. Sixty-five received reductions; 22 of those reductions
were awarded to major traffickers, Ms. Brennan contends. Did her
office protest? "We can oppose it until we're blue in the face;
doesn't matter, it's done," she says. A grand total of one inmate
applicant, in her opinion, actually fit the presumptive reform
criteria of being a low-level, first-time, nonviolent offender. Nice
that he got out early; not nice about the rest. Irksome.

"The thing that rankles me is that we have to be guided by the law in
this effort, but when the legislation is out of sync with the facts,
you have to make it up as you go along, and what I'm seeing from
judges is a tremendous amount of inconsistency," she says. "I'm not
saying repeal the reforms. I'm saying, spell it out just which
offenders they apply to."

If she has ever met a drug dealer she liked, she does not remember it;
she says the underlying violence in the drug culture is the reason she
does not disclose the borough where she lives or her husband's last
name (their two young children share it, and while she has received no
death threats, others in her office have). She says it has been
obvious to her ever since she worked in the homicide and sex crimes
divisions in the crack-ridden 1980's that drugs are a corrosive
"poison" that fractures families, holds entire neighborhoods hostage
and has a recurring connection to guns and homicide. As for the folks
for whom drug sales constitute their bread and butter, well, Ms.
Brennan, 51, prefers to place them on a starvation diet of sorts.

"If there was a better place than prison to put them in, I'd be all
for it, but there isn't," says Ms. Brennan, a freckle-bedecked,
strawberry blond Wisconsin expatriate who joined the legal staff of
the Manhattan district attorney's office in 1983 on the recommendation
of a professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School who had once
worked for Robert M. Morgenthau and felt she should, too.

She stayed 10 years before moving to special investigations and
focusing on wiretap investigations of international narcotics
traffickers based in the city. Kingpins, she calls them, not reverently.

"You can do five and a half years of prison in your sleep if you know
that waiting for you on the other end is $16 million you made moving
drugs," says Ms. Brennan, who tends to sound a tad hard-boiled when
reminiscing about dealers she and her office have investigated,
arrested and imprisoned.

THIS week, 18 months into the spate of resentencing and outright
releasing that is the byproduct of the Reform Act, Ms. Brennan
released a 100-page study that is highly critical less of the reform
than of the convicted narcotics felons who are benefiting from it. Her
wish list: a "kingpin" provision, as well as a "guns and drugs"
provision, written into the resentencing guidelines. "I know reform
advocates want further reductions in response to street dealers, but I
feel the penalties have already been rolled back enough," she says.
How much influence does she think her study, which she admits is a
"dauntingly" dense read, will exert?

"If history is any guideline, probably not much," she says. Laughing.
Ms. Brennan, the second of 11 children, whose father, Gale, wrote
children's books with characters like Elihu the Elephant and Robert E.
Flea, is not devoid of humor. Asked her husband's occupation, she
grimaces and says, "Lawyer." And why do lawyers always seem to marry
other lawyers?

"Because no one else will have them."