Column One

MAINE IS NOW ON THE DRUG MAIN LINE

It's a long way from Mexico, but to cartels it's an emerging market
for heroin. Just ask the detectives in the small-town trenches.

The obituary in the York Weekly was heartbreaking.

Just 17, Bethany Fritz was a high school senior hoping to study art at
the University of Maine. She lived in an affluent coastal community of
tidal pools, winding roads and thick stands of maple and oak. She
loved her family and friends, her two cats and her dog, Farleigh.

Unmentioned was her cause of death: an overdose of
heroin.

"We were completely flabbergasted that someone could get heroin here,"
said Sarah Lachance, one of Bethany's older sisters. "We thought
heroin was something only junkies in the city did."

New England may be thousands of miles from the producers and brutal
drug enterprises of Mexico and Colombia. But a busy pipeline from
Mexico resolutely moves heroin and cocaine to emerging markets as far
away as coastal Maine, where more and more addicts fill courtrooms,
jail cells, treatment facilities and morgues.

"It's just unbelievable what we've seen here," said Edward Strong,
police chief in nearby Kittery. "I can remember when people around
here didn't know what the word 'heroin' meant. Now, it's everywhere --
cheaper, more available and demand is high."

When Bethany died in 2004, York's small police department didn't have
a full-time narcotics investigator. Tom Cryan, the detective assigned
to the case, acknowledged, "I wasn't getting anywhere."

Then he got an offer of help from Steve Hamel, the full-time narcotics
detective in Kittery, another tiny coastal community one exit south on
Interstate 95. Hamel already was working closely with a narcotics
officer in the next town down the coast, Portsmouth, N.H.

Detectives from the three departments banded together to trace the
source of the heroin and, eventually, helped send Bethany's boyfriend
and his supplier to prison.

Now, the detectives have created an unofficial partnership, impishly
dubbing themselves the Seacoast Narcotics Interdiction Force, or SNIF.
Although their home cities have a combined population of only 40,000,
they've shut down several local heroin and cocaine rings and racked up
dozens of arrests in three states.

But, Hamel said, "you could have 30 guys at every police department
doing drug enforcement and you still couldn't keep up."

Most days, southern Maine's preeminent narcotics officer looks like a
suburban father on his way to the hardware store: bluejeans, work
boots and a New England Patriots cap shading a sunburned face.

The son of a New Hampshire state trooper, Hamel has spent most of his
21-year career working undercover, investigating biker gangs and
drugs. At 47, he actually is a suburban father who coaches and
referees high school and college basketball and runs a landscaping
business on the side.

Hamel's counterpart across the Piscataqua River in New Hampshire is
Stephen Arnold, a stocky 45-year-old father of four with a round,
bearded face, a thick brogue and a fondness for baseball hats and
Marlboro Lights.

Rounding out SNIF are two detectives from York, the Beverly Hills of
the coastal burgs. Cryan, 44, father of a teenage boy, has been
investigating crimes in York for two decades. His colleague Mark
Clifford, 40, is a former golf pro who came out of a patrolman's
uniform several years ago as York's first full-time narcotics detective.

The members of SNIF all answer to their own chiefs, but they function
as an independent unit on the ground. Keeping in contact by cellphone,
text message and two-way radio, they share information and informants
and take turns making undercover buys and running surveillance.

They also work with the Drug Enforcement Administration and follow
cases where they lead, roaming three states and towns as far south as
Lawrence, Mass., the source for most of the narcotics in New Hampshire
and Maine. In Lawrence, the drug trade is run by Dominican dealers
with ties to Mexican cartels.

SNIF's efforts have resulted in tens of thousands of dollars in
confiscated homes, cars and cash, which is divvied up among the
departments to help fund drug enforcement efforts.

Along the way, Hamel and Arnold have been teaching their York
colleagues the dangerous art of undercover drug work.

"No one teaches you to be a street narc in the academy," Hamel said.
"And most guys look at the work and say, 'Not for me, dude.'"

As they waited for an informant to arrange an undercover buy recently,
the veterans teased Clifford about a York heroin addict he had turned
into an informant a few months earlier -- an informant who was robbing
banks to feed his habit even as he helped the police.

Both York detectives have picked up valuable lessons along the way,
including the importance of a plausible cover identity.

"If you're 130 pounds soaking wet and have smooth hands, like Cliff
here, you can't pretend to be a bricklayer," Hamel said. "You have to
look the part."

One reason the overdose death of Bethany Fritz was such a shock was
the setting: York is a family resort town with a rich, 350-year-old
history, located just over an hour's drive north of Boston.

"It really opened our eyes," Cryan said, "and made us realize we had
issues."

Before that, police in Maine had been primarily concerned with
OxyContin, a highly addictive prescription painkiller. Now cocaine and
heroin have emerged as major problems, and the cause is a combination
of supply and demand.

"People who get hooked on it create their own demand, soliciting
customers so they can pay for their habit," said Strong, the Kittery
police chief.

In 2007, for example, SNIF detectives uncovered a cocaine ring
operated by Leslie Smith, who did body work at a Kittery garage.
Smith, 44, and three friends were making daily trips to Lawrence for
cocaine, using some of it themselves and selling the rest in Kittery
and Portsmouth at a 300% markup.

The detectives, working with a DEA-led task force in Lawrence,
arrested Smith and his friends. They also got his source, a Dominican
dealer in Massachusetts, after Hamel made several undercover buys. All
are in federal prison.

In the last year, though, heroin has flooded Maine and New Hampshire
as OxyContin addicts turn to heroin. A bag of heroin costs about $5 on
the street here today, compared with $50 for an OxyContin tablet.

"Heroin arrests are up 100% from just three years ago," Hamel said.
"And I can't remember the last junkie I busted for heroin who didn't
say he started with OxyContin. And why not? They can get a hit of
heroin for less than a six-pack of beer."

At Counseling Services Inc., an addiction treatment facility in Maine,
Medical Director Dr. Patrick Maidman said the number of people seeking
help for addiction to opiates such as OxyContin and heroin had been
overwhelming.

"We're not able to manage the volume of people looking for help," he
said.

It was five years ago that Bethany spent her last night at her best
friend Amanda Corey's house, a New England colonial nestled in woods
near I-95 and a sign that reads: "Welcome to Maine. The Way Life Should Be."

Amanda tried for several hours to wake her friend that morning and
finally called an ambulance in the early afternoon. Bethany never
regained consciousness and died later that day.

"If you had asked me back then how many teenagers were using heroin,
I'd have said very few and I couldn't name one," Cryan said. "Today, I
can name 20."

The detectives traced the heroin to Scott Fisher, Bethany's
20-year-old boyfriend. Hamel began making undercover buys from Fisher
and eventually arrested him.

Fisher, now serving a 12-year federal prison term in Allenwood, Pa.,
recalls that time with sadness.

"I wish I had made different choices," he said in a telephone
interview from prison. Heroin and cocaine "were so easy to obtain. It
was just always easy. And it seemed like everyone was using."

Bethany's family saw him as a victim. "Scott was just a kid who got
caught up in this whole thing," said Lachance, Bethany's sister. "It
was a tragedy not only for our family but for him."

The SNIF detectives also tracked down Fisher's source, Juan Delacruz,
an illegal immigrant from the Dominican Republic who worked in
Lawrence as a drug runner. Delacruz is serving an eight-year sentence.
The drug boss, a man known by the street name King Louie, returned to
the Dominican Republic, authorities said.

For the SNIF detectives, that was the first battle in an escalating
war.

Hamel unlocked the Kittery police evidence locker recently, revealing
piles of yellow envelopes stuffed with heroin, cocaine, crack cocaine,
chalky "re-rock" cocaine and tablets of OxyContin and other
prescription drugs.

Each envelope represented a recent arrest -- the fruits of a small
band of detectives on a mission.