DEA TO TAKE COMMAND IN CAMDEN COUNTY DRUG WAR

Most drug dealers in Camden probably
have no idea what the acronym HIDTA stands for until they're face down
on a street corner in handcuffs.

Since 1995, the Philadelphia-Camden High Intensity Drug Trafficking
Area (HIDTA) joint task force has been combatting violent drug
activity in the city and its surrounding suburbs with a unique lineup
of local, state and federal law-enforcement agencies.

Come January, the Drug Enforcement Administration, an agency that
sources say has been conspicuously absent from Camden's HIDTA
initiative for years, will take over day-to-day operations from the
Camden County Prosecutor's Office, the agency that has run the
initiative there almost since its inception.

DEA officials say that they're simply a new "quarterback" on the same
team, but the prosecutor's office, and, according to sources, at least
one federal law-enforcement agency, are concerned that Camden's HIDTA
might have a whole new game plan with the DEA behind the center.

"We're a team player and will do what has to be done and we'll get the
job done," said county prosecutor Warren Faulk. "But we certainly have
concerns about this that we're going to have to see about."

Chief among those concerns, Faulk said, is whether the DEA will focus
solely on large-scale busts and prosecution of major drug
organizations while excluding street-level drug dealing that affects
the daily lives of city residents.

"We don't have thresholds," Faulk said, "We'll prosecute
anyone."

New Jersey Attorney General Anne Milgram, who spearheaded the HIDTA
reorganization, said that she felt that the Camden task force could
have been more "effective" and needed to bring back federal partners
"who walked away" from the program over the years.

The prosecutor's office claims that its HIDTA initiative has met or
exceeded the national program's parameters for arrests and seizures
annually.

Today the task force was to announce results of a 22-month-long
investigation into a multimillion-dollar marijuana and methamphetamine
ring that stretched from South Jersey to Mexico and resulted in up to
30 arrests in two states.

Milgram said that the reorganization will free investigators and
officers from both the prosecutor's office and the city's police
department to focus on those street-level issues, which, she says, is
their responsibility.

"The goal [with HIDTA] is to do long-term, often complex, cases," she
said during a recent interview. "The goal is not to do what the police
department and the . . . prosecutor's office does every day. We're
basically giving officers back to do what they do on their day-to-day
jobs."

Camden Police Chief Scott Thomson, a former member of HIDTA, did not
return several phone calls or e-mails for comment, but the
reorganization means that both he and Faulk will each get
approximately a dozen officers back. Without HIDTA funding, however,
Faulk doubted whether he or Thomson would have the money to provide
those officers with the wiretaps, vehicles, cameras, undercover "buy"
money, or even office space, available through the task force's
$750,000 annual budget.

Gerard P. McAleer, special agent in charge of DEA's New Jersey
division, declined to comment on the number of agents that DEA will be
bringing to HIDTA or how large the task force would be. He said that
the DEA was not "full time" with Camden's HIDTA initiative in the past
but has collaborated on operations there.

"Camden needs all the help it can get now," McAleer said. "We're going
to add a value."

Sources familiar with HIDTA said that the Philadelphia office of the
FBI was opposed to the reorganization. A spokesman there said that
Janice Fedarcyk, the special agent in charge, would not comment on the
issue.