Mccreary County, September 2003

'IT DIDN'T STOP THE COCAINE'

In The End

Sitting on his front porch, a few weeks after sentencing, David Perkins was
barefoot and shirtless, wearing his University of Kentucky ball cap and an
old pair of shorts.

He was holding 6-month-old David, his son with his new wife, Ashley. The
boy now and then looked at Perkins' wrist and the black home-incarceration
bracelet he wore.

Perkins was trying to think of the right way to answer a question.

What would be the effect of the DEA's roundup of Perkins and 12 other
people who took part in the drug network?

Well, Perkins said, it "didn't stop the cocaine in here."

During the sentencing of one of Perkins' co-defendants, the judge asked
Assistant U.S. Attorney Roger West whether the defendant had identified any
of the Chicago dealers.

"He has. In what I believe to be candor on his part, he did identify who
those individuals were," West said.

But the prosecutor added, "The amount of cocaine, as we understand for the
Chicago area, will not rise to a federal case. And I'm trying to say that
delicately, as this is public record."

The shipments that Perkins, Valentin and the rest were involved with had
come in ounces and 1 or 2 kilograms at a time -- hardly the stuff of big
Chicago drug busts.

West continued: "The interest of investigators in that area was not as
profound as interest would be for investigators in the Eastern District of
Kentucky."

Because the dealers in Chicago never traveled to McCreary County, West
wrote in a court document, a decision was made not to try to prosecute them
in Kentucky.

As was the case with every facet of the prosecution of Perkins and the
other 12 defendants, the U.S. attorney's office for Eastern Kentucky had no
comment about the Chicago dealers.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Randall Samborn in Chicago would not say whether
his office pursued the people who sold cocaine to the McCreary County
group. He also declined to discuss, in general, guidelines used by the
office to decide which cases to prosecute.

A court filing in Kentucky gives the name of one of the Chicago men who
allegedly sent cocaine to McCreary. A review of records at the federal
district court in Chicago showed that no charges have been filed against
him; the same was true in state court.

"A prosecutor in Chicago, their threshold can be higher than ours," said
Kentucky State Police Detective Greg Pace, who worked with the DEA on the
Perkins case. "In Mexico, down there, they're used to seeing 2 tons come
through, and here, if we get a kilo of cocaine it's a big deal."

And if the big-city dealers of the world want to keep sending drugs to
rural counties such as McCreary, they probably won't have trouble finding
local partners.

Pace gave a surprisingly similar answer to the question Perkins pondered on
his front porch -- whether putting Perkins' group in prison would make a
change.

"You would want to think you're making a difference, but you don't know,"
Pace said. "Somebody else may be stepping up."in the end."