DRUGS ON MAIN STREET

Months-Long London Case Underscores Growing Problem Of Small-Town Dealing

LONDON, Ohio -- On an unusually cold night in October, Chester Jackson
waited impatiently for his son. A family friend had arrived at the house,
someone they'd been expecting.

Although snow flurries had been forecast, lightning streaked the sky and
the winds were whipping, delaying 22-year-old D.J., who was traveling by
bicycle.

When he finally made it, the threesome wasted little time getting down to
business.

D.J. placed a golf-ball-size rock of crack cocaine on the coffee table,
used his father's box cutter to chip off pea-size chunks, then handed them
to the friend.

"You see the lightning like crazy back there?" the friend asked. "They're
saying like 50 mph winds. I wish I would've brought more money. You just
never know what's up."

Amid the talk, Chester Jackson's daughter entered the room, school papers
in hand.

"You need to sign this," she told her dad. "Remember? I told you about it."

He reached for a pen.

As it might in any other living room, the conversation later drifted to
high-school football -- specifically, London's chance of winning its
upcoming game against Miami Trace.

"They're in the wrong division, man" Chester Jackson said. "We used to only
scrimmage them."

Less than 20 minutes after arriving, the friend had paid the Jacksons $20
for the crack and was out the door.

The ordinary setting and details of the drug deal are all part of the
police record in London, where authorities have spent nearly a year trying
to quell a drug trade whose grip was tightening on this community.

Using the Jacksons' friend as a wired informant, London police sponsored
many such "buys," gathering enough evidence to indict Chester Jackson,
three of his brothers, his son D.J. and 20 others.

Like London, authorities say, other small towns across the country are
struggling with drug activity.

In the past five years, the number of drug-related arrests has declined
11.2 percent in big cities but increased more than 10 percent in rural
areas, according to the FBI.

Dealers and users are seeking out relatively obscure locations for three
reasons: aggressive prosecution in big cities, the greater reach of
anti-drug task forces and increasing demand.

But small-town police can afford neither the drug purchases nor the
overtime pay required for covert operations. And confidential informants
are difficult to find: Local cops are familiar; outsiders stand out.

Still, London authorities did pull off an operation, one that will largely
end in October when the last of those arrested goes on trial.

Chester Jackson and his brothers are among eight people sentenced to prison
so far.

For London police, however, some unfinished business remains: D.J. Jackson
and another suspect are still at large, and two others remain to be identified.

Increasing complaints

Five blocks north of the Jackson home, a London resident swept the front
walk to the house she has owned since 1961. She raised three boys there and
now baby-sits her grandchildren.

But life on this quiet side street in this Madison County city of 8,700 has
changed over the decades.

When her boys were young, they could spend their summers amid the snaking
branches of the 100-year-old maple trees that shade the back yard. But by
the summer of 2001, her young grandchildren were confined to the front porch.

Neighbors, she suspected, were dealing drugs.

"They might as well have put a drive-through window like at McDonald's at
the one house on this street," said the grandmother, who didn't want her
name used in this story. "It was a steady stream of people from morning
until night."

The drug trade by then wasn't confined to any one neighborhood. No area,
she said, seemed immune.

Although she never witnessed a crime, she was haunted by what-ifs,
especially when visitors left a drug dealer's house yelling about deals
gone bad.

"What if they had guns and we got caught in the middle? What if they were
too high to notice these kids playing near the street?"

Her first impulse was to ignore what was happening, but she couldn't. So
she called London Police Chief Michael Creamer.

She wasn't the first. He'd heard dozens of complaints.

"It was clear that the drug trade here was getting heavier," Creamer said.
"We had one guy selling here and one guy selling there, and they were
starting to compete for business.

"Next thing you know, there'd be guns and turf wars, and we would have lost
control."

Working with agents from the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Identification &
Investigation, a Delaware County SWAT team and local deputies, Creamer and
his officers began rounding up suspects April 26.

Nine were arrested the first day before word spread and other suspects
started to scatter. The additional arrests -- in Columbus, Florida and West
Virginia -- were made during the next four months.

London police are still actively looking for D.J. Jackson and Robert L.
"Gooch" Jones, whose last known address was in Columbus.

Authorities thought they had Jackson on Sept. 11 after they cornered him
inside his girlfriend's apartment on Columbus' West Side, but he managed to
escape through the unit's crawl space.

Compared with an August roundup in Franklin County -- armed with 155
warrants, authorities arrested 69 people on Columbus' South Side -- the
London bust seems like small potatoes.

But the London arrests were just as crucial, said Ted Almay, a former
longtime drug agent who now heads the Bureau of Criminal Identification.

"Getting the dealers off Main Street sends a message that rural America is
taking back its towns," he said. "A little bit of crack-cocaine trade goes
a long way in a place like London. These people were watching their
neighborhoods go to hell."

State and county money and a hometown informant made the difference in
London. Undercover agents spent six months and $6,000 -- $10 and $20 at a
time -- buying crack cocaine inside the living rooms and on the front
porches of London homes.

If not for the complaints, however, the raids likely wouldn't have happened.

Law enforcement, Almay said, is selective.

"If people complain about speeders, you go after the cars. If they complain
about drug dealers, you go after the drugs."

Limited Funding

Early last week, Chief Creamer stopped for a cookie at the downtown deli.
He needed a cover to leave the office -- food was as good as any -- and
walk the streets, searching for a man business owners had grown suspicious
of: an unknown face, a loiterer.

More typically, with no secretaries or assistants on the payroll, he spends
his day answering phones, writing reports, even sweeping the floors.

He takes care of such tasks, he said, so his officers can remain on the
streets.

But none of the 15 full-time London officers is assigned to fight
drug-related crime. That's a luxury a small force can't afford, Creamer said.

Most of the department's drug arrests -- an average of 18 paraphernalia
charges and 12 drug-abuse charges a year -- stem from traffic stops or
routine domestic-violence or disorderly conduct calls.

A $1 million budget allows for few raids, Creamer said.

"In a normal year, I wouldn't have one spare dime in my budget to give to
an officer so that he can hit the streets and see who is selling the drugs."

Instead, leftover money buys cruisers, uniforms and equipment.

Such priorities are typical, state officials say, and they help explain why
drug sales are increasing in rural areas.

"You want to deal drugs? You gonna take your chances in a city with
hundreds of officers and dozens who solely monitor drug activity, or are
you going to head to the town where three cops take turns patrolling in one
cruiser?" said Peter C. Tobin of the BCI's narcotics division.

"That's a no-brainer."

In Madison County, luck more than anything permitted Prosecutor Stephen J.
Pronai to contribute the vital funding for Creamer's anti-drug effort. The
chief filed his request in December, when Pronai still had a little left in
a special crime-fighting fund.

Pronai often buys computers, cameras and cars for the smallest village
police departments in the county, he said. Creamer and Tobin, however,
convinced him that the London drug ring was important.

He committed the money and assigned a prosecutor to help.

A Far-Reaching Supply

It's all about cash.

A study published last year by an arm of the U.S. Department of Justice
proved what law officers already knew: Drug dealers are setting up shop far
from Ohio cities.

"A rock of crack cocaine costs more when the supply is less," Tobin said,
"so a guy can make a lot better living selling dope out in Timbuktu."

Crack cocaine is Ohio's biggest threat, the study said, but most anything
appears to be available.

"There's not a village or crossroads in this state where you can't buy
illegal drugs," Almay said. "The small towns better start paying attention
to this because it is a business that gets more dangerous as each day passes."

The drugs, he added, are easily tracked by arrests and intelligence.
Marijuana can be bought border to border, and methamphetamine labs pock
southwestern Ohio. LSD is popular in college towns.

Crack cocaine is most prevalent in counties adjacent to metropolitan areas,
where heroin is king.

Rural law-enforcement agencies realize that they need to dedicate resources
to the problem but know they can't do it alone.

A narcotics officer for nine years in the 1980s and '90s, Almay said police
used to be the only ones with guns. Then, he said, along came crack cocaine.

"That made the drug world a whole different animal -- uglier, meaner and
deadlier."

The problem is especially challenging in small towns, he said.

"One round from a dealer's Uzi kills just the same in London, Ohio, as it
does in Columbus, Ohio, but London officers are unprepared to confront that
kind of firepower."

So drug task forces have become a powerful tool, most agree.

Smaller departments more often work with one another, their urban
counterparts and state and federal agencies to pull off busts.

Last year, Almay said, his agency assisted 28 drug task forces in 192
cases. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency worked with Ohio task forces to
confiscate nearly $8 million through forfeitures.

Such cooperation not only allows for better use of resources but also
provides valuable links to the underbelly of larger drug operations.

Often, local-level raids lead state agents to suppliers in big cities.

Then federal agents get involved, hoping this second ring of offenders will
provide a line to the grand prize: the cartels responsible for importing
the drugs.

"It's all one big web," said Frank M. Magoch, special agent in charge of
the DEA's six Ohio field offices.

"We've all overcome professional jealousy and realized that if we don't
battle over turf and just work to take out dealers, it makes the towns
where we live better places."

Creamer said he didn't hesitate to ask for help in London. After all, he
understands the benefit of such cooperation.

In 1995, with the help of five state and federal agencies, three other
police departments and the county sheriff, London authorities conducted a
sweep that resulted in 21 arrests and the closing of the 151 Club, a local bar.

For London's latest operation, the state and the DEA provided agents,
surveillance equipment, technical assistance and cash. A Delaware County
tactical team and Madison County deputies assisted in the raids.

"You better believe the drug dealers are networked," Creamer said, "so we
better be, too."

Judgment Day

Chester Jackson had nothing to say Aug. 16 in Madison County Common Pleas
Court. The former custodian for London schools only listened to the judge's
admonitions.

But his attorney, Ron Parsons, described Jackson as a habitual drug user
who happened to share his crack with a longtime friend who happened to be
working undercover for the cops.

"He permitted others to use in his house," Parsons said. "He wasn't out
there making a living at it."

Neither that argument nor the tears of Jackson's relatives that day swayed
Judge Robert D. Nichols: He sentenced Jackson to 26 months in prison on
felony charges of cocaine trafficking.

"You were running a crack house, and now, only on the day of reckoning, do
you claim to be a user, not a dealer," Nichols said. "There's no excuse for
that."

Although small-town cops have fewer resources to deal with drugs, the
judges in those areas wield more weapons than their urban counterparts --
time and accountability.

In Franklin County last year, 16 Common Pleas judges dispensed with a total
of 9,603 felony cases -- 600 each. As Madison County's only Common Pleas
judge, Nichols heard 82.

"We have a lot more time to attend to one case," he said. "I know these
people coming before me; I've probably sat in the bar next to them and
drank a beer. I know what they need."

The judge has ordered one defendant in the London case to attend a
drug-treatment program. Besides the eight sentenced to prison, nine await
sentencing, three were transferred to juvenile court, and two indictments
involving "un-named persons" are pending.

"There's still a certain social conscience that says drug users are bad and
need to be dealt with," Nichols said. "It's not an acceptable way of life
here like it has gotten to be in the cities."

Franklin County Common Pleas Judge John P. Bessey agrees.

"We have 29 capital-murder cases pending right now in Franklin County.
Rightly or wrongly, drug offenses can sometimes take a back seat," Bessey
said. "We see it on federal juries: Jurors who come from rural areas are
more conservative and demand more punishment.

"Nichols is doing what his community demands."