AFTER ARRESTS, DRUG EVIDENCE GOES MISSING

One day last December, a Brooklyn prosecutor called the Police
Department laboratory to check on a test of drugs that had been seized
six weeks earlier.

The drugs were nowhere to be found in the laboratory.

As officials hunted for the evidence in that case, they made a
startling discovery: The drugs seized in 42 other arrests made in
Brooklyn that same day, Oct. 20, 2006, also had vanished without a
trace.

In short, all the evidence from every narcotics arrest in Brooklyn
that day was gone.

"A search was conducted, disclosing that an entire bundle of
narcotics, 43 in total, which should have been submitted to the
laboratory for examination was not present," Dr. Peter Pizzola, the
director of the laboratory, wrote in a letter in April to an
organization that oversees forensic laboratories. "Additionally, all
paperwork associated with this delivery was also missing."

Despite an inquiry that began over a year ago, officials still cannot
say whether the drugs were lost, stolen or thrown away. Investigators
believe that a police officer serving as a courier took several large
plastic bags of drugs as far as the laboratory. There, the trail goes
cold.

At various stages, prosecutors from all five boroughs have joined the
Police Department's Internal Affairs Bureau in the investigation,
which is now being led by the district attorney's office in Queens,
because the laboratory is there.

"This remains an active investigation," John M. Ryan, the chief
assistant district attorney in Queens, said on Tuesday.

The drugs were seized in both felony and misdemeanor arrests, at least
some made by police officers working undercover.

Authorities in Brooklyn said on Tuesday that they could not
immediately determine what had become of those 43 cases, but that
without the evidence -- much less the laboratory analyses, which were
not performed-- it was unlikely that any prosecutions could have taken
place.

Scientists in the lab measure the weight and purity of the drugs,
factors that determine the severity of the charges and penalties.

"We are reviewing the records, but we would expect that it would
difficult to proceed without the evidence, and in a timely manner,"
said Jerry Schmetterer, a spokesman for the Brooklyn district
attorney, Charles J. Hynes.

The Police Department has not publicly disclosed the mass loss of
drugs last year. However, the missing evidence was mentioned in a
footnote on page 32 of a report issued last week by the state
inspector general, Kristine Hamann, that dealt with charges of a
cover-up of serious misconduct in the laboratory five years ago.

Ms. Hamann noted that new managers at the laboratory had promptly
notified city prosecutors and a professional oversight group about the
disappearance of the drugs. A police spokesman took questions on
Tuesday about the episode, but did not provide any
information.

For generations, the investigation of illegal narcotics trafficking --
and the subsequent handling of evidence -- has been a fraught subject
for the Police Department, exposing the honest to the perils of
contact with violent people, and the corrupt to the temptations of
easy money.

Perhaps the most notorious episode involved the theft of 120 pounds of
cocaine and 398 pounds of heroin from the police property clerk's
office, a portion of which had been seized in the case that was made
famous in "The French Connection," the 1971 movie.

Years later, the police discovered that on six occasions from 1969 to
1972, someone had used a version of a detective's name and badge
number to check the drugs out of storage. The bags that took their
place contained a mixture of flour and cornstarch. The theft was
discovered when swarms of red beetles ate through the bags.

Though the amount of the drugs that disappeared last year is not
known, officials said none of the cases that day involved big
seizures, and certainly nothing approaching the scale of the French
Connection case. And those who have been involved in the investigation
say that honest error -- rather than theft -- could provide the most
reasonable explanation.

At least once a day, police couriers travel to every precinct to
collect sealed evidence bags that contain suspected narcotics. As the
evidence is handed from one officer to the next, the chain of custody
is documented in evidence vouchers.

Then the evidence bags are bundled into larger bags -- similar to
plastic garbage bags -- and taken by the courier to the laboratory,
generally late at night. There, the bags are logged by officers and
stored in the Evidence Control Section until the contents are removed
for analysis.

This was the procedure that should have been followed on Oct. 20,
2006, when one officer arrived with all the apparent narcotics seized
in Brooklyn.

"The messenger had no receipt proving that the evidence had been
submitted to the laboratory," Dr. Pizzola wrote in his April 27
letter, which was addressed to Ralph Keaton, the executive director of
the American Society of Crime Laboratory Directors/ Laboratory
Accreditation Board. The text was read to The New York Times by a law
enforcement official involved in the inquiry.

DESPITE the lack of paperwork, officials say that they are virtually
certain that the police messenger did take several large bags of
evidence to the laboratory. It is not clear how this was established;
the officials, who spoke on the condition that they not be identified
because of the continuing investigation, would not say if the
laboratory has video recordings of those who come and go.

What happened next remains a mystery. There is no record that the
drugs, including what seemed to be marijuana, cocaine and heroin,
collected on Oct. 20, 2006, were ever logged into the Evidence Control
Section. It appears certain that they never were checked out by any of
the 100 scientists in the lab.

In his letter, Dr. Pizzola said he had been told by investigators with
the department's Internal Affairs Bureau that, "In their opinion, the
laboratory's Evidence Control Section was responsible for the loss of
43 cases of narcotic evidence."

He summed up the episode with a question: "Was it a criminal act by a
member of the laboratory, or an accidental loss of the evidence by
mistaking the bundle as trash, or another error?"