PILING UP EVIDENCE

Methamphetamine Users Are Stealing People's Identities; Need For Drug
Leads To Thefts, Law Enforcement Officials Say

It's crystal, it's ice, it's powder, it's paste.

Officials say the drug has become the No. 1 illegal substance abused
in Ventura County in the past five years, and its users show a
predilection for fraud in the hours they spend high and wide awake.

It's methamphetamine.

Stolen goods confiscated from one meth addict convicted of forging
hundreds of checks and driver's licenses are stacked inside a
shoebox-sized plastic container in the Ventura police station. The
box is filled with stolen credit cards, Social Security numbers and checks.

It was part of the evidence the Ventura County District Attorney's
Office used to help convict Ventura resident John Cundiff of making
fake documents, which he and a ring of meth addicts used to steal
about 50 people's identities, said Cpl. Terry Medina, a member of the
Ventura Police Department's Street Crimes unit.

The box of evidence is now a visual aid Medina uses to teach other
Ventura police officers about the connection between meth and ID
theft. His informal course is part of the growing consciousness that
methamphetamine abuse and identity theft are often related.

"It seems almost everyone we arrest in ID (theft) cases is a meth
user" or dealer, said Sgt. Glen Utter, who heads the Ventura Police
Department's Street Crimes unit.

Law enforcement officers see meth so often it "almost seems that
besides marijuana, it's the only thing out there," said Capt. Ross
Bonfiglio of the Ventura County Sheriff's Department.

Meth isn't the only drug abused in Ventura County, but it has the
highest profile.

n Six years ago, the majority of people admitted into drug
rehabilitation in Ventura County said they used primarily heroin. By
2005, meth had replaced heroin as the most abused drug among people
entering rehab in the county.

n In Ventura County, meth abusers make up 60 percent of the people
referred to California's Proposition 36 drug diversion program for
nonviolent offenders, according to the county Behavioral Health
Department. Statewide, meth abusers account for 50 percent of those
referred to the five-year-old program.

Hard statistics on identity theft are more difficult to pin down.
States began to recognize the crime officially in the late 1990s. Law
enforcement departments place the crime in overlapping categories,
including identity theft and various types of fraud.

Nationwide, from 8 million to 15 million Americans were victims of
identity theft last year, according to studies by the Gartner and
Javelin research companies.

Connection is easy to see

The Ventura County District Attorney's Office reported 819 cases of
fraud in 2006. Identity theft figures into each of seven categories
of crimes, including using someone else's personal information to
commit a crime and using a fraudulent access card.

The District Attorney's Office does not break out complete numbers of
identity theft cases, however.

Because the data on identity thefts are imprecise, it is nearly
impossible to know how many of the crimes are connected to
methamphetamine users, said Howard Wise, a deputy district attorney
who prosecutes major fraud and computer crimes cases in Ventura
County. But the connection is easy to see in the criminal justice
system, he said.

"The vast majority of the defendants in the serious and complex
identity theft cases claim to be users of methamphetamine," he explained.

Wise prosecuted Cundiff's case, and he has handled similar cases in
Simi Valley, Thousand Oaks and Oxnard, he said.

Medina first saw a correlation between meth use and identity theft in
2002, when he moved from the narcotics division to property crimes.

"Some of the people I saw in narcotics, their names were coming up in
check forgery cases or in theft cases," he said.

This year, Medina began volunteering to teach his course on
methamphetamine and identity theft for the California Narcotics
Officers Association. The organization has two similar courses
scheduled this year, one in Stockton and another in Hayward.

Conducive to criminal behavior

The connection between identity theft and methamphetamine users has
been recognized nationwide.

In a 2005 survey by the National Association of Counties, 27 percent
of respondents reported increases in identity theft due to meth use.
The county officials responding also linked meth to increases in
burglaries, robberies, domestic violence and jail populations.

Addictions of all kinds have long been linked to theft, but
methamphetamine is particularly conducive to criminal behavior, said
Igor Koutsenok, director of the Center for Criminality and Addiction
Research, Training and Application at UC San Diego.

The drug boosts dopamine, a brain chemical that regulates emotion and
pleasure, along with serotonin. Binge users can become paranoid as
they stay hyped up for long periods of time, sometimes without sleep
or food, he said.

To understand why methamphetamine can lead to criminality, start by
imagining a car, said Koutsenok, who is also a psychiatrist.

"Dopamine is gas, serotonin is a brake fluid. Imagine a car full of
gas with no brake fluid driven by a paranoid driver." That's what a
meth user is like while on the drug, he said.

Other stimulants -- including cocaine ---- have similar effects as
methamphetamine, but meth is cheaper and more easily available,
Koutsenok said. The effects of using meth also last much longer than
cocaine: from 10 to 12 hours, compared to 45 minutes for the
coca-based stimulant, according to state Department of Alcohol and
Drug Programs.

Unlike users of depressants such as heroin, who tend to enjoy their
lethargic highs in solitude, revved up and paranoid meth users tend
to band together, officials said.

"What we see is that a small group of four to five people can become
a mini crime wave," said Port Hueneme Police Detective Robert Albertson.

Cycle would start again

That's what police say happened in Cundiff's case. A low-level
methamphetamine dealer, Cundiff would give the drug to a small group
of addicts who brought him stolen mail and other personal
information, Medina said. Cundiff would manufacture fake documents
with the information, and other addicts would use those documents to
cash fake checks or buy goods they could sell. The money would come
back to Cundiff for meth, and the cycle would start all over again,
Medina said.

Meth also lends itself to identity theft, because users are able to
stay up all night and focus on tasks such as working on computers, Wise said.

"It's almost the type of crime you'd expect to see from someone doing
a drug like that."

The link between meth abusers and property crime drove the Ventura
Police Department to create its Street Crimes unit two years ago,
said Utter. The unit combines narcotics and property crime investigators.

Harsher sentencing begins

Other local law enforcement agencies address identity theft and meth
abuse, but rarely the specific connection.

As part of the Port Hueneme Special Problems unit, Albertson deals
with identity theft and narcotics among a slew of other crimes.

The danger meth-addicted parents pose to children drove a number of
county agencies to form a cooperative Drug-Endangered Child Program.
A formal announcement about the new program will come Friday in a
news conference.

As identity theft becomes more common, Ventura County courts have
started handing out harsher sentences to people convicted of the
crime, Wise said.

In a July 2005 case, Oxnard resident Richard Frenes was sentenced to
12 years in prison for his role in a series of identity thefts.
Frenes was convicted of nine felonies, including four counts of
identity theft, after police found him in a motel room with thousands
of pieces of mail, a computer and other tools common in identity
theft operations, according to the District Attorney's Office. Frenes
was on probation for a narcotics violation when he was arrested.

Cundiff's 2006 sentence of five years and four months in prison was
another example of increasingly severe sentencing, said the deputy
district attorney.

Because identity theft is widespread and deeply intertwined with
other illegal activities such as methamphetamine abuse, prosecution
is not enough to combat it, said Jay Foley, executive director of the
Identity Theft Resource Center in San Diego.

He said increasing sentences for identity thieves might deter some
low-level criminals, but to really reduce identity theft, businesses,
consumers and the government need to make personal information harder to steal.

Right now, he said, identity theft "is an incredibly easy crime to commit."