TEXAS CONNECTION - POLICE BREAK DRUG RING

Armed with flashbang grenades and a battering ram, the SWAT team
waited for the signal.

Federal agents, aided by officers from Texas and North Carolina,
ringed the house outside Houston.

A Fayetteville narcotics officer watched from across the road, hoping
that 15 months of work were about to pay off in a raid at the home of
Donald Miles. An investigation that started in Fayetteville had
identified him as the head of a multimillion-dollar ring that brought
marijuana and cocaine to the city. "I wanted him to be there," the
officer remembers thinking. "I thought, 'Hey, we're finally going to
wrap this up.'" The Fayetteville Police Department's Drug Interdiction
Team doesn't look like a law enforcement recruiting poster. These
aren't muscular men in sharp uniforms. If anything, they're soft
around the middle, scruffy-looking; they look like blue-collar,
working-class guys.

These officers don't want to be famous. They don't even want to be
known. They agreed to talk about some details of their biggest case --
Operation Second Wind -- on condition that their identities not be
revealed. The Drug Interdiction Team members work undercover and
behind the scenes to stop drugs before they make it to Fayetteville's
streets. The reward when they do their job well is the trickle-down
effect: A vein in the heart of the city's drug trade has been blocked,
the spinoff crimes stemmed. "The root of a lot of crime is drugs," one
said. "It's probably the addict's footprint on the door of the
(break-in)." The work isn't like a television cop show in which
officers discover and nail a drug dealer in an hour-long episode. The
real work requires patience. Lots of patience.

The waiting game in this case started in November 2005. The team got a
tip: Watch this spot and keep an eye out for this guy. He's moving big
money from Fayetteville to Texas.

The man, they learned, was Donald Miles, a former Fayetteville
resident now living in Porter, Texas, a small town about 30 miles from
Houston. The Fayetteville officers realized they were onto a big
operation and were going to need help.

They turned to Houston's High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area Task
Force. The task force -- made up of federal, state and local officers --
works to shut down drug rings operating out of Houston and along the
Mexican border. Task force leaders agreed to "adopt" the case --
meaning the people arrested are facing federal charges. They dubbed
the probe "Operation Second Wind," because, as Fayetteville Vice Squad
supervisor Bobby Chapman said, officers were getting a second chance
at the people involved. Most of them had already been convicted of
drug charges at least once. The team won't talk in detail about the
way the investigation progressed over the next few months. Much of it
was the tedious business of watching suspects. It wasn't until April
1, 2006, that they were ready to make their first move.

Anor "Tip" Burnside Jr., 25, had been recruited to handle cocaine
deals in Fayetteville for the drug ring, the team said.

Burnside is a 2000 graduate of Westover High School, where he was a
three-sport athlete. He was a standout quarterback for the Wolverines,
played on the basketball team and in 1999-2000 was an all-conference
baseball player.

A former coach, Gene Arrington, remembers Burnside as a "polite,
courteous" young man who impressed colleges with his athletic skills.
But Burnside didn't have the test scores needed to get into college,
Arrington said. Arrington said he is baffled by Burnside's arrest. "I
can't understand what happened," he said.

Team members kept an eye on Burnside; and on April 1, they stopped a
5-kilogram shipment of cocaine from Texas to his home. They were able
to trace the drugs back to Miles, Chapman said.

Two days later, officers arrested Burnside at his home on the 7500
block of Carrollburg Drive in the La Grange subdivision. They found
half a kilogram of cocaine, 5 grams of crack cocaine and three
handguns. Two months later, the team swept up more members of the
ring. On June 15, officers cut off 160 pounds of marijuana shipped
from Miles to Stanley W. and Jeane Darrigan and intercepted another 80
pounds headed to Harold Monsour. All three, along with Stanley
Darrigan's son, were arrested. The Darrigans, both 47, own Darrigan
Seal and Stripe, a parking-lot surfacing business.

They live in a ranch house at the corner of Hilton and Java drives. It
is, team members said, an average-looking middle-class suburban home
with a privacy fence around the backyard and a manicured lawn out
front. Hidden by the wooden fence, officers said, is a
top-of-the-line, in-ground pool. William M. Darrigan, 25, Stanley's
son from a previous marriage, lived with the couple off and on. The
younger Darrigan worked for his father. Stanley Darrigan had a passion
for UNC athletic teams. He enclosed a carport and turned it into a
Carolina shrine.

What visitors wouldn't guess, officers said, was that the Darrigans
had pulled time in prison for drug-related charges.

When they searched the Darrigans' home, they found $25,000 in cash in
a vehicle. Monsour, who is 47, lived in an inconspicuous apartment on
Morganton Road, near Ruth Street.

Monsour's brother is Joey Monsour, who owns It'z nightclub in
Fayetteville. Police said Harold Monsour sold roses in his brother's
club. And Harold Monsour has a connection to the Darrigans. Jeane
Darrigan was his wife for about seven years.

After the four arrests in June, the investigation hit a lull, at least
in public action. The team was doing paperwork, documenting evidence,
working with officers in Texas.

And watching a growing number of suspects. One was Robert Hamilton, a
handyman and painter who lived with his wife, Margaret, on Edinburgh
Drive, in the Stratford Hills subdivision. On one stakeout, the team
said, they watched Hamilton drive to a ministorage business and unlock
a unit.

Their curiosity fueled, the police brought in a drug-sniffing dog. The
dog smelled something, enough for the team to get a warrant. On Jan.
18, the locker was opened. Inside was the bonanza. -- 1,500 pounds of
marijuana, packaged in 71 bales packed in black plastic. The bales
were heat-sealed, Chapman said, and wrapped in layers of cellophane
and dipped in motor oil and axle grease -- an attempt to keep dogs from
sniffing out the drugs. It didn't work.

Hamilton was arrested just down the road, driving his small blue
pickup. His wife was picked up later.

As he was taken into custody, officers were getting a warrant to
search his home. There, they found more than $100,000 in cash
scattered throughout the house. Under the couch and a coffee table.
Inside books. Inside jackets hanging in closets. They also learned
that Hamilton had once worked for Darrigan. With the arrest of
Hamilton, the pace of the investigation was picking up. Just 10 days
later, police waited in a cold rain outside a home on Carter Baron
Place in the Beaver Dam subdivision off Bingham Drive. They had been
watching the house since the day before.

Now, they saw a man -- later identified as Anthony Wolfe -- back his
Buick sedan under a carport and get out of the car.

Minutes later, another vehicle pulled up with the package Wolfe was
waiting for: cocaine. Officers haven't said who was delivering the
package. Once the deal was done, officers moved in and arrested Wolfe.
They seized a total of $119,000 -- $88,000 in a suitcase used for a
down payment and $31,000 stashed in the car.

The cash, officers said, was supposed to be headed to Donald Miles. It
was time to go to Texas.

Miles, who is 47, had grown up in Fayetteville and moved to Texas in
the 1980s. But he stayed in touch with friends from his old hometown.
While Fayetteville police were watching his friends and business
partners, Texas agents were watching Miles.

David Womack is a sergeant with the Montgomery County, Texas,
Sheriff's Office and is a member of the Houston-based drug task force.
Three things about Miles stood out, Womack said.

"We noticed cameras outside, surveillance cameras, and it was a fairly
large home in a nonlarge-home community. And we saw activity that was
not conducive to a man living there who was not going to work," Womack
said, laughing. Texas officers had already stopped two men driving a
stolen Ford Ranger pickup as they were leaving Miles' home, Womack
said. The men carried Texas identification but lived in Mexico -- which
is where officers suspected Miles was getting his drugs.

Officers learned the two were headed to a second house, in Houston,
owned by Miles. It was his stash house, Womack said.

On Feb. 19, five members of Fayetteville's Drug Interdiction Team
boarded a plane, bound for Houston. While they were in the air,
federal lawmen were getting indictments against Miles and search
warrants for his homes. The 2-hour flight was an hour longer because
of ferocious headwinds. They shared one thought: Could they get Miles?
Would they find him? The Fayetteville officers joined with federal and
Texas lawmen on Feb. 20 to plan for the raid on Miles' home.

The next day dawned sunny under a crystal-blue sky. Fayetteville
officers, federal task force members and the Montgomery County, Texas,
SWAT team gathered near Miles' home.

Not wanting to tip off Miles, the SWAT team set up in a neighbor's
driveway. One dropped to all fours and let the others use his back as
a step over the wrought-iron fence around the house and a three-car
garage. At nearly the same moment, officers saw someone lift a blind
and look out a window. It was Miles; he was home.

At 9:30 a.m., flashbang grenades exploded simultaneously in front of
the house and garage.

The blind dropped. SWAT team members banged on the doors, barely
hesitating before pummeling them with battering rams.

Miles, a stocky, balding man, offered no resistance as lawmen rushed
in. The Fayetteville team members laughed last week, recalling those
tense moments. Inside the garage where Miles was living, there were
monitors connected to the surveillance cameras and 40 pounds of
marijuana stuffed into a ceiling crawl space.

They found floor safes buried in the concrete in the garage. Officers
managed to pry one open and called a local fire department to use a
crowbar on the second one.

The third posed a problem. It weighed between 500 and 600 pounds.
Officers tore the safe out of the floor and managed to load it onto a
hand truck, flattening the wheels.

When it was cut open with an acetelyne torch, an officer reached
inside and pulled out jewelry, a Rolex watch and $64,000.

The heat of the torch had melted the jewelry. One of the Fayetteville
officers was disappointed. He wanted to see some of the money Miles
had been making.

Twenty miles away, officers were searching one of Miles' stash houses.
They found two large safes and brought in a technician to burn them
open with a torch. Each safe held cocaine.

It was another disappointment. Officers wanted more. They found it.
Two suitcases stuffed with cash in bundles of $10,000 and $50,000. It
totaled $2.6 million.

The seizures put the operation's haul -- counting all the arrests since
they had picked up Burnside 10 months before -- at 26 kilograms of
cocaine worth $2.6 million, a ton of marijuana worth $9 million and $3
million in cash. They had Miles.