Cocaine Nation

by Thomas Feiling

  Chasing drug dealers from pillar to post made for good footage for the nightly news and might have reassured Americans looking for a resolute response to social breakdown. But police detectives knew that only long-term intelligence-led operations would allow them to pierce the inner workings of drug-dealing organizations. Another way to do this was by creating profiles of likely drug suspects. Police drug teams have repeatedly said that they don’t stop and search Americans on the basis of their race. Today, the word ‘profile’ isn’t even officially mentioned by the police because prosecutors and defence lawyers know that the racial implications can raise constitutional challenges.22

  Interstate highway 95 is a crucial drug-trafficking corridor connecting the major cities of the East Coast. Between 1995 and 1997, racial profiling of potential drugs couriers created a situation in which 70 per cent of the drivers stopped by police on I-95 were African-Americans, even though African-Americans made up only 17 per cent of the drivers on the road.23 Yet the instances in which drugs were actually discovered were the same per capita for black and white motorists. I asked Jack Cole about how they went about creating drug courier profiles in the early 1970s, when the war on drugs first got underway. ‘If we didn’t create racial profiling, we certainly raised it to a high art form,’ he told me. ‘Road troopers on the New Jersey turnpike would back their cars up on the side of the road at night, so their headlights were shining perpendicular across the highway and they could see all the cars going by. Whenever a car with brown people in it went past, out they’d go. The thinking was that since all the cocaine is in the brown community, if I stop Colombians and Cubans, I’ll wipe out the cocaine.’

  Guidelines for DEA agents give conflicting advice on when police officers should become suspicious. In Tennessee, a DEA agent told a judge that he was leery of a man because he ‘walked quickly through the airport’. Six weeks later, in another affidavit, the same agent said his suspicions were aroused because the suspect ‘walked with intentional slowness after getting off the bus’. One Maryland state trooper said he was wary because the subject ‘deliberately did not look at me when he drove by’. Yet a second Maryland trooper testified that he stopped a man because ‘the driver stared at me when he passed’.

  If police methodology seems opaque, their target was not. A review of federal court cases in which drug courier profiles were used between 1990 and 1995 revealed that in all but three of sixty-three cases, the suspects were members of an ethnic minority.24 To this day, African-Americans are twice as likely to be arrested for drug law violations as non-African-Americans. In Texas, they’re three times more likely to be arrested, and in the town of Hearne, Texas, they’re sixteen times more likely to be arrested. In November 2000, the local narcotics task force raided Hearne’s only public housing complex. They found no drugs, but they did arrest 15 per cent of the town’s young black males, charging twenty-seven of them with selling cocaine. The District Attorney’s case rested on information provided by Derrick Megress, a convicted thief and crack user. As the cases began to crumble in court, it transpired that the police had given Megress a list of the names of young black men in Hearne, and had asked him to indicate which of them had sold him crack. In court, the DA admitted that he ‘might’ have warned Megress that he would be raped in prison, and that the best way to avoid doing time was to testify against those who had sold him drugs.

  There are forty-five narcotics task forces in Texas alone. They are subject to no federal scrutiny, and their budgets are allocated according to the number of arrestees each force can proffer. Derrick Megress’s arrest in Hearne coincided with the annual budget round and the local task force needed to get their numbers up. This focus on numbers encourages the police to focus on the quantity, rather than the quality, of the arrests they make. Because black people in Hearne generally don’t have the money to hire a lawyer, they get whatever legal representation they’re given, and are deemed to be ripe for the picking.25 Russ, a former narcotics detective from San Jose, California, told me that ‘a lot of times you wouldn’t make any progress up the line, you were just running around laterally. You know, “hey, we made fifteen arrests!” Very rarely did we get to the real head person, the person supplying the cocaine, because he never touches it. He just gets on the phone and says, “Sally, I want you to deliver this cocaine to this guy.”’

  Another reason why drug laws are hard to enforce is that the transaction between buyer and seller is willed by both. Because there is no victim, the police become dependent on informants. ‘Ninety-five per cent of federal indictments are put together starting with informants,’ Lance, the former cocaine wholesaler from South Jamaica, New York, told me. ‘Our business was all family-oriented, and even the outsiders were considered family because we’d been together for twenty years. If it wasn’t for informants we’d have never got arrested.’ Russ explained how he found those informants, and the dangers he ran in doing so. ‘The under-the-influence team would arrest someone for being under the influence, or the buy team would arrest someone at a party for having a small amount of cocaine. The guy didn’t want to go to jail, so he’d give evidence on who he was buying his cocaine from. They would pass that person to me. My job was to go after the big dealers, the guys who were making the big bucks. So we would go to meet his dealer, and the guy would pass me off as one of his buddies who wanted to make a large purchase, and the dealer would sell me two or three ounces. The next time, I’d try to buy half a pound. If he couldn’t get me a half pound, he’d introduce me to his supplier. I’d dress fancy, pretend that I had flown in from who-knows-where and I’d take everyone to dinner. I might be doing a $120,000 buy. Things start to get real dangerous at that point. What’s to stop them pulling a gun and stealing your money? And of course, they’re afraid that you’re going to pull your gun and steal their cocaine.’

  The police’s dependence on informers also means that those with information to trade are able to negotiate with the police over the charges they’ll face in court. As a result, the courts are full of the drug trade’s ‘foot soldiers’, who generally have nothing to trade. Tony Papa’s story is telling. ‘I had been showing up late for the league at the alley where I bowled in Yonkers, and this guy asked me why. I told him that my car had broken down. He asked me why I didn’t fix it, and I told him that I didn’t have the money. So he introduced me to somebody who dealt coke in Westchester County, a big spender, and this guy asked me if I wanted to make a quick buck. I turned him down, but some time later, I think it was January, a blizzard hit. I owed rent, I had no money, and I was desperate. The guy approached me again with his carrot on a stick and this time I went for it. I took an envelope containing four and a half ounces of cocaine to Mount Vernon, New York. But I walked into a police sting operation. Twenty cops came at me out of nowhere. The guy I had met had three sealed indictments, and he was facing life imprisonment. The cops had said, “If you get us other people, you’ll do less time,” so he’d turned informant. That moment changed my life for ever.’

  Sometimes, informants supply enough credible evidence to indict the senior members of a drug-trafficking organization. But it is often a Pyrrhic victory, as Russ explained. ‘We’d have a nine-month investigation, and eventually all the search warrants would get signed, and at four in the morning I would have all these police officers from Santa Clara and Cupertino here. Homes would be searched, cocaine would be seized, and a bunch of people would go to jail. Later that morning the District Attorney would have all the drugs and the guns on a table, and he and the police chief would talk about how the cocaine community had been dealt a terrible blow. Of course we narcotics officers knew that what was really going to happen was that someone was going to take this dealer’s place and we would start on another investigation.’

  This ‘terrible blow’ invariably fell in the form of a prison sentence, but the police know that many drug dealers consider prison time an inevitable cost of doing business. When a drug dealer is sent to jail, a subordinate w
ill most likely take his place and keep the operation going. If, however, the police can seize the dealer’s assets and working capital, they can shut down his business for good. In the words of Cary Copeland, Director of the Department of Justice’s asset forfeiture unit, ‘asset forfeiture can be to modern law enforcement what air power is to modern warfare’.26 Before being elected Mayor of Baltimore in 1987, Kurt Schmoke was the public prosecutor for the state of Maryland. ‘I was, in the parlance of our time, a drug warrior, and a very aggressive and successful one. Year after year our arrest numbers went up, our conviction rates increased, and our drug seizures multiplied. My office seized so many vehicles from drug dealers that many joked that I was the largest used car dealer in the city. In the war on drugs, this is how success is measured.’

  Once the government had established that a property was subject to forfeiture, the burden of proof was reversed. There was no presumption of innocence, and no right to an attorney. The property owner had to prove that his or her property did not belong to the government. Goods could be forfeited even if their owner was acquitted. Jury trials could be refused, illegal searches condoned and rules of evidence ignored. With no right to appeal, it is not surprising that almost 90 per cent of cash forfeitures went uncontested.27

  Such was the booty yielded by the asset forfeiture laws that by 1987 the DEA was paying for itself, and by 1996, the Justice Department’s asset forfeiture fund was raking in $2.7 billion a year.28 The prospect of a self-financing law enforcement branch, largely able to set its own agenda and accountable to no one, had sceptics echoing the words of George Mason, one of the framers of the American Constitution, who had warned that ‘the purse and the sword ought never to get into the same hands’.29 Before long, police departments were arresting drug buyers over drug dealers because buyers were sure to have cash with them, even though targeting buyers did little to reduce the supply of drugs. Patrick Murphy, the former Police Commissioner of New York City, told Congress that police had a financial incentive to impose roadblocks on the southbound lanes of highway I-95, which carried the buyers and their cash into the city, rather than the northbound lanes, which carried the drugs back up into New England, because seized cash would be forfeited to the police department, while seized drugs could only be destroyed.30

  Even when the police were able to arrest senior members of drug-dealing organizations, the forfeiture laws allowed kingpins to buy their freedom. Those with the most assets to forfeit served shorter prison sentences and sometimes no prison sentence at all. In New Jersey, for example, a defendant facing twenty-five years to life on drug kingpin charges negotiated a dismissal of that charge and parole eligibility in five years on a lesser conviction, by agreeing to hand over $1 million in assets. In Massachusetts, agreements to forfeit $10,000 or more bought elimination or reduction of trafficking charges in 70 per cent of such cases.31

  Back in 1988, an article published in the University of Chicago Law Review warned that ‘The law enforcement agenda that targets assets rather than crime, the 80 per cent of seizures that are unaccompanied by any criminal prosecution, the plea bargains that favour drug kingpins and penalize the “mules” without assets to trade, the reverse stings that target drug buyers rather than drug sellers, the overkill in agencies involved in even minor arrests, the massive shift in resources towards federal jurisdiction over local law enforcement—is largely the unplanned by-product of this economic incentive structure.’32 The Justice Department boasted about the big fish they caught, but threw a cloak of secrecy over the many innocent people swept up in the same net; most of the items seized weren’t the playthings of drug barons, but the modest homes, cars and savings of ordinary people.33 Worst of all, the aggressive use of forfeiture laws had no impact on drugs trafficking. The $730 million obtained by federal authorities in 1994 was never going to shut down America’s $50 billion a year drugs trade, but it was enough to show some appreciation to the police and government officials for their efforts in the war on drugs.

  Drugs law enforcement is hampered by the nature of the crime and the self-preservation instinct of bureaucracies, but also by the nature of some police officers. Trying to enforce drugs laws exposes police officers to large amounts of cash and drugs held by individuals who are not likely to complain about police corruption. The Knapp Commission, appointed in 1972 to investigate corruption in the New York City Police Department, had found that the most prevalent form of corruption among police officers was taking money to overlook illegal activities such as bookmaking. The war on drugs transformed this venality. Cynicism grew more pervasive among rank and file officers as the militarized response to inner-city drugs markets proved ineffectual. The Mollen Commission of 1994 found that the most prevalent form of police corruption in New York City was police officers actively committing crimes, especially in connection with the drugs trade. The Commission found that police corruption and brutality were prevalent in every police precinct with an active drugs trade that it studied. It found that police officers had stolen from drug dealers, sold and used drugs, and indiscriminately beaten the innocent and the guilty alike.34 Lance, the former cocaine wholesaler from South Jamaica, Queens, told me that ‘If they don’t have enough evidence to build a case against you, they just try to hurt your business. They’ll try and catch you going in to stores to buy furniture or whatever and they just take your money from you. Then they get so used to taking your money that they acquire expensive tastes. It’s free money, you know?’ Enforcing drug laws also made explicit the latent racism rife in police departments, as Daryl Gates, the former head of the Los Angeles Police Department, unwittingly revealed when he defended his officers against accusations of using excessive force on black suspects. ‘We may be finding that in some blacks, when the choke-hold is applied, the veins or the arteries do not open as fast as they do on normal people.’35

  Since 1995, ten police officers from Philadelphia’s 39th District have been charged with planting drugs on suspects, shaking down drug dealers for hundreds of thousands of dollars, and breaking into homes to steal drugs and cash. David, the former police officer with South Bureau Narcotics in Los Angeles, told me that planting drugs on suspects was common. ‘Sometimes when we stopped a guy, we’d search him thoroughly but couldn’t find any drugs. So we figured that he must have dropped them when he saw us, and we’d go back and check the pathway. When we couldn’t find anything, one of my partners would say, “Hey, here it is!” Well, after that I went to the Filing Team, where we used to take all the drug arrests to the District Attorney to be filed. We used to get a lot of reports that said “saw cop, dropped rock”. We’d smile when we saw those reports.’

  In 1998, forty-four officers from five law enforcement agencies in Cleveland were charged with taking money to protect cocaine-trafficking operations. There have also been cases of drug-related police corruption in Atlanta, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles and New Orleans. This corruption feeds on police officers’ cynicism about the criminal justice system, their contempt for suspects, and their unquestioned loyalty to other officers. ‘When you work dope, it’s a whole different mental environment within the police department,’ said David. ‘You’ve got all kinds of cool cars. You’ve got lots of money so you can pay snitches to go out and work for you, and your time is pretty much your own. A lot of dope cops felt like they were a class above everybody else. You’re working together and you have to be able to trust each other.’

  Jack Cole freely admits that narcotics policing was brutal, corrupt, racist and ineffective. ‘I knew it was bullshit, but I had my own addictions. I was addicted to the adrenaline rush of working these jobs. As you go up the ladder, you catch all the useless ones, but going up, you’re getting to some really smart people. Had they been in a legitimate business, they’d have gone right to the top. Me and my partner worked our way up from an eighth of an ounce cocaine buy in a little bar in Union City, New Jersey, to a billion-dollar cocaine ring, what was at the time the largest cocaine-trafficking organizati
on in the world. It was exciting.’

  It was so exciting that the police became wholly engrossed by the primordial conflict between good and evil that they believed they were waging. In 2002, Detroit’s Chief of Police Jerry Oliver admitted that 75 per cent of his department’s budget was spent on fighting the drugs trade.36 This has had important ramifications for other branches of law enforcement. In cities where police agencies commit the most resources to arresting their way out of their drug problems, the arrest rates for violent crime such as murder, rape and aggravated assault have declined. In Baltimore, drug arrests have skyrocketed over the past three decades, but arrest rates for murder have gone from 90 per cent to half that. Younger police officers are no longer capable of investigating crime properly, having learnt only to make meaningless drug arrests at the nearest corner.37

  By 1989, three quarters of all cases heard in the criminal courts of Los Angeles were drug-related.38 James Gray is the presiding judge of the Superior Court of Orange County, California, and has seen how counter-productive this narrow focus on policing the drugs trade has been. ‘I’d have five or six members of the Santa Ana police department sitting outside my courtroom, waiting to testify in a case where they had a $20 purchase of cocaine from some schmuck who is basically an addict selling drugs to support his habit. You look at all the back-up for these undercover officers, the people surveilling them to make sure that they’re safe, all the wiretaps, and then all of the reports. We’re spending so much time and energy prosecuting low-level, non-violent drug offences that we don’t have the resources to prosecute the really heavy-weight offences.’

  Those arrested for violation of US drug laws find judges to be no less draconian than police officers. A genuine drug epidemic, combined with simple-mindedness, blind ignorance and an unrestrained rush to punish, ensured that a compulsive urge to pass new drug laws gripped the Congress that gathered in 1986. Eric Sterling described the passage of the $6 billion Anti-Drug Abuse Act that soon followed. ‘At the beginning of July, the Speaker of the House, Tip O’Neill, the top elected Democrat in Washington, called the Steering and Policy Committee of the Democrats together and said, “We control the House. We are the chairs of every House committee. If we use this drug issue the right way, perhaps we can take the Senate in ’86. I want the House to report out a comprehensive anti-drug bill.” The first federal crack law was passed in 1986. I helped write it when I was counsel to the judiciary sub-committee on crime.’