Pubdate: Mon, 12 Aug 2013 Source: Aspen Daily News (CO) Copyright: 2013 Aspen Daily News Contact: http://www.aspendailynews.com/submit-letter-editor Website: http://www.aspendailynews.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/635 Author: Chad Abraham FOR TRIDENT, A CLOSE RELATIONSHIP WITH DEA AND FEDERAL MONEY, BUT NOT WITH FEDERAL RULES (Editor's note: This is the final story in a three-part series examining the Two Rivers Drug Enforcement Team, the drug task force known as TRIDENT; its undercover work and use of confidential informants; and its history, including the federal funding it receives, and why some law enforcement agencies have opted out of joining. Thursday's installment focused on TRIDENT's undercover operations; on Friday, an informant's story about why he signed on to help TRIDENT and the ramifications of his assistance, along with allegations about his behavior during that time, were covered.) During the recent trial of a former Carbondale man accused of drug distribution, after the attorneys were finished questioning witnesses, jurors were asked if they had any questions for those on the stand. The only question a juror asked in the entire trial happened during the testimony of Justin Wareham, a task force officer with the Two Rivers Drug Enforcement Team, which is known as TRIDENT. "Why does TRIDENT operate with little or less rules and procedures than the federal government?" asked Judge Denise Lynch of Garfield County District Court, reading the juror's inquiry. Wareham, under questioning from defense attorney Ryan Kalamaya of Aspen, had said a few minutes before that TRIDENT does not have to abide by federal regulations in connection with the $180,000 or so in federal grant money it receives annually. Kalamaya was representing Cory Upton, 22, who had been charged with two felonies related to cocaine distribution. Upton testified that a confidential informant working for Wareham used an offer of free drugs to entrap him into selling cocaine to another man who was a TRIDENT officer, working undercover, in May 2012. The jury ended up hung, split between nine who wanted to acquit Upton and three who favored a guilty verdict, according to the attorneys involved. In answering the juror's question, Wareham spoke for three straight minutes. "We operate ultimately under all the same rules as any police officer, and have the same procedures when arresting somebody," he said at one point. "You have to be flexible. The more rules you put together, the less flexible you are. ... Our procedures are very basic. The rules that we have in place are basically to build good cases, try to collect as much evidence with the manpower that we have, with the time that we have, to try to build the cases that we can." Judge Lynch eventually interrupted him and told him he gone "way beyond" the scope of the juror's question. The question was set up by Kalamaya's cross examination of Wareham, who said he has been with TRIDENT since 2008. After he acknowledged that TRIDENT agents aren't beholden to federal rules because they're not federally deputized, Kalamaya asked him, "So the federal government gives you play money?" "They give us money that we're held accountable for," Wareham said. "It's to be used for" narcotics investigations. "Are there written policies about that?" "No." Through Kalamaya's questioning, Wareham also said that he did not write a "suitability determination" of the informant (that person is being called Juan in this story to protect his identity after he said he had been threatened with retaliation for orchestrating more than 30 drug buys for TRIDENT). Kalamaya described the suitability metric for an informant as a written report that considers the person's age, their residential status, and the extent to which the person's information or assistance would be relevant to an investigation or prosecution. "You didn't do that, did you?" Kalamaya asked. "Sounds like a federal regulation," Wareham said. TRIDENT officer's relationship questioned Wareham's role in another portion of the drug investigation in which 20 people were arrested was also brought up, out of the earshot of the jury, during the July 30-Aug. 1 trial. A 17-year-old who said that, like Upton, he was coerced by Juan into selling a fake drug to a TRIDENT officer - in this case ibuprofen that supposedly was ecstasy - was scheduled to testify about his case. Before he took the stand, Kalamaya told Lynch that he should be able to bring up Wareham's relationship with the teen's mom, who allowed the informant to live with her family in the summer of 2012. "By introducing this overall investigation ... that opens the door to talking in a limited fashion about how exactly [TRIDENT] conducted that investigation," Kalamaya said. "And [the teen] is part of that." Lynch allowed him to ask the teen if TRIDENT had anything to do with Juan living in their home. "But I don't see the relevance as to the relationship between Officer Wareham and [the teen's] mother, and I think it's highly inflammatory," the judge said. Kalamaya never questioned the teen about his mom's former relationship with Wareham. Wareham was asked outside of the courtroom whether his relationship with the mother of the teen TRIDENT investigated and arrested gave him any pause in using Juan as an informant. "Whenever we detect that there's a conflict of interest, we remove ourselves, much like" prosecutors do, he said. "That's what was followed in this case. As soon as there's any involvement with something that was attached to my past, I remove myself from it as far as possible. Other case agents, other undercovers, they did the bulk of the investigation. "We're on the up and up." Wareham admitted under cross-examination that he provided surveillance in the teen's case. The teen eventually pleaded guilty to a distribution charge and was sentenced to a juvenile-diversion program, which is similar to probation. Given the hung jury, the district attorney's office offered Upton a plea deal. Upton pleaded guilty to a lesser felony charge and under the terms of the plea agreement is expected to receive a one-year deferred sentence. The charge will not appear on his record if he stays out of trouble. Paying TRIDENT's bills TRIDENT started in 1994 with the goal of being able to cross jurisdictional bounds for drug investigations, said Terry Wilson, Glenwood Springs' police chief and a member of the task force's board of directors, in an interview last month. "When you do an investigation as a local agency, you're very jurisdictionally bound," he said. "You're locked into your town, so TRIDENT has more latitude." TRIDENT is made up of officers from the Garfield County Sheriff's Office and the police departments of Glenwood Springs, Carbondale, Rifle, Silt and Vail, according to its website. Its main funding comes through the Rocky Mountain High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area, a regional branch of the White House's Office of National Drug Control Policy known as HIDTA. TRIDENT, according to a U.S. Department of Justice website, is one of 22 investigative task forces in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming. There is competition for grant money, Wilson said. Kalamaya sought, through a pretrial motion, to have TRIDENT release information about its funding. It is "believed that TRIDENT's funding in 2012 was based on the number of arrests made instead of the amount of drugs seized," he wrote in a court filing. Wilson said TRIDENT's funding cycle is based on the calendar year; grants are applied for in March and released the following January. Upton was one of 20 people arrested on warrants that were drafted in December 2012, court records show. But Wilson said he found "insulting" the accusation that TRIDENT launched these arrests to bolster its funding chances. The notion that HIDTA provides more money based on the number of arrests "absolutely isn't true," he said. (The Rocky Mountain HIDTA director did not return a message seeking comment.) "We don't make up cases, we don't make up drugs," Wilson said. "We investigate what is." On the other hand, if a task force only manages two drug arrests in a year, for instance, "you're probably not trying very hard," he said. Glenwood police provided an "initiative request" submitted for grant money that details TRIDENT's enforcement activity for 2010 and its "expected outputs for 2011." The task force in 2010 arrested 65 people for drug trafficking and narcotics violations. TRIDENT seized about 14.7 kilos of cocaine, 81.3 grams of methamphetamine and 5.3 ounces of marijuana, among other drugs, in 2010. "TRIDENT increased their local arrests for 2010 by 12 percent," the request form says. The task force expected in 2011 to "complete 66 felony arrests" and seize approximately 2 pounds of cocaine, 0.5 pounds of methamphetamine and 3 pounds of marijuana. The request also says the task force expected to disrupt two major drug-trafficking organizations and dismantle another. "Public awareness, support and positive press coverage has increased the educational value of the TRIDENT mission," the form says. "During undercover purchases TRIDENT is being constantly brought up by the targets and their associates, confirming a heightened sense of concern by traffickers." DEA relations It's unclear for how long TRIDENT has used confidential informants. But for eight or so years, it has shared an unmarked Glenwood office with two agents from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. TRIDENT's name is not on the listing of businesses and organizations in the building's lobby. "It's obvious that we don't want to advertise where we're at," said Mike Tyler, TRIDENT's commander and a member of the Rifle police force, when a reporter showed up at the office. "Then we'd have all these people trying to take pictures of us." For undercover agents, being photographed is counterproductive for obvious reasons. "We try to stay undercover all the time because we're out there with our families on our days off," Tyler said. Asked if the DEA shares tips and training with TRIDENT, DEA agent Jim Schrant said, "We share everything. And that's what having a co-located space does: It gives us the opportunity to share training, information, informants, whatever it might be." But TRIDENT agents, while operating with federal money, are not federal agents. Except sometimes they are, Schrant said. For certain DEA investigations, when it needs manpower, the agency will deputize TRIDENT officers and give them the full authority of a federal agent. Such was the case of Paul Pedersen, a former TRIDENT agent and Glenwood Springs police officer. He helped in the 2011 arrests of several Aspen-area residents targeted by the DEA in a Los Angeles-to-Aspen cocaine ring. In January 2012, he was stopped near Silt after his vehicle was spotted weaving. Pedersen presented a DEA badge to the Garfield County sheriff's deputy who pulled him over, a police report says. The deputy wrote that "Paul then advised me that there was a confidential informant in the vehicle that he was working this evening," the deputy wrote. "Paul advised me that he has been working this informant very hard to get information." He eventually pleaded guilty to a DUI charge. 'A toilet full of crap' Pitkin County Sheriff Joe DiSalvo said he doesn't share the philosophy of TRIDENT or the DEA on informants, so his office does not provide a deputy to the task force. "We just don't believe in the undercover system and how it betrays the trust of the community," he said. "It's a betrayal of the public trust, is the way I see it. The snitch system is broken. "When you incentivize freedom or money, it does give people the incentive to lie or to embellish, and I think that does happen." Even Wareham said he doesn't particularly like that aspect of his job. "I'm not in the business of partying and hanging out with drug dealers," he said. But "there's only so far that we can go without informants. They're a necessary thing we need to have." Assistant District Attorney Scott Turner didn't try to defend Juan and in fact called him a "piece of crap." In his closing statement in the Upton trial, Turner gave an analogy, one that he said he hoped wasn't too graphic for jurors. "The drug world is a toilet full of crap. ... We have a drug trade here, and it's a toilet full of crap," he said. "These guys [TRIDENT] have to go unplug it. Juan's the plunger they try to use to unplug that toilet. It's not a tool they like to use, but it's a necessary tool." District Attorney Sherry Caloia said that while she thinks TRIDENT plays a crucial crime-fighting role, she has mixed feelings about confidential informants. "It's something that we don't necessarily want people who have problems with drugs to go out and do because it's not going to aid in their own recovery," she said. "I'm cautious about it." In exchange for his work with TRIDENT, a former district attorney dropped a felony charge of possession of a dangerous weapon against Juan (he was arrested for having brass knuckles). He was also paid more than $4,000 for setting up scores of drug buys. Since being sworn in in January, Caloia said TRIDENT has approached her on a couple of occasions seeking to have charges dropped against someone the task force wanted to use as an informant. She declined the requests. "It is not a blanket policy," she said of denying the overtures. "I will look at every situation individually. "TRIDENT's undercover work is important but again, I do think that it has to be used cautiously so we're not actually making a bigger problem out of drugs." Even after his arrest, during the time he was working for TRIDENT, Upton testified that Juan continued to use and sell cocaine. Kalamaya, in his closing argument, said that was wrong. "Our taxpayer dollars, our federal money, has gone to a drug dealer," he said. "This case is about what we say about our society. ... The issue here is we deserve better. We deserve better from our police. If they can't abide by federal regulations, what does that mean for us? "What sort of message are we sending?" - --- MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom