Pubdate: Mon, 29 Sep 2014
Source: Washington Post (DC)
Copyright: 2014 The Washington Post Company
Contact: http://mapinc.org/url/mUgeOPdZ
Website: http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/491
Author: Sari Horwitz
Page: A1

DARK SIDE OF THE BOOM

North Dakota's Oil Rush Brings Cash and Promise to Reservation, Along 
With Drug-Fueled Crime

ON THE FORT BERTHOLD INDIAN RESERVATION - Tribal police Sgt. Dawn 
White is racing down a dusty two-lane road - siren blaring, police 
radio crackling - as she attempts to get to the latest 911 call on a 
reservation that is a blur of oil rigs and bright-orange gas flares.

"Move! C'mon, get out of the fricking way!" White yells as she hits 
102 mph and weaves in and out of a line of slow-moving 
tractor-trailers that stretches for miles.

In just five years, the Bakken formation in North Dakota has gone 
from producing about 200,000 barrels to 1.1 million barrels of oil a 
day, making North Dakota the No. 2 oil-producing state, behind Texas, 
and luring thousands of workers from around the country.

But there is a dark side to the multibilliondollar boom in the oil 
fields, which stretch across western North Dakota into Montana and 
part of Canada. The arrival of highly paid oil workers living in 
sprawling "man camps" with limited spending opportunities has led to 
a crime wave - including murders, aggravated assaults, rapes, human 
trafficking and robberies - fueled by a huge market for illegal 
drugs, primarily heroin and methamphetamine. Especially hard-hit are 
the Indian lands at the heart of the Bakken. Created in 1870 on 
rolling grasslands along the Missouri River, Fort Berthold 
(pronounced Birth-Old), was named after a U.S. Army fort and is home 
to the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation - known as the MHA Nation, 
or the Three Affiliated Tribes.

"It's like a tidal wave, it's unbelievable," said Diane Johnson, 
chief judge at the MHA Nation. She said crime has tripled in the past 
two years and that 90 percent is drug-related. "The drug problem that 
the oil boom has brought is destroying our reservation."

Once farmers and traders, the Mandan was the tribe that gave Lewis 
and Clark safe harbor on their expedition to the Northwest but was 
decimated in the mid 1830s by smallpox. Over many years, the 12 
million acres awarded to the three tribes by treaty in 1851 has been 
reduced to 1 million by the United States.

The U.S. government in 1947 built the Garrison Dam and created Lake 
Sakakawea, a 479square-mile body of water that flooded the land of 
the Three Affiliated Tribes, wiped out much of their farming and 
ranching economy, and forced most of them to relocate to higher 
ground on the prairie.

"When the white man said, ' This will be your reservation,' little 
did they know those Badlands would now have oil and gas," MHA Nation 
Chairman Tex "Red Tipped Arrow" Hall said in an energy company video 
last year. "Those Badlands were coined because they're nothing but 
gully, gumbo and clay. Grass won't grow, and horses can't eat and 
cattle or buffalo can't hardly eat . . . but there's huge oil and gas 
reserves under those Badlands now."

The oil boom could potentially bring hundreds of millions of dollars 
to the tribes, creating the opportunity to build new roads, schools, 
and badly needed housing and health facilities. But the money is 
coming with a steep social cost, according to White, her fellow 
tribal officers and federal officials who are struggling to keep up 
with the onslaught of drugs and crime.

"We are dealing with stuff we've never seen before," White said after 
leaving the scene of the latest disturbance fueled by drugs and 
alcohol. "No one was prepared for this."

The 20-member tribal police force is short-staffed and losing 
officers to higher-paying jobs on the oil fields. Sometimes, there 
are only two tribal officers on duty to cover the whole reservation, 
including part of the North Dakota Badlands. There is only one 
substance-abuse treatment center, with room for only nine patients at 
a time, to help the soaring number of heroin and meth addicts.

Over the summer, the White House Office of National Drug Control 
Policy singled out drug trafficking in the Bakken oil patch as a 
"burgeoning threat." Violent crime in North Dakota's Williston Basin 
region, which includes the reservation, increased 121 percent from 
2005 to 2011. The Bakken is also experiencing a large influx of 
motorcycle gangs, trying to claim "ownership" of the territory and 
facilitating prostitution and the drug trade, according to a federal report.

"Up until a few years ago, Fort Berthold was a typical reservation 
struggling with the typical economic problems that you find in Indian 
Country," said Timothy Q. Purdon, the U.S. attorney for North Dakota, 
whose office prosecutes violent crime on the reservation.

"But now, boom - barrels of oil mean barrels of money," Purdon said. 
"More money and more people equals more crime. And whether the 
outsiders came here to work on a rig and decided it would be easier 
to sell drugs or they came here to sell drugs, it doesn't make any 
difference. They're selling drugs. An unprecedented amount."

Operation Winter's End

Hall, the longtime chairman of the Three Affiliated Tribes, called it 
the "worst tragedy" on the Fort Berthold reservation in his memory.

On a November afternoon two years ago, an intruder burst into a home 
in New Town, the largest town on the reservation, and shot and killed 
a grandmother and three of her grandchildren with a hunting rifle. A 
fourth grandchild, a 12-year-old boy, survived by hiding under his 
slain brother's body and pretending he was dead.

The young man responsible for the killings slit his own throat hours 
later in a nearby town. He was high on meth, according to federal officials.

On the same day, in an unrelated incident, Sgt. White stopped a 
motorist who was wanted on an outstanding warrant. As she grabbed the 
handle of his car door, the driver, who had drugs in the vehicle, 
took off, dragging her on the ground for half a block and sending her 
to the hospital with a concussion.

It seemed as though big-city drug violence had arrived like a sudden storm.

"We wanted to find out, immediate top priority, what happened here," 
Purdon said. "Who was this shooter? Where did he get the meth? Who 
was he involved with? And what can we do about it?"

Purdon and the FBI teamed up with White and other tribal officers, 
focusing on a large-scale drug-trafficking ring led by two brothers 
from Wasco, Calif. - Oscar and Happy Lopez. In the summer of 2013, in 
an investigation dubbed Operation Winter's End, Purdon indicted 22 
people, including the Lopez brothers as well as members of the 
tribes, for dealing heroin and meth on or around Fort Berthold. The 
drugs came from Mexico through Southern California, officials said.

One suspect, Michael Smith, was wanted on a warrant for drug 
trafficking in Colorado. He holed himself up in a reservation house 
with a gun for more than 12 hours before police knocked down the 
walls with a front-end loader.

"The ' wow effect' was pretty strong," said Assistant U.S. Attorney 
Rick Volk, who oversaw the case. "That's not something that happens 
every day in a small town like New Town."

Since then, Purdon has indicted more than 40 other people who have 
all pleaded guilty to felony drug charges in the ongoing Winter's End 
case, with a large amount of the meth and heroin also coming from 
gangs in Chicago or dealers in Minneapolis.

Investigating crime on Fort Berthold is more difficult than most 
places because the reservation sits in six different counties each 
with its own sheriff - some of whom do not have a good relationship 
with the tribe, according to tribal members. If the victim and 
suspect are both Native American, the tribal police or the FBI 
handles the arrest. But if the suspect is not Native American, in 
most cases the tribal police can detain the suspect but then have to 
call the sheriff in the county where the crime occurred. Sometimes 
they have to wait several hours before a deputy arrives to make the 
arrest. In a murder case, the state or the FBI might be involved, 
depending on the race of the victim and the suspect.

"There are volumes of treatises on Indian law that are written about 
this stuff," Purdon said. "It's very complicated. And we're asking 
guys with guns and badges in uniforms at 3:30 in the morning with 
people yelling at each other to make these decisions - to understand 
the law and be able to apply it."

In the quadruple murder, for example, all four victims were white. 
But police didn't immediately know if the perpetrator was white or 
Native American, so there was initial confusion among law enforcement 
officials about who was in charge of the investigation.

"Can you imagine the idea that we didn't know the race of the 
shooter, so we didn't know at first who had jurisdiction over the 
homicide?" Purdon asked. "That's not something your typical county 
sheriff has to deal with."

The killer was later identified as a 21-year-old Native American.

'I helped bring that heroin'

In the front seat of her cruiser, White, an Army veteran who grew up 
in Fort Berthold, carries an eagle feather and a photograph of the 
rodeo-champion grandfather who raised her.

Volk calls her "the eyes and ears of the reservation," a cop who is 
able to find anyone. Her fervor to save her people from the ravages 
of heroin and meth gives White the fortitude to arrest even tribal 
members she knows well.

"I put the uniform on," White said, "I have no family. I have no friends."

Before she sets out on patrol, she lights the end of braided sweet 
grass, a tradition of the Plains Indians to drive away bad spirits. 
White, a mother of three, places it on her dashboard for protection.

White also carries a set of pink handcuffs, a personal signature that 
she says represents "girl power." One night last year, White slapped 
the cuffs on one of her relatives, Rachelle Baker, a 29-year-old 
former Fort Berthold teacher who became addicted to heroin shortly 
after it arrived on the Bakken.

"I was in the back of her cruiser, cussing her out, telling her to 
get away from me, ' you don't know what you're doing,' " Baker said 
in a recent interview. "I was bawling my eyes out. I was sweating, my 
hair was sticking to my face. She took my hair and pushed it back and 
she said, 'Rachelle, I don't want to see you like this anymore. I 
don't want to see you live like this. You need to get better for your 
kids, Rachelle.' And she closed the door."

Three years ago, Baker's boyfriend at the time got heroin from an oil 
rig worker who had brought it with him from Boston. "That was the 
first time in my life I ever saw it," Baker said.

Soon, she was hooked on heroin, buying from a dealer who came from 
Minneapolis and shooting up, along with her friends, on a reservation 
where she said "there's no other recreation."

"There's not a movie theater here," Baker said. "There's not a 
swimming pool. There's nothing. There's nothing to do here."

She became pregnant and was using when she had her son.

"I just couldn't stop," Baker said. She shot up so many times that 
she couldn't find an easy vein and inserted needles into her neck, 
legs, ankles and toes. One time, she shot up in her forehead.

By last fall, Baker was also using meth. In January of this year, 
social workers took away both of her children, now ages 3 and 1.

"That was the lowest point in my life," Baker said. She said she 
tried to kill herself by swallowing 200 Tylenol pills. Baker was 
transferred from the hospital to a mental-health facility and then 
jail, where lying in the bunk she said she felt a sense of peace for 
the first time in years.

"Because it felt like the nightmare I had been living was finally 
over," she said.

When she was released, Baker enrolled in a treatment program; she's 
now been drug-free for nearly eight months. She's in counseling and 
finished parenting classes. She is tested for drugs every week and is 
one step away from regaining custody of her children. She's helping 
to start two Narcotics Anonymous groups at Fort Berthold, where there was none.

But in a few months, Baker goes to federal court, where she said she 
faces 56 months in prison. She pleaded guilty to distribution of 
heroin after being caught in Purdon's drug sweep.

"It is so sad because I am finally getting my life back together," 
Baker said. "But I helped bring that heroin here. I sold it to people 
here on the reservation. I gave it to family members. And if I have 
to pay that price, then I will."

An unsafe community

Responding to another call, White pulls up to the reservation's 4 
Bears Casino and Lodge to check on a call about a small child who was 
left inside a car while her mother went inside to gamble.

Lined up outside the casino's hotel are four other police cars. They 
are not the cruisers of officers who have come to investigate the 
child. They belong to several new recruits who have no place to live. 
The housing shortage has forced officers to move with their families 
into casino hotel rooms until homes are built for them.

Three Affiliated Tribes Police Chief Chad Johnson said he needs at 
least 50 more officers.

"I get a lot of applicants from all over," Johnson said. "The first 
thing they ask is if we have housing available. We've been putting 
them up in the casino, but some of them have families and they don't 
want their families living in a casino."

Johnson, the judge, has the same problem recruiting prosecutors. "We 
can't get them to come to the MHA Nation because of the lack of 
housing and the community is becoming so unsafe," she said. "It is 
extremely dangerous to live here now."

While Fort Berthold needs more police officers, housing for recruits, 
more tribal prosecutors and judges, and additional drug treatment 
facilities, some residents say their leaders have made questionable 
purchases, including a yacht. Just behind the casino on the lake sits 
a gleaming white 96-foot yacht that the tribe purchased last year to 
be used for a riverboat gambling operation.

While some federal officials have questioned the tribe's financial 
priorities, tribe members have called for an investigation into their 
leader's business dealings.

Earlier this year, the seven-member tribal business council led by 
Hall voted to hire a former U.S. attorney to examine Hall's private 
oil and gas business dealings on Fort Berthold - including his 
relationship with James Henrikson, a man who was arrested on felony 
weapons charges and was indicted two weeks ago on 11 counts, 
including murder-for-hire of an associate.

Hall, who served as chairman for 12 years, lost his reelection bid 
the same week. In a statement, he has denied "affiliation with any 
gangs" and said he is cooperating with federal investigators in the 
Henrikson case.

Another member of the tribal council, Barry Benson, was arrested this 
year on drug charges.

Federal officials have sent more agents and resources to the Bakken, 
tripling the number of prosecutions in what Purdon calls a "robust 
response" to the crime wave.

But, he added, "it's not for me to talk about what the appropriate 
response is by the state of North Dakota, or these counties and the tribe."

This month, Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.) created a task force of 
North Dakotans to focus on the increase in drug-related crime and 
human trafficking in the Bakken, including Fort Berthold.

The state "could absolutely do more," Heitkamp said in an interview, 
pointing to the need for more mental-health services, drug treatment 
facilities and drug courts.

"We are blessed with a growing economy and the country's lowest 
unemployment rate, but there was a 20 percent increase in drug crimes 
in North Dakota last year," Heitkamp said. "A better-coordinated 
response from the state would be helpful. The lack of roads, housing 
and law enforcement has stretched this small rural reservation to the max."

' The last of the last'

Earlier this year at a tribal conference in Bismark, N.D., which 
Purdon and Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. attended, White was 
presented with an award for her work trying to eradicate drug 
trafficking at Fort Berthold.

She choked back tears as she walked to the podium, where she 
dedicated her award to her Native American grandparents who raised 
her. She spoke about the time she has spent away from her three 
children because of her job.

"I sacrifice because this is the only place I'm going to be a cop, 
the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation," White said, her voice cracking.

"This is the last of what my people have," White said. "Our people 
have survived so many things in history. The methamphetamine use, the 
heroin use, is just another epidemic like smallpox and boarding 
schools. And the last of the last are going to have to survive. And I 
want to be in the front lines because that was my vow - to protect my people."
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom