Pubdate: Sun, 13 Jun 1999 Source: Santa Fe New Mexican (NM) Copyright: 2000 The Santa Fe New Mexican Contact: 202 E Marcy, Santa Fe, N.M. 87501 Fax: (505) 986-3040 Feedback: http://www.sfnewmexican.com/letterstoeditor/submitform.las Website: http://www.sfnewmexican.com/ Author: Barbara Ferry Note: This article is part of the "Heroin: The Damage Done" series. NARCS ON THE STREET On Duty And Off, Officers' Lives Are Fraught With Danger The narcotics agent is a fireplug of a man who likes his job. "There's no sense being a cop if you're going to hide from the criminals," he's fond of saying. He lives in Northern New Mexico, close to the homes of drug dealers. After someone shot at his house, he took home a bulletproof vest and hung it over his child's crib. Soon after that, it was time for the baby's christening. When he got to the church, there was another family there for a baptism with two men the agent had set up on a drug bust just weeks before - they were out on bond. "My heart started pounding real fast," he recalls. "I thought 'Oh God -- we're going to have a rumble, right here in the church.' But they acted respectfully. You know, some of these guys aren't bad people at heart. A lot of people I grew up with are drug users." The phone rings. The agent stacks and restacks boxes of bullets on his desk as he talks with an informant. A buy-and-bust deal he hoped to do that afternoon has been delayed because the target, a cocaine dealer, has to take her 12-year-old son to the doctor. "Can you believe this?" says the agent, rolling his eyes. "Life is beautiful." The agent looks out the narrow window of his office. "Is it me, or are drugs everywhere? ... It seems to me they're everywhere. ... But maybe it's just me." He takes his latest seizure out of a safe and places it on his desk. The black-tar heroin is encased in bits of colorful balloons, each the size of a gumball. They look like primitive toys. A handful of the heroin balls roll around on the desktop. "That's $30,000 worth right there," he says. He takes out a letter agents confiscated on a recent search. The letter is in a combination of English and Spanish. It reads "te quiero mucho (I love you very much) but I can't be with you, because my family knows you sell drugs." The agent holds up the letter laughing. "Isn't that beautiful," he says. The letter will be good evidence, he hopes. In the first three months of this year, the Region III Drug Task Force, which gets federal funding for drug cases in four Northern New Mexico counties, has seized a little more than three ounces of heroin. That's down compared to the same period last year, when the take was six ounces. An ounce of heroin sells for about $3,500 in bulk. If the dealer breaks it up into individual doses or caps, the value rises to about $28,000, according to the agent. Santa Fe County Undersheriff Benjie Montaño says the seizure figure is lower this year because agents are working on investigations that take longer. Montaño admits the task force is still working to restore its credibility after an embarrassing series of incidents in the early 1990s. On two occasions, agents holding search warrants went into the wrong homes. In one case, agents burst into a Santa Cruz home where a woman was cleaning her bathroom. They pointed a gun at her head, made her lie on the ground and handcuffed her before realizing agents had read the address wrong on the warrant. Agency cooperation wasn't what it should have been, either, Montaño said. In one case, deputies conducting surveillance on a reputed dealer's property spotted agents from a different agency peering back at them through their binoculars. "It turned out both were doing surveillance on the same guy from different ends of the property," Montaño recalled. But Montaño says a lot has changed. State, city and county agencies are stressing cooperation. A bill by U.S. Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., designates Rio Arriba County as a High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area - which qualifies it for about $250,000 in federal funds. N.M. 76 between Santa Cruz and Chimayó is the stronghold of heroin dealers. The agent points out the houses. "That one there, we had to rebuild the gate because we broke it during a search warrant." The agent, like a lot a people around town, knows where the dealers live. He knows the signals they use to let customers know they're open for business - the porch light on all day, or the front gate left in a certain position. "People think we don't know," he says. "We know." But the agent says catching dealers isn't as easy as one might think. Some dealers live on remote back roads, have two-way radios and do their own surveillance. Going undercover in Chimayó, population 4,100, is difficult, and in any case some dealers use a tried-and-true narc-detecting technique: Before they will accept a new customer, they make him or her inject the drug in front of them. "If we tried to put someone undercover in here, they'd end up dead or a junkie within a year," the agent says. Plus, he says, the narcs are understaffed. The Region III task force has only five agents for Santa Fe, Los Alamos, Taos and Rio Arriba counties. Rio Arriba County alone is the size of Connecticut. The agent turns onto a deeply rutted dirt road. He drives over an arroyo and back into the woods to a trailer - the home, he says, of a family of dealers who have been in business for more than 20 years. "There's one way in and one way out," he says, noting the dealers have two-way radios. "They know we're coming way before we're coming." Back in town, the agent recognizes the car of an informant, an addict who trades information for cash. Nearby in the street stands a man who the agent says is a well-known dealer. The agent waves down the informant, who pulls over and rolls down his window. The informant doesn't appear too happy to be talking to the agent. The informant is shaking and sweating, although it's unclear whether from drugs or fear. He tells the agent about a man selling heroin out of a nearby motel room. Then he peels away, his tires squealing. What would happen if a dealer spotted an informant talking to the agent? "I dunno; I guess they could kill him," the agent says. The agent says the heroin trade in Northern New Mexico is an unorganized assortment of locals who are being increasingly dominated by a more organized Mexican faction. "The locals are taking a back seat to the Mexicans," he says. In some cases, he says Mexican dealers have moved in with women who provide them with a base of operations in exchange for drugs. Another agent says, "The local people used to have the drug trade in their pockets." Now, he says, the majority of the traffickers are Mexicans who are better organized. There aren't any visible drug kingpins in the Española Valley. Instead of narco-palaces, the dealers tend to live in modest houses or double-wides. And, in general, the drug trade in Rio Arriba hasn't been marked by the shoot-outs and street killings that have characterized trafficking in urban areas and border cities. The route of the drugs traditionally has been across the border at El Paso, with the drugs carried in private vehicles and sometimes on passenger trains to Albuquerque. But an agent who has worked in narcotics for 17 years says that in the past year he and his colleagues have been seeing drugs routed into Northern New Mexico from Denver and other points north. The narcotics agent likes his job. But in some ways he sees it as ultimately futile. "We really can't be too proud," he says. "We're out here busting people, and the heroin problem is getting worse and worse." So while spending his days sifting tips, trying to manipulate informants, arguing with the prosecutors about whom he can turn for a bigger fish, the agent would like to see himself as a quasi-social worker. "If an addict comes to me for help, I'm going to do everything I can to get him into a program," he says. "These people have a sickness. I want them to know, I'm not here to make their lives more miserable." MAP posted-by: Doc-Hawk