Pubdate: Thu, 22 July, 1999 Source: Boston Phoenix (MA) Copyright: 1999 The Phoenix Media/Communications Group. Contact: 126 Brookline Ave., Boston, MA 02215 Fax: (617) 536-1463 Feedback: http://www.bostonphoenix.com/standard/feedback.html Website: http://www.phx.com/ Author: Jason Gay Note: Jason Gay can be reached at this is the second of 2 parts. Related: more articles are available at http://www.mapinc.org/meth.htm & http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v98/n533/a10.html NORTHERN EXPOSURE (continued from part 1 of 2) The top person in charge of tackling Aroostook County's methamphetamine problem is an MDEA agent named Darrell O. Crandall Jr., the agency's supervisor for the region. A stocky, soft-spoken 32-year-old, Crandall says he left the sheriff's department to join MDEA in 1989 because he was "looking for a challenge." In methamphetamine, he says, he has found that challenge. Crandall's MDEA unit is based in Houlton, in an office on the second floor of the town's old brick county courthouse. Since 1995, he says, MDEA has arrested close to 50 people on methamphetamine-related charges in Aroostook. Very few of these busts, he emphasizes, have been for simple possession. The vast majority have been for distribution, like the arrest of Richard Leyva, a 27-year-old Presque Isle resident originally from Texas, who led authorities to the record seven-pound seizure that flabbergasted local officials in May. "We've never seized seven pounds of cocaine, I can tell you that," Crandall says. As is common in the drug-enforcement trade, much of Crandall's intelligence about the Aroostook meth scene comes from undercover informants and incarcerated suspects looking to swap information for reductions in prison time. As a result, most of MDEA's meth cases have been built piecemeal over a period of months, sometimes years. For example, the case against the Bridgewater Group began in 1995, when MDEA agents, who were looking for an indoor marijuana crop, obtained a search warrant for a home in Mars Hill. Inside the home, agents found about three ounces of a white powder that they assumed was cocaine, but that turned out to be meth. The MDEA kept the investigation open, and more than a year later, when reports of increased methamphetamine began to hit the Mars Hill-Bridgewater-Houlton area, they began paying attention to individuals from the original pot case and discovered that some were bringing meth into Aroostook via air mail. In September 1997, agents arrested Randall Hunemuller at the Mars Hill post office after he picked up a package from California containing slightly less than a pound of methamphetamine. The arrest of Hunemuller, who was from California, led to the arrests of five other people involved in the operation, including Karla Davis, who was waiting in a car at the post-office parking lot, and Hunemuller's brother, Richard, the supplier, in La Mesa, California. Authorities believe that before they were caught, members of the Bridgewater Group were responsible for distributing more than six pounds' worth of methamphetamine, an amount with an estimated street value in the hundreds of thousands. But since the arrests of the Bridgewater Group, it appears that Aroostook's meth demand has only increased. Part of the problem is that the methamphetamine trade, both nationally and in northern Maine, is very difficult for authorities to tackle: unlike cocaine and heroin, which are typically dominated by specific crime organizations and international smugglers, meth is furnished by an extremely diffuse web of distributors including everyone from mom-and-pop dealers and dorm-room chemists to large cartels. Darrell Crandall says that Aroostook's meth trade behaves more like a small business than a major drug-running network, and it's hard to put a finger on who's doing what. Dealing operations are small, typically confined to a few individuals who are using as well as selling. There is no street-level dealing to speak of in Aroostook; exchanges are usually arranged in advance, and made in homes and cars, away from public view. (The going rate for meth in Aroostook is $100 a gram, which is consistent with the national average, and is also the local price for cocaine -- but again, meth's powerful high makes it a more attractive buy for many users.) For a tiny law-enforcement team working in an extremely rural area, stopping a meth wave can be like trying to catch a housefly between two fingers. Crandall's biggest problem is his lack of personnel. In addition to himself, there are only two other MDEA agents in Houlton. (Crandall also oversees Washington County to the south, where another agent is posted.) Though Crandall and his agents do get assistance from state and local police, the US Border Patrol, MDEA agents from other jurisdictions, and even an occasional US DEA agent (and Crandall is quick to praise all these contacts), he's desperate for help. "I have the technology," he says. "I have the knowledge base, as do the people working for me. I have the cooperation of [other law-enforcement agencies]. I simply need people to get the job done." It's clear that the drug fascinates Crandall even as it torments him. When I visit him in his office one day, he goes to an evidence room, takes out a red toolbox, unlocks it, and pulls out a large plastic bag. Inside is a thick pile of methamphetamine, most of it in large, irregular crystalline chunks. It looks like a bag of dirty, oversized rock candy. Crandall opens the bag and tells me to take a brief whiff. The meth has a putrid, chemically intense odor, not unlike the rotten-egg scent of burning sulfur. "Smells terrible, doesn't it?" he says. I ask Crandall to describe the meth addicts he's encountered. "Well, most of them have almost uncontrollable movements," he says. "Their head and arms will flail, they'll pick at particular spots on their arms and face, they'll sweat and rock back and forth on their feet. And if it's extended use, they're paranoid." Crandall shakes his head. After nearly five years of fighting meth, he's not about to give up, but he knows that interdiction alone won't solve anything. He expresses concern that the new drug problem isn't getting enough attention, and that there aren't enough rehabilitation outlets for Aroostook residents. And most of all, he worries that the locals who try meth don't know what they're getting into. "There are people who use this drug who believe their intentions are genuine," Crandall says. "There are people who take [meth] thinking it will make them work harder -- laborers who figure they can squeeze out four to five extra hours a day don't think twice. They may be right in the short term, but they are terribly misinformed about the eventual consequences." But why Aroostook? After all, the rest of New England has largely been spared from the national meth epidemic. Even Crandall is puzzled. "I get that question all the time from law enforcement, from members of the media," he says, "and I don't have an answer." It's true that Aroostook County possesses many of the same characteristics as meth-saturated regions elsewhere in the country, particularly the midwestern states. It is rural, economically deprived, almost exclusively white, and home to a sizable blue-collar population. Like people in the Ozarks or on the Nebraska plains, people in Aroostook can suffer from loneliness and isolation (what Mark Nelson describes as the "nothin' to do" problem), which can contribute to substance abuse. And meth is no ordinary substance; users share an almost cult-like devotion to the drug. "These people hang together, despite extraordinary crises going on, in order to be close to the drug," says Donald Carson of Aroostook Mental Health. "It's a very intense network of dealers and users that is very difficult to break apart. It's just as intense as the drug itself, and it's a very seductive lifestyle that is difficult to extract yourself from." But how did the drug get there in the first place? There are plenty of theories. Some believe that Aroostook's current meth wave started with itinerant truckers, who brought the drug up Route 1 and turned locals on to it. Crandall agrees that some methamphetamine came into the county with truckers, but he thinks that they weren't the main suppliers and certainly aren't nowadays. "We know that in the past, meth has been brought here by commercial transport -- trucks -- and I'm sure that continues," he says. "But the vast amount of seizures are not coming in by [that method]." Others suspect that methamphetamine is coming into the area through Canada, with which Aroostook shares a border hundreds of miles long. Smugglers have often brought illicit drugs, especially marijuana, from Canada into this country (and vice versa), and though the US Border Patrol maintains a presence in the region, nearly everybody I speak to in Aroostook claims to know a place -- a lake, a wooded patch, a dirt road -- where it is easy to sneak across the international line. One afternoon, Crandall drives me to a bumpy dirt road on the outskirts of Houlton, less than a mile away from the official border checkpoint at the end of Interstate 95. Stopping his car, Crandall points to a small opening between an overgrown thicket of trees. "See that clearing?" he asks. "That's Canada." To date, however, no border smugglers have been caught with methamphetamine in Aroostook. Neither is there any clear evidence that the drug is being manufactured locally; the last meth-lab seizure in Maine was in 1990, when agents raided one in Washington County. This doesn't mean that local production isn't happening, however. It is no secret that methamphetamine chemists favor rural locations, not only for their low levels of law enforcement, but also because it is easier to hide the drug's telltale odor. (For dealers, this problem is not insignificant: in other parts of the country, drug-enforcement agents are training everyone from cable-television installers to Avon salespeople to recognize what a clandestine meth lab smells like.) Crandall, in fact, was part of a Maine contingent that recently attended a DEA workshop on clandestine lab detection in Quantico, Virginia. When I ask Crandall what he would say if he had to bet whether there's a lab somewhere in Aroostook, he doesn't hesitate: "Yes." "We can't preclude the fact that someone might get the idea to make this illegal substance, given the fact that all the chemicals are available at your neighborhood Wal-Mart," says Roy McKinney, the MDEA director. Still, authorities believe that most of the methamphetamine arriving in Aroostook is coming by air mail, as in the Bridgewater Group case. (Citing its ongoing investigation into the recent Richard Leyva case, the MDEA declines to say where the seven pounds of meth it seized in May came from. They won't even specify where the meth was found, saying only that Leyva "led" them to it.) Though sending drugs through the mail has its risks -- shipments can't be especially large, and packages must be carefully sealed and disguised to avoid detection -- it's relatively easy for a West Coast or Midwest supplier to send a shipment to Maine. If most of Aroostook's methamphetamine supply is coming by mail, it undermines the theory that the region was somehow predisposed to a problem for reasons of geography or economy. After all, every community has access to air mail. Every community, blue-collar or white-collar, has potential meth addicts. The reality is that chance -- random bad luck -- may have had as much to do with meth's invasion of Aroostook as any other factor. For example, the leader of the Bridgewater Group came from California. He knew about meth, his brother sent it to him, he got hooked, other people got hooked, and the drug took off. The same chain of events could have happened anywhere, and as the national experience has shown, it does happen almost anywhere. In evaluating the methamphetamine problem in northern Maine, the proper question to ask isn't "Why?" It's "Why not?" That said, it is still uncertain whether Aroostook's methamphetamine trade is an aberration or a sign that the drug will work its way into the rest of New England. Certainly, some experts see it as a danger sign. "It's still a locally based problem, but as the Midwest has found out, it didn't take very long to spread across the country from California to Iowa and Missouri," says Jay McCloskey, the Maine US Attorney. Pamela Mersky-Hay of the DEA says that federal agents are keeping close watch on developments in northern Maine, as well as in the rest of New England. "We don't want to get hit like we've gotten hit in the West and Midwest," she says. "We don't want to see the human wreckage we've seen elsewhere in the country." But authorities are concerned that many residents don't realize how devastating meth's spread could be -- and sometimes, people aren't aware of the problem at all. When I call the Maine Office of Substance Abuse, I talk to a researcher who is intimately familiar with other drug trends but positively surprised by the news of Aroostook's meth crisis. Even in Aroostook, crank has yet to achieve critical mass as a public-health issue. Almost everyone I speak to in the county is aware of the recent meth seizures and arrests, but many of them seem to think that the drug is just a fad, that the current trouble will be short-lived. A number of people attribute the drug's rise in the area to transients -- and postulate that when the out-of-towners are gone, methamphetamine will go too. "There's some denial that it isn't as bad as they've heard," says Mark Nelson, the Houlton counselor. "There are some people who think [users] are just weekend warriors, stuff like that. But it's bad. It's all bad." Just ask Scott Hafford, the man who tried to rob the supermarket in Fort Kent nearly two years ago. Before he started using meth, Hafford says, he was married with three children and gainfully employed as a construction worker, skilled in everything from carpentry to roofing to steel work. Drugs were not a part of his life. "My idea of a good time was renting movies and staying home with the kids," he says. "Of course, I drank my beer, but I was kind of a homebody." Hafford says he was working one day when someone introduced him to methamphetamine. The person told him that if he just took a little snort of crank, he could "work 18 hours a day, drink all night, and go right back to work the next morning," Hafford recalls. At first, he got some meth for free, but soon, he started paying. Within weeks, Hafford says, he found himself hooked. He plunged into Aroostook's burgeoning methamphetamine scene -- a netherworld he recalls as "paranoid and gun-toting, with everyone suspicious of everyone," and marked by weekend crank parties where "90 out of 100 people were using." Barely six months after he first tried meth, Hafford attempted his botched armed robbery in Fort Kent. After bingeing on crank for five days, he says, he went up to the northern town after abandoning an attempt to settle a score with a drug dealer in Bangor. To this day, Hafford says he intended simply to go get beer, but wound up trying to rob the place instead. Details are still sketchy to him -- "I was on autopilot," he says -- but he remembers telling the employees to open the safe, and then waving his gun around when they couldn't. He even remembers the young store employee who told him he shouldn't leave empty-handed. "I'm on my way out the door, and the kid says, 'You didn't get nothing -- you should at least get some beer,' " Hafford says. "I admire that kid." Hafford practically chuckles at his lack of skill as a robber. "It was as poorly planned as a project could have happened," he says. But he doesn't attempt to minimize his crime or its impact on the people in the market that night. "I scared the hell out of them people," he says. "And I'm very sorry about that." Hafford pled guilty to robbery, use of a firearm during the commission of a federal crime of violence, and possession of an unregistered short-barreled shotgun. His pastor, his boss, an aunt, and a town official all testified at his sentencing hearing in Bangor, and Hafford wrote letters apologizing to all the workers in the market, but it didn't help much: he got 10 years. People familiar with the case are disturbed by what they describe as an honest life that spiraled out of control because of drugs. "I've been doing this work for 12 years," says Bangor attorney Terence Harrigan, who represented Hafford. "And of all the cases I've tried, this one bothers me the most." Says US Attorney McCloskey: "He wasn't necessarily a choirboy, but he had a life." Scott Hafford, born and raised in northern Maine, is now a resident of the Federal Correctional Institution in Fairton, New Jersey. He has eight years left on his sentence, with no chance of parole. His wife has divorced him, and his contact with his three teenage children is sporadic. He says he doesn't think about what he's going to do when he gets out of prison, because that time is too far away. Right now, Scott Hafford says he can't think about freedom. But he does think about methamphetamine. "In total honesty, I still miss that stuff," he says. "It gets that kind of hold on you." - --- MAP posted-by: Thunder