Notes From the Drug Wars : A Promise: It’s Going to Get Hotter

The cop:

Mike Melton looked up at the mid-afternoon sun as he dispersed his ragtag-looking colleagues for their daily duel on the streets of South Los Angeles. “It’s hot,” he said, wiping his brow, “but it is going to get a lot hotter for some people in a little while.”

Melton heads the Los Angeles Police Department’s 32-member Narcotic Task Force, which uses undercover buys and high-visibility patrols to fight street peddlers in South Bureau areas. His office makes out the list of suspected dealer locations, and Melton adds two or three a day.

“Those additions are what I label ‘promises’ . . . people who have called me about dealers in their neighborhood and I’ve promised that as soon as we can, we’ll do something.”

Melton’s radio crackles. A dealer is making an offer to an undercover officer. The buy goes down. Melton is disappointed. Only a couple of cigarettes are sold and the suspect’s stash is not found.

Later an undercover agent tries to buy “rock” and the dealer pulls a knife. Within seconds, the dealer is surrounded by officers. At another site, they hit the jackpot. An officer is taken into a “smoke room” to get cocaine. Five suspects are arrested in the dark, acrid garage.

Arrests go down so fast that Melton worries he may run out of cars. At one point, a drug peddler enters a house. Officers move in and find the marked police “buy money.” As the dealer is taken away, a neighbor walks up to Melton and says, “Thank you for responding.”

A promise kept. And 15 arrests for the afternoon.

The money:

He is a customer that employees at the Budget Rent-a-Car counter in San Francisco are unlikely to forget quickly--even though they don’t really know who he is.

It is not that he rented the 1984 Ford Tempo with a phony driver’s license, nor that all of his identification was fake, nor that he left the car in the airport parking lot instead of checking it in.

What is so memorable is what they found in the trunk--$5.64 million in cash, 450 Canadian gold coins worth $157,500 and 500 platinum bars worth $162,500. The amount of money, the presence of cocaine residue in the suitcases carrying the cash and a federal agent’s statement about a man who had come from Miami and rented the car convinced U.S. District Judge Samuel Conti that an illegal dope deal had been involved.

Two rental car company employees, a security guard and the state of California, under its “unclaimed property law,” all filed claims to the $6 million. But Conti ruled that it should go to the federal government because of the drug connection and put into the fund “to fight those who sell this poison.” His order was affirmed last week by the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. The Justice Department is expected to share the money with the San Mateo County Sheriff’s Department.

“If anybody has any doubt about how much money is involved in some of these cocaine deals, they should look at this case,” said Assistant U.S. Atty. William McGivern. “Particularly when they can walk away from $6 million just so we can’t connect anybody to it.”

The user:

Cocaine was the drug of choice for race car driver Michael Rosen’s friends, and the 25-year-old Beverly Hills resident believed that it made him more outgoing. When he entered a treatment center, Michael told his mother he “wanted to be free.” But he continued to use.

The second time he was released from treatment, he joined a support group for former users but soon quit. “He thought he could do it alone. That’s the fallacy of cocaine,” Arlene Rosen said. He tried treatment a third time but failed to finish the program. The next week, while vacationing in Fiji, Michael died of an overdose.

Arlene Rosen recalls a talk they had before he left treatment. Robert F. Kennedy’s son had just died of a drug overdose. Michael told her: “‘There’s no way that will happen to me.”

“He really believed it,” she said.

The dealer:

Paul, who works in the fashion industry, is amazed at how easily he slipped into the narcotics trade--and how easy it was to make thousands of dollars a week tax free.

Two years after he was introduced to cocaine at a party, he took over drug accounts of his supplier to earn the money to support his addiction. Young professionals would stop by Paul’s Westside apartment to get drugs. Some tried to leave without paying. He learned to lock his door and carry a gun.

One of his suppliers was a Colombian ring in Orange County. He didn’t know their names, but he did know that they were tailing him and taking photos. “It was their insurance so I wouldn’t rip them off.”

Paul’s health declined; cocaine use triggered chest pains. One night, police kicked their way into the apartment next door. Paul feared that he would be next. He tried to put together one last big drug buy, borrowing thousands of dollars from several backers. The supplier skipped with the money. One of Paul’s backers held a gun to his head and demanded payment.

Paul called home for help and checked into a treatment center. He now has a job and attends therapy. “I still can’t believe how fast cocaine took over my life,” he said.

The worry:

“Drug trafficking is the most critical crime problem in the United States. And it brings with it the enormous capacity to corrupt those charged with the enforcement of the law,” FBI Director William H. Webster said recently.

It is not known how many narcotics officers have given in to the temptation, but many police forces have created internal units whose job it is to watch the police. Few cases have come to light on the West Coast; in Florida they are more common.

The FBI has begun an inquiry into drug-related corruption of the Miami Police Department, which has more than a dozen officers facing charges ranging from drug dealing to murder.

In Key West, the Police Department was recently accused by a grand jury of being a racketeering enterprise. Seventeen prominent residents were indicted on drug charges, including Assistant Police Chief Raymond Casamayor Jr. According to Assistant U.S. Atty. Michael P. Sullivan, who got 12 convictions, Casamayor’s salary was $30,000 a year, but he “spent a grand a month on clothes, bought a couple of pieces of nice property, jewelry and cars for girlfriends and took vacations in Europe and Central America.”