Sheriff Skirts the Legal Limits : Florida lawman says he will fight court to reopen his department’s crack lab.

To his critics he is a publicity junkie, a lawman whose concerns about public safety rank somewhere below his hunger for self-promotion. In recent years he’s appeared on ABC’s “Nightline,” on “CBS This Morning” and on the Fox Network’s “Cops,” among other television shows.

He helped out pal Geraldo Rivera by letting him film a live dope bust. And in 1990 he gained worldwide attention when he arrested 2 Live Crew on obscenity charges and boosted sales of the Miami-based rap group’s raunchy album “As Nasty as They Wanna Be” into the stratosphere.

This month, Broward County Sheriff Nick Navarro returned to the headlines when a state appeals court shut down a crack cocaine laboratory he was running from the seventh floor of the county courthouse.

Navarro said the lab was an invaluable tool for arresting drug peddlers in reverse sting operations, in which police offer to sell drugs to buyers on the street.

“It’s sort of like making fudge,” said the sheriff’s chief chemist.

Nonsense, the court said. “The sheriff . . . acted illegally in manufacturing crack,” one judge wrote for the majority in a 2-1 decision. “The police agencies themselves cannot do an illegal act, albeit their intended goal is legal and desirable.”

The Jan. 3 ruling overturns the conviction of a man sentenced to three years in jail for buying the smokable cocaine from an undercover deputy who set up shop near a Ft. Lauderdale high school. It also imperils about 200 similar cases, according to public defenders.

The judges were troubled by the sheriff’s inability to account for all of the cocaine rocks used in the sting operations. Navarro denied any accountability problem. “Every time we do a reverse sting, every rock is contained in a sealed glassine envelope with the chemist’s initials on it,” he said. “No one walks away with it.”

To Navarro, 62, a native of Cuba who came to the United States in the 1950s and once worked as a federal narcotics agent, the court’s ruling represents only a temporary setback. He sees himself on a crime-fighting crusade that pleases a majority of voters despite the criticism by those who think his interpretation of the Constitution is too cavalier.

Among other anti-drug measures unheard of anywhere else in the country, Navarro has instructed his deputies to search bus passengers’ bags for contraband, and to inspect the crotches of airline travelers. The U.S. Supreme Court recently affirmed the constitutionality of the bag search, while state courts said patting down a suspect’s crotch went too far.

“I am not controversial, I am innovative,” Navarro said. “Other police departments sit on their duffs; I do things like they’ll be done in the 21st Century.” And he insists that his methods work.

“You can walk the streets here, ride bicycles, and not be in fear of being accosted or shot,” he said from his Ft. Lauderdale office. “We have improved the quality of life in our county.”

The sheriff says he plans to appeal the district court’s ruling to the state Supreme Court. He said the amount of crack cocaine seized by police was insufficient to supply his department’s reverse sting operations.

As for the ridicule he has received over the crack lab from newspaper columnists and editorialists, Navarro says he is unfazed.

“Anytime something like this (criticism) comes out, it’s because of 2 Live Crew,” he says. “I touched the sacred cow. I followed the orders of the judges and arrested them.

“I obey the courts, not the newspapers. You have to take risks. Hard working, decent people deserve clean neighborhoods. Why don’t others do these things? Maybe they don’t have the problems I have. But I am not afraid of criticisms.”