Career of High School Undercover Drug Agent Ends in Morals Charge : Crime: Youthful 24-year-old worked as a free-lance informant since 1987. Now he is out of work, accused of taking indecent liberties with a minor.

For six years, Kevin Carter repeated his senior year of high school. Always the nice-looking new kid, he studied math and English, made friends, scored drugs from other students.

And busted them.

He’s 24, but his face is as unlined and pink-cheeked as a 10-year-old’s. He’s loose-jointed, rangy, adolescent. He could have passed as a high-school senior for many more years.

But Kevin Carter’s career as a high school narc is over. He did well in Utah, but when he moved his show to Wyoming, disaster ensued. In the end, the only charges filed were against Carter; he was too old to mess around with teen-age girls, and that is what he is accused of doing.

He denies it. “I had every opportunity to have sex with those females. I didn’t. Other officers did,” he said, but he wouldn’t elaborate.

Actually, the charges against him do not accuse him of having sex with minors--although a private lawsuit does.

Carter, whose uncle was a California Highway Patrol officer, always wanted to be a cop. He swears he never used drugs. He had made a living as a contract narcotics investigator or a free-lance informant since 1987, the year he graduated from high school in Utah.

He put himself through a four-week training session at the state Police Academy. When he didn’t have a regular undercover assignment, he free-lanced.

He once earned $1,000 for turning in a man he befriended after overhearing him talking on the telephone about drugs. In Summit County, Utah, he was paid $5 per hour for his high school undercover work.

Carter was provided with false driver’s licenses and dummied school records, but he had to keep his grades up enough to stay in school.

Carter approached the students carefully. For the first month or so he wouldn’t mention drugs. Then he’d tell his new teen-age friends he was a former user, now clean--a tactic the youths found irresistible.

Ultimately, he would ask someone to score for him, then made a point to be there when the teens were arrested: “I had to I.D. them. But I also wanted to look them in the face. I didn’t want them to think I couldn’t do that.”

Carter readily acknowledges his living arrangements helped lure his quarry. His friends swallowed the lies he told about why he was living alone. And with no parents around, his house or apartment would become the favorite party spot.

Carter said the arrangement was enticing--but not a trap.

“We afforded them the opportunity to commit crime. But we didn’t force them to do it,” he said.

In a major drug sweep in 1991 that included an undercover operation at a small-town high school, Carter made 13 of 30 cases before his cover was blown and authorities ended the operation. All 13 of his Utah cases brought convictions, most for second-degree felonies.

“I never should have left Utah,” he said.

But he did. In 1992, the Wyoming Department of Criminal Investigation hired Carter to go undercover in the state’s first-ever high school drug stings; they did not go well. One operation ended after Carter helped steal beer from an American Legion hall. The other netted six arrests but no prosecutions.

Some families accused Carter of encouraging their children to buy drugs. Wyoming Atty. Gen. Joseph Meyer investigated, then left it to the county attorneys to file charges. They did--against the informant.

In two separate cases in different Wyoming counties, Carter is charged with taking indecent liberties with a minor, which is causing or encouraging a child to commit an immoral or indecent act, not including sexual intercourse. Convictions could bring 10 years in prison.

A $6-million suit filed by parents of a 17-year-old girl from Pinedale, Wyo., provides more details.

They allege their daughter was taken into custody by the Department of Family Services’ Sublette County office on Sept. 18 in response to charges she made of being sexually abused by her father.

The lawsuit accused Carter of coercing the girl into making those charges.

The county placed the girl in the home of a Pinedale DCI agent, the lawsuit said, where Carter spent a night alone with the girl. There, the girl was molested and assaulted, the lawsuit said.

The lawsuit also said that Carter supplied drugs and alcohol to the girl and her three younger siblings.

The state and county are defendants in the suit; the parents accuse them of being negligent in Carter’s hiring and supervision.

They find some support in Joe Offret, a detective with the Summit County sheriff’s office in Utah. He believes that whoever was responsible for supervising Carter’s operation in Wyoming wasn’t doing his job.

“Kevin did an effective job when he was working for us,” Offret said. “We were watching him pretty close.”

But Tom Pagel, director of the Wyoming Department of Criminal Investigation, said no one could watch Carter 24 hours a day.

“Regardless of how much supervision a person has, he still has to be responsible for his actions,” Pagel said.

Does Carter agree? “I don’t know that there wasn’t supervision in Wyoming. I just think everyone should take responsibility,” he said.

Carter feels hung out to dry. “I’ve been doing this for six years now. It’s my life,” he said.

At 24, he finds himself alone, his ex-wife and child in another state, his prospects for full-time employment in law enforcement dim.