DEA Quietly Aids Local Drive Against Drugs

A quiet federal program aimed at attacking neighborhood drug dealing has been sweeping through California cities over the past 22 months, bringing money, manpower and expertise to local police agencies that have been overwhelmed by the violent trade in illegal drugs.

“We’re not coming in with any magic bullets,” said one Drug Enforcement Administration official involved in the effort. “We’re coming in with highly trained narcotics agents.”

The so-called Mobile Enforcement Team program has completed five operations in Southern California, teaming DEA agents with police in San Luis Obispo, Compton, Gardena, Ventura and Los Angeles.

In a sixth operation this fall, the teams are being credited with Lancaster’s biggest drug bust of the 1990s: 55 people arrested and a crack house seized for use in a sting operation earlier this month. The operation, a joint effort with Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department officers in the Antelope Valley, is still underway.

“I think all of us have been pleasantly pleased by what’s going on up here,” said Sgt. Harvey Hathaway, who oversees sheriff’s narcotics officers in Lancaster. “They add manpower, a lot of different resources we don’t have, and they are willing to let more money go. I believe it’s going very well.”

Armed with more cash, equipment and training than their state and local counterparts, the federal drug agents more easily gather evidence and arrest drug dealers, who are generally familiar with the faces and techniques of local undercover officers, DEA agents and local officers concur.

The federal team typically works 60 to 90 days in a community at a cost to U.S. taxpayers of between $100,000 and $200,000. Members target drug dealers believed responsible for homicides and other violent crimes who supply street sellers and, ultimately, drug users.

While some critics have argued that the DEA should target high-level drug kingpins in Latin America, the program has been hailed by Clinton administration officials, who say it represents the best of community policing. Atty. Gen. Janet Reno has frequently remarked that the program, the brainchild of DEA head Thomas A. Constantine, represents the perfect match between federal and local law enforcement agencies.

Seizing on its reputation both nationally and statewide, the DEA this year is requesting a boost in funding--by a couple of million dollars--to $5.9 million to add 60 field agents to its 325 nationwide. The DEA has 19 strike force teams across the country.

Mostly, the federal government is seeking to aid communities plagued by growing drug use and violent crime and faced with shrinking police budgets.

The Antelope Valley, for example, has nine sheriff’s deputies assigned to quash narcotics use in a 2,800-square-mile area with a population of 300,000.

Since the Antelope Valley effort began last month, “we’re making headway up there,” said Abel Reynoso, spokesman for the DEA field office in Los Angeles. “When you get new blood in town, it helps.”

In fact, federal agents were surprised both by the amounts of crack cocaine being sold in the area and by the seemingly large numbers of teenagers who claim or seek to claim gang ties. They declined to release figures until the operation there is complete.

In the most recent sting, the agents and sheriff’s deputies searched five apartments in the evening, then immediately took two of them over and began posing as dealers, selling macadamia nuts chopped to look like crack. The police finally shut down their operation at 10 p.m. but said they could have continued all night.

“It worked like a champ,” said one federal agent who assisted in the reverse sting.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Myron Jenkins said that although his Antelope Valley office was flooded by the Nov. 1 undercover bust, the results were well worth it. Officers arrested 55 suspects, generally buyers, who were mostly charged with attempting to purchase narcotics, a felony.

“Basically I think if they were done more often on a regular basis in areas throughout the county--if not the state--you’d begin to make a dent in drug trafficking,” Jenkins said. “I think you have to impact the buyers.”

In court documents, police revealed that they searched the apartments on East Avenue in Lancaster based on information deputies received from informants. Those sources told officers that crack was being regularly sold from the apartments.

The DEA agents say they typically let the local police guide them but that they assist in analyzing, collecting and sharing confidential information.

In San Luis Obispo, for example, the agents assisted the area’s six sheriff’s deputies in a major undercover raid in the Paso Robles area. In all, police made 81 arrests and seized drugs worth $250,000.

At the Century-Lennox stations of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, the team made 30 arrests in the Compton area, nearly one-third for heroin possession, and recovered about a dozen firearms, ranging from assault rifles to sawed-off shotguns.

In the Rampart area of Los Angeles, the team made more than 400 arrests, including dozens of known gang members, the LAPD said. Overall violent crime, including assaults, robberies and rapes, dropped by about 25% during the 90-day operation, the LAPD said.

But while Rampart Capt. Nick Salicos praised the effort--”We shook hands when they left and said we couldn’t wait to have them back”--he said the crime rate is again creeping up.

“Unfortunately . . . all we do is move criminals from one area to another,” Salicos said. “We’re beginning to see the same activity starting up again.”

The DEA acknowledges that crime dips when the teams are present in a community and that it tends to return--albeit slowly in some places--when the agents move on. But agents say they often arrest the major players in an area, reducing both the pace and the quantity of the rebound.

In Arlington, Texas, for example, agents say they arrested methamphetamine traffickers from Mexico who were believed to be the major suppliers of the drug in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. And in Galveston, agents arrested two drug dealers believed to be the sources of supply for crack houses in Galveston County. One suspect was supplying 400 kilograms of crack cocaine to gang members annually, according to the DEA.

To be sure, the teams don’t always nab the highest-level traffickers, nor do they always seek to.

The target “may not be a major drug kingpin, but you might have a group of individuals responsible for a lot of violent crime in an area . . . and we are the premier experts when it comes to drugs and law enforcement,” said Van Quarles, a DEA spokesman in Washington, D.C.

Whatever the outcome, it is usually met with news conferences touting arrests and seizures and much mutual backslapping.

The DEA, however, tries to maintain a low profile throughout the project. In its briefing book, the DEA states: “Significantly, the DEA will not involve itself in any way with the press. . . . All media relations and press announcements concerning the progress and outcome of the investigations will reside solely with the requesting agency.”

Credit for the arrests should go to local agencies because the DEA sees its role as a helper, not the driving force behind the crackdowns, federal agents say.

But the agency can’t help but receive widespread attention at the end of its operations. In L.A.’s Rampart area, for example, residents bought a billboard thanking the DEA--and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, which also aided in the effort--for the agents’ help.

“Please Come Back!” the billboard read.

But left off was one agency: the LAPD.

Times correspondent Sharon Moeser contributed to this story.