A new type of crime for Vegas

Matthew Nichols was shocked to discover the apartment across from his had a methamphetamine lab. The revelation led him and his wife to flee their neighborhood east of downtown seven years ago and buy a house where they could raise their three children safely.

Last week, drugs again intruded into Nichols’ life, this time on a quiet suburban street hard up against the mountains that separate the city’s sprawl from Lake Mead. Drug dealers broke into his neighbor’s house and kidnapped her 6-year-old son. The child’s grandfather, police said, owed them money.

“It just goes to show it can happen in any neighborhood now,” said Nichols, 35.

For decades, Las Vegas -- as opposed to the slice of unincorporated Clark County that houses the Strip -- has wrestled with drugs and prostitution. But even as its population swelled, crime has steadily dropped.

The number of meth labs has shriveled. The city hasn’t seen the fighting between rival crime rings that has led to a rise in kidnappings in other Southwestern cities like Phoenix.

That’s one reason the kidnapping of Cole Puffinburger, who was returned unharmed over the weekend, has resonated. “This is not the norm for Las Vegas,” said Michael Flanagan of the Nevada office of the Drug Enforcement Administration.

Police said Cole was taken by Mexican drug dealers who were ripped off by his grandfather, Clemons Fred Tinnemeyer, who was arrested in Riverside on Friday night. Authorities arrested his companion, Terri Leavy, 42, in Fontana on Sunday.

The two appeared in federal court in Riverside on Monday, where they were ordered held as material witnesses. Authorities said Tinnemeyer was involved with drugs and allegedly stole money from drug dealers.

Las Vegas is no stranger to drug traffic. “We’re a hub, just like Los Angeles, San Diego and Phoenix,” Las Vegas Police Lt. Martin Lehtinen said. “It’s the same sort of thing going on across the Southwest. The networks that are causing trouble in Mexico are coming up here.”

Cocaine, heroin and meth are smuggled across the border and distributed around the U.S. from Las Vegas, authorities said. But some of the drugs stay in the city.

Lehtinen and other investigators said crime often is linked to drugs. Crime in Las Vegas dropped 15% in the first half of 2008.

Northeastern Las Vegas, however, remains a problem. “It’s always been an area of town that draws people who gravitate toward narcotics,” Lehtinen said.

Tinnemeyer lived in a single-story, wood-paneled house in northeastern Las Vegas on a street that two decades ago was largely ranchland. Neighbors fret that the once-tranquil area has become increasingly crime-ridden, but children still play in the streets and walk to school.

Cole lived in a slightly ritzier area with his mother. Their house is on a hillside about a mile east on a tidy street of split-level ranch homes built in 1985 at the edge of the city limits.

“We don’t have graffiti, we don’t have nothing in this neighborhood,” said Jack Davis, 62, who lives up the block from the Puffinburger house, where three armed men stormed in Wednesday, bound the boy’s mother and her boyfriend, and abducted Cole.

Authorities here had never seen a kidnapping like it, but they know similar crimes have been used to extort money from rival drug dealers elsewhere, especially in Mexico.

“It’s always in the back of our minds,” Lehtinen said. “Some of the lawlessness in Mexico is starting to spread into the United States. When it happens one place, it can happen somewhere else.”

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nicholas.riccardi@latimes.com

Times staff writer David Kelly contributed to this report.