| Chapter 3
Reporting
on Drug Law Enforcement
and Controlled Substances: Story Ideas
By
Bill Wallace
Covering the subject of drug trafficking and controlled substances
enforcement involves much more than simply covering raids, arrests
and prosecutions. Like any other area of the criminal justice system,
this topic is a rich area for developing features and investigations
on a variety of related subjects, most of which can be put together
on a rather limited budget.
Patterns of Abuse
Check with law enforcement sources and service providers such as
treatment clinics to find out about the drug abuse situation in
your local area. Use seizure information, arrests for possession
and sale, and other data available from law enforcement to determine
what seem to be the most commonly abused drugs.
Don't rely on local police: check with your county sheriff, state
Department of Justice, state troopers or state police and the federal
Drug Enforcement Administration. Some of these agencies –
the state department of justice and the DEA, for example –
produce annual reports on drug abuse enforcement that can yield
valuable information about drug use in your own area.
Check also with local emergency rooms, drug testing laboratories
and federal sources such as the Drug Abuse Warning Network (DAWN)
for information about the frequency of overdoses in your area and
the drugs that are linked to the largest number of emergency room
visits.
Drug War Costs
Go to budget documents for your local police or sheriff's department
at City Hall or the County Administration offices to find out what
portion of the local law enforcement budget is going for drug enforcement
activities. Review budgets for a period of years to find out if
expenditures have been holding steady, going down or up. The detail
submitted by agencies in support for changes in spending will sometimes
reveal new enforcement programs or strategies that are worth separate
coverage.
Be aware of hidden costs of these programs: payouts in civilian
lawsuits alleging misconduct by drug control units, specialized
radio equipment for undercover officers and similar expenditures
that are unlikely to be openly publicized by law enforcement agencies.
Look also for other types of tax money that are flowing into particular
programs – state grants and money from federal sources. These
are often used to start new initiatives that are later cobbled into
the local budget when the money runs out. And these funds come from
taxpayers just like those in regular law enforcement budgets do
– they aren't simply gifts from another branch of government.
Try to determine how effective these programs are in terms of the
money that is spent on them. You will get one interpretation from
elected officials and law enforcement sources and quite a different
one in many cases from drug treatment centers and organizations
like the American Friends Service Committee, the American Civil
Liberties Union, the Drug Policy Forum and the National Organization
for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML).
Drug Organizations
While many drug busts seem to be singular affairs involving only
one or two individuals who allegedly were involved in a particular
transfer, drug trafficking is a complex and highly organized activity
that involves a host of people working together, often despite differing
ethnic backgrounds, nationalities or geographical locations.
Try to probe behind the individual arrests to paint a picture of
the larger organizational structure of a drug sales network. If
your arrestee was a street dealer, where did he get his stuff? Who
sold to his middleman? Who transported the drugs from their place
of origin?
Federal case affidavits can often be invaluable in scoping out
this type of story. They frequently contain a wealth of detail about
alleged members of a network, meetings between key figures, transfers
of drugs and money and so forth. They may mention businesses that
are being used as fronts for drug trafficking activities –
often restaurants or bars that handle lots of cash and provide a
handy money laundering mechanism in the bargain.
Sometimes federal indictments also contain a large amount of detail
about a drug operation as well. Local courts may have files of state
cases prepared by your Attorney General's narcotics enforcement
unit or the state police. The paperwork filed in these can often
flesh out the details of a criminal organization – and even
provide you with leads to other types of criminal activity it conducts.
When associates or confederates of your star suspect appear in
court records, check them through court records independently. You
may find other cases that are pending against them or have been
filed in the past. Those case files may lead you to additional names,
which may in turn lead you to other case files.
When you have reaped as much information as possible from court
files, run that information past your key sources in the beat –
prosecutors, defense attorneys, cops and people involved in drug
rehabilitation programs. Find out what they can tell you about the
people who have surfaced in your research.
Finally, put the information you have gathered together into some
sort of narrative or a descriptive piece that gives the big picture
about drug trafficking in your area.
Money Laundering
Drug sales generate large quantities of cash and to spend it. Drug
dealers and their confederates must find ways to disguise its origins.
In the past 20 years, new laws have been adopted that allow law
enforcement agencies to go after the money that drug transactions
generate – and make efforts to obscure that money's origin
a crime all by itself.
Money laundering is charged now in the vast majority of federal
drug conspiracy cases, as well as a growing number of state cases
(local law enforcement agencies often lack the resources and professional
expertise to conduct these types of investigations). Chances are
good that there will be a number of these prosecutions within your
own media market. They are worth covering, both because they illustrate
the vast wealth generated by the drug business and also because
they invariably make good reading.
Once again, court records may be your best bet as starting points
for money laundering stories. Ask federal, state and local prosecutors
which cases they know of that really illustrate how various laundering
schemes work.
If you have a local drug bust that involves a number of people,
try doing asset searches on the people who have been charged. Run
the individuals' names through your local assessor's and recorder's
offices. Look for recent acquisitions and check into the way they
were financed. Somebody who has been living in a mobile home who
suddenly buys a $2 million house might just have come into a huge
inheritance – or a source of illegal wealth.
Check your suspects through the Secretary of State's corporate
filings to see if they are officers or incorporators of any businesses.
See if they have recorded any fictitious business names at your
county offices. Be particularly alert for businesses that generate
lots of cash – these are the ones most frequently used for
money laundering.
Misconduct
by Drug Enforcement Agencies
Controlled substance enforcement is a high-profile law enforcement
task, and there is a lot of pressure on drug agents and prosecutors
to make cases and win convictions. Sometimes law enforcement agents
will bend the rules – or even break them – to nail a
particular suspect.
At the same time, drug sales generate huge profits, and those funds
are sometimes used to corrupt law enforcement officers who are responsible
for drug cases.
Let's be blunt here: some cops violate people's rights or cause
them physical harm without provocation; some lie under oath about
the circumstances of an arrest or the reason they made it; and some
steal.
While covering your beat, look for:
1) Complaints about violations of suspect rights, particularly
if one or a few officers' names always seem to be mentioned in them.
If complaints against police in your media market are a matter of
public record, check them for allegations against members of your
local, county and state narcotics control unit. Look also for lawsuits
filed against narcotics enforcement officers containing similar
claims.
2) Allegations that cops seized a larger amount of money than they
booked as evidence. This is an indicator that the police are stealing
from drug dealers, secure in the knowledge that they are unlikely
to be caught because nobody will take the allegations seriously.
3) Persistent reports of brutality, untruthfulness or manufacturing
evidence against narcotics officers.
Keep your eyes and ears open for stories about cops who break the
law. Your best source for this information will always be drug suspects
themselves and the attorneys who customarily defend them in court.
If you start seeing judges throw cases prepared by certain narcotics
specialists out of court because of complaints of police misconduct,
you should start digging into the allegations.
Although cops tend to dismiss anything said by a drug suspect as
inherently incredible and beyond belief, they aren't always lying.
For a career criminal to complain about someone they are likely
to run into again in similar circumstances in the future takes a
certain amount of raw nerve. Most people in the underworld tend
to take their lumps and shrug it off. When they are willing to go
public with it, what they say is worth checking out.
Story Examples
Date Rape Drugs and New
Types of Dope
Gamma hydroxybutyrate (GHB), the so-called "date rape drug,"
was added to the Schedule I controlled substances list in 2000 after
Samantha Reid, a 15-year-old Michigan girl, unwittingly took the
drug and died.
Detroit Free Press Staff Writer Dan Shine jumped on the
story soon after Reid's death and wrote a good initial piece on
Jan. 19, 1999, serving up solid follow-ups in the weeks and months
afterward. His colleague Patricia Montemurri did a profile of the
drug the day after Shine's first piece ran that explained the history
of GHB and its various misuses. On the day four men were indicted
for Reid's death, she weighed in with an interview with a woman
who had been raped while under the influence of the substance.
Their stories are a good example of how to turn quick, solid coverage
of a dramatic new type of drug on deadline, then keep the story
alive afterward with fresh material and new insights. See particularly
"Date-Rape Drug Suspected in Death/Girl's Friend Hospitalized,"
Free Press, January 19, 1999. Page 1B.; "Police Seeing
Date-Rape Drug in More Cases," Free Press, January 20,
1999, Page 1B; "Woman Given GHB Tells of Bitter Experience,"
Free Press, March 16, 1999, Page 7A.
Drug Policy Reform Stories
Sometimes, even otherwise routine coverage of court decisions can
help to illuminate the shifting political attitudes toward drug
policy. Sacramento Bee Legal Affairs Reporter Claire Cooper
did an April 9, 2002, story about a hearing before the Ninth Circuit
Court of Appeals in San Francisco that neatly recapped the federal
government's attempts to prosecute doctors who recommend pot to
their patients under California's Medical Marijuana Initiative,
outlined the history of the controversy and provided a view into
the thinking of some key jurists considering the case. See "Effort
to Muzzle Pro-Pot Doctors Argued in Court," Bee, April
9, 2002, Page A3.
Drug Trafficking Organizations
A piece I wrote a few years ago detailed the organizational structure
of a Northern California-based drug organization that operated all
over the U.S. and dabbled in a variety of other criminal activities,
including armed takeover robberies, contract murder, money laundering
and the smuggling of illegal immigrants. The story drew on interviews
with law enforcement sources and a review of state and federal court
records in California and Oregon. See "Mafia-like Crime Ring's
Bay Link," San Francisco Chronicle, June 19, 1997.
Money Laundering
New York Times reporters Larry Rohter and Clifford Krauss
did a two part series on money laundering and smuggling by Colombian
cocaine traffickers in the Dominican Republic in the Times on May
10 and 11, 1998, that contained a lot of color, vivid characterizations
and a straightforward treatment of the way in which the vast sums
generated by drug dealing can skew the affairs of small countries.
See "Dominicans Allow Drugs Easy Sailing," New York Times,
May 10-11, 1998, p. 1.
Racial Drug Enforcement
Patterns
Mark Pazniolas of the Hartford Courant highlighted the disturbing
disparity between sentences given to mostly black dealers in crack
cocaine and their white counterparts who trafficked in powder cocaine
while covering what could otherwise have been a routine story about
the prosecution of a Connecticut crack cocaine organization in 1994.
See "Bridgeport Case Puts Crack Law on Trial," Courant,
May 15, 1994. Page A1.
Drug Dealing in Unexpected
Places
Mark Arax of the Los Angeles Times weaved together interviews
with drug abuse counselors, prison officials and prison inmates
involved in drug sales at Chowchilla State Prison in California
to write a compelling account of the heroin trade that was burgeoning
inside the country's largest women's prison. See "Doing Time
– and Drugs – Inside Chowchilla," LA Times
Aug. 31, 1997, p. A1.
Freeze, Officer: You're Busted!
Megan Woolhouse of the Louisville Courier-Journal recently
made good use of a search warrant affidavit and return in reporting
the arrest of a Kentucky police officer on cocaine trafficking charges.
See "Police officer, husband arrested; Cocaine discovered in
their home near Shively, authorities say," Courier-Journal,
Aug. 31, 2002 p. 1B.
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