Please note: This article is published as an archive copy from Philadelphia City Paper. My City Paper is not affiliated with Philadelphia City Paper. Philadelphia City Paper was an alternative weekly newspaper in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The last edition was published on October 8, 2015.
March 12–19, 1998
cover story
Red Alert
Part 2 of 2, to read part 1 click here
As the heroin trade spreads beyond Philadelphia, politicians, cops and community leaders struggle to contain an epidemic at the source.
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Last year police busted a ring that moved 50,000 bags of heroin from |
It is a rhetorical question, really, asked more to bust chops than anything else.
Still, the Drug Enforcement Agency special agent, standing in the DEA garage amid the vans and trucks and other unmarked vehicles used for surveillance and undercover buys, answers his partner's question, absolutely deadpan.
"Yes."
Of course the agents are both bringing guns.
And wearing flak jackets.
They are headed, on this alternately cloudy and sunny February morning, to Ninth and Indiana, where you never know when a gun or a vest might save your life.
"Do you have one in the chamber?" asks the first agent, who is black and the younger and more conservative of the two.
This time, his partner, who is white and most definitely a child of the '60s, doesn't answer.
"We have different approaches," the younger agent says, flashing just the slightest hint of smile.
The agents, who've requested anonymity, work for the DEA's Group 6, which hunts down violent traffickers.
Group 6 is enjoying a fine year, having seized 6.8 kilos of heroin so far in fiscal year '98—about 70 percent of the total taken in by all DEA agents in Philadelphia between Oct. 1, 1997, and mid-February 1998.
The seizures represent just a small portion of the tons of heroin flowing into the City of Brotherly Love.
"Philadelphia plays a unique and complex role" in the worldwide heroin trade, says Larry McElynn, special agent in charge of the DEA's Philadelphia office. "Philadelphia is one point of a triangle, with New York and San Juan, Puerto Rico, being the other points."
It is a very frightening situation, says McElynn.
"Philadelphia always had a reputation as a user city, but all that is changing," he says. "In the last two years, Philadelphia has become well-known as a distribution center, because of the high quality of heroin that is obtained here. The heroin available here is the highest purity in the United States. And it has been that way for the past three years."
It used to be, says McElynn, that the opium poppies cultivated for heroin were grown in Southeast Asia and sold by Southeast Asians.
But now South America is the world's heroin hothouse.
"It is controlled by the Colombians, who used to have a primary stake in cocaine," says McElynn. "They've shifted their operations to heroin in a very interesting marketing strategy to undersell everyone and ensure their product has the highest purity."
Under the Southeast Asians, a bag contained less than 10 percent pure heroin and retailed for $35. Now, authorities report that the Colombian machine is selling bags with as much as 90 percent pure heroin for $10.
"They forced the Southeast Asians out of the market," says McElynn.
The strategy is chillingly efficient.
"They want to drive up the addict population, then raise prices and cut the purity. Right now, there is this romantic notion about heroin in the media. It is portrayed as a clean type of drug that you no longer have to inject because of the purity. What will happen when tolerance levels build up and purity levels are slashed is that addicts will be forced to use needles. They will be outsmarted in the long run."
The Colombians are already outsmarting rural Pennsylvania.
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The problem is so bad, says McElynn, that the DEA is organizing a training session next month "for the law enforcement community to get the word out on exactly what the threat is. It is very large."
McElynn says he would like to be more specific about exactly how large a threat, but "it is very hard to check out."
Local health and law enforcement agencies, he says with extreme frustration and disgust, "don't routinely collect information about heroin-related deaths. We had to go to every community to get that information."
Getting a count has been so difficult that the DEA has yet to update its tally since last June.
What the DEA did find is that nearly two-thirds of all heroin overdose victims are white. And their numbers are increasing, up a projected 12 percent between 1996 and 1997.
It could be worse. Or better. There is no way to tell because there is no information.
"Nobody collects it," says McElynn. "I can't figure it out. We are trying to deal with a '98 problem with a '58 mentality. No one wants to hear about the rising use of heroin. That teenagers are falling for it. This is unwelcome information that nobody wants to hear, because if you hear it, then you have to deal with it."
It is morning in Philadelphia and the boys from Group 6 are heading out of the garage for the Badlands.
"Morning is a good time to go see heroin dealers," says "Ray." "People get up. That's what they do. Score heroin."
The older agent goes by the name "Bob." Driving up Fifth Street to North Philly, he explains that the way heroin enters this country is anything but chic.
A drug runner, he says, explaining one scheme, will go to Panama or some other South or Central American country and pretend to be a tourist, for a week or so, to avoid suspicion.
On the last day of the vacation, says agent Bob, the runner will hook up with a Colombian supplier.
The heroin, says Bob, comes in "rock-hard pellets" each weighing 8 to 10 grams.
He holds up his right thumb to show the size of a pellet.
The runner, he says, places each pellet in latex, ties it off with dental floss, then swallows.
Which is the best way to get around drug dogs, metal detectors and strip searches.
"When they land, they come up to a hotel room in New York or Philly," he says.
"They usually check in by the airport, but sometimes closer to town in one of the fancier hotels."
Like many weary travelers, says Bob, the runners head straight for the bathroom.
These guys, however, skip the toilet.
"They pass the heroin into a bucket with a screen," says Bob. "Sometimes when we get the heroin, it's all brown and stinky."
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"He was telling me that it can take him seven hours to swallow 800 grams," says Bob, adding that the CI's say "swallowing is the hardest part."
Getting the pellets out of the system and into the bucket, says Bob, is comparatively easy, and there are digestive aids available if necessary.
"A more experienced person will be better at passing it. But sometimes, the suppliers will give something to the runner to bind him, before takeoff. Then, at the hotel, they will give them a laxative to help them pass it."
But not the expert swallower.
"My guy," Bob adds, proudly, like he is talking about a child who aced a report card, "he didn't need anything."
His pride is more than mere facetiousness. Bob and Ray both say that they work hard to build relationships with the CI's and that they genuinely care about what happens to them.
Which is why Bob points out that swallowing is extremely risky business with minimal payoff.
"If the latex breaks or the floss comes off, then he's all done," says Bob. "They don't get as much money as you would think for risking their lives. Maybe $2 or $3 a gram."
Or about $2,400 a trip for an expert.
By the time Bob finishes discussing heroin's long, strange journey to Philadelphia, the agents are driving by Second and Lehigh.
"This is heroin central," says Ray, pointing out where cars double-park to pick up heroin in bulk, a gram or more at a time.
It is a busy place, here on Lehigh and back in the debris-clogged side streets and alleys, where young men run in and out of abandoned buildings and bodegas with bundles of dope for the endless line of customers who pull up, cop and drive off.
The colors here in this North Philadelphia neighborhood are muted shades of gray interrupted every so often by bright blues and greens and yellows splashed on dingy brick walls by graffiti writers.
Mostly, the graffiti serve as memorials, to kids who wound up dead thanks in some way or another to the drug trade.
A trade they are lured into by economics and Madison Avenue-style marketing.
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Melendez-Rodriguez, pleased to deal with regulare customers, did what he could to keep them coming back for more. |
Out of this mess emerged a man named Ramon Melendez-Rodriguez, a carpenter by training who made a nice living on the corner of Ninth and Indiana.
He had a wife and three kids and was, for a while, a modern success story, running a business in a neighborhood wiped out by years of poverty, crime and neglect.
But Ramon Melendez-Rodriguez didn't use a hammer or a screwdriver or a saw on the job.
His mark on the world wasn't a great building or fine inlaid woodwork.
His empire was built on the human condition, and the need for a substance to make the pain go away. He made his mark with glassine bags of nearly pure heroin, called Montego in Harrisburg, which he branded with names like Drop Zone and Turbo.
So that the addicted and those feeding off them would know where to come back for more.
Melendez-Rodriguez, like his suppliers the Colombians, learned from cocaine that marketing, not violence, was the best way to make a buck in the drug trade while living long enough to spend it.
And the money started rolling in for Melendez-Rodriguez, a short, squat, muscular man nicknamed Red for the color of his buzz-cut coif.
Amid the Mad Max madness of Ninth and Indiana, dopers and dealers came looking for Red because Drop Zone and Turbo were the hot brands in town.
They came from Philly and South Jersey, Northern Delaware and all over Pennsylvania.
Particularly Harrisburg, home of a beefy thug from the Allison Hill section named Richie Soto.
Soto was just another anonymous baggie peddler until he met Red.
Then, on one of his trips to the Badlands, past the rolling farms and the billboards touting Amish crafts and wholesale outlets, past the creeping suburban sprawl, and finally, past the traffic chokepoint on I-76, up Fifth Street and over to Ninth and Indy, Soto found the mother lode.
Melendez-Rodriguez and his wholesale heroin.
Nearly 90 percent pure, 30 times what the addicts in the Hill were used to.
In short order, Soto, thanks to Red, became the most popular guy in the Hill, an open-air drug market just a half-dozen blocks from the state capitol.
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They were Latinos mostly, from right in the neighborhood.
But increasingly people of all flavors from outside of town.
They all came looking for Soto because he was the man, who made a name for himself when he discovered that when you buy something for $8 and can sell it for $20, you are going to be rolling in plenty of money.
So two or three times a week, when he needed to re-up, Soto drove into Philly, past the competition, heading straight for Melendez-Rodriguez, who, knowing a good customer when he saw one, took care of Soto, and his boys Francisco Olivero and Jose "Chino" Vargas-Sellan.
The boys would come to Philly with enough cash to cop 40 or 50 bundles.
Melendez-Rodriguez, pleased to deal with regular customers, did what he could to keep them coming back for more.
He gave the Hill crew a 5 percent discount, charging $95 per bundle of 10 bags—each containing about 3/100ths of a gram. And he threw in four or five extra bags per bundle as a bonus.
For eight months, it was a beautiful thing. Soto and his crew flooded Harrisburg with more than 50,000 baggies that they picked up from Melendez-Rodriguez. The crew made money. Melendez-Rodriguez made money.
But even the most beautiful business relationships don't last forever.
Especially at Ninth and Indiana.
The gangsters who hang out under the awnings of local grocery stores and leap out at passing cars at first seem to care very little when agents Bob and Ray drive slowly by.
"See that guy, in the green shirt?" asks Bob, who pulls over and parks a block away from the Super Value. "I bet he's running this operation. You watch. He'll walk around, but you will never see him touch the stuff."
For a while, the crew goes about its business.
Cars pull up.
Jersey tags, Delaware tags, drivers whose only business is procuring heroin.
Hands reach into windows. Hands reach into pockets.
Cash is exchanged for Montego.
The ceaseless rhythm is interrupted by a shrill yell.
"Agua. Agua."
"That's Spanish for water," says agent Ray, explaining that he and his partner have been discovered. "Blue. For the blue cop cars."
In seconds, a dozen people scamper and scurry and duck out of sight into the alleys and abandoned buildings that make this place such a nightmare to police.
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Big Dope: He says plenty of dealers move out of Philly to Harrisburg, York, Lancaster and other small |
And the occasional sweeps by the Philadelphia Police Narcotics Strike Force, which has since moved out of the Badlands into West Philly.
Going after the dealers is a pain.
Finding the drugs is difficult, say the agents, because dealers carry little on them, stashing larger amounts in abandoned buildings, or under rocks or in garbage.
Finding the dealers is even harder.
"These are tough streets to get into," says Ray. "If we are in the car and chasing someone down, and another driver stops in the middle of the street, by the time that guy moves, the people we are looking for are gone."
Worse, he adds, is the danger factor.
"If one of us gets into trouble on an undercover assignment, it is very tough to reach them," he says.
Another problem with putting a hurt on the dope trade, says agent Ray, is that even with surveillance, it is hard to know which corner-hanger to go after.
"Do we go after the three guys down there who might be holding?" says agent Ray. "Well, what about the guy holding a gun? Are we going to get shot in the back?"
As popular as he became with the addicts in Harrisburg, Richie Soto became even more popular with cops from the Dauphin County Drug Task Force.
The task force, led by Dave Laudermilch, had just broken up the Spider brand dope ring from New York when Soto began flooding Harrisburg with a new and even more potent brand.
As they continued their crackdown, making hundreds of undercover buys and hitting up informants, the task force agents began finding that Spider dope was being replaced by Turbo and Drop Zone and that it was amazingly pure and no longer coming from New York.
"It told me we are getting our asses kicked," he says.
As they worked their way up the food chain, the task force began to discover that addicts were copping from Soto and his crew and that, in turn, the crew was copping in Philadelphia from some guy named Red near the graveyard at Ninth and Indiana.
Beyond that, they had little information. So the task force turned to the U.S. Attorney's Office. A federal grand jury was convened in the early part of 1997.
Federal convictions, says David Barasch, U.S. attorney for the middle district of Pennsylvania, carry far stiffer penalties for smaller amounts of dope. And a federal investigation, he adds, is far more comprehensive.
The noose was tightening around Melendez-Rodriguez's neck and, if he had a clue, he wasn't letting on.
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Unfortunately for him, all those little baggies were like a trail of bread crumbs, leading from 13th and Derry 120 miles east to Ninth and Indiana.
The task force began making arrests, rounding up about 10 people in Harrisburg in the early spring of 1997. Those suspects, says Laudermilch, were able to identify Soto's crew as the Harrisburg hookup for Turbo and Drop Zone.
On May 6, 1997, the grand jury indicted Soto, Olivero and Vargas-Sellan, charging them with four counts of conspiring to distribute heroin.
It did not take long before the three, fearing the potential of a very long stretch in jail under federal sentencing guidelines, cooperated with Laudermilch's task force.
Agreeing to cooperate for reduced sentences, the Harrisburg dealers accompanied the task force on surveillance missions to Philly, sometimes buying drugs from Red, other times pointing out to police Red and his crew so that they could be identified.
The undercover operation, says Laudermilch, had its darkly comical moments.
"We were doing surveillance and dealers would be banging on our windows," he says. "We'd shout, 'Get away from me!' but they would still come."
It didn't even matter, says Laudermilch, when police brought out the cameras and started shooting pictures.
"They were hollering '5-0, 5-0!'" he says, referring to one way spotters inform dealers of police presence. "But they didn't stop dealing. They could care less that we were there."
After about six months, that cavalier attitude blew up in the dealers' faces.
On Nov. 4, 1997, the grand jury handed down a sealed indictment against "John Doe, a/k/a 'Red.'" Ten days later, 60 officers from the task force, the DEA, the state police, the Philadelphia Police and the Immigration and Naturalization Service piled in vehicles and burst onto the scene at Ninth and Indiana.
The arrests went down without incident. No guns or drugs were recovered.
Melendez-Rodriguez, who has since plead guilty, was shocked, says Laudermilch.
"He was surprised that we would make a case against him from Harrisburg," says Laudermilch.
The Melendez-Rodriguez investigation was personally eye-opening as well.
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It is a pretty grim situation in Harrisburg and other small communities as well.
There are dealers like Melendez-Rodriguez and Soto hooking up Philadelphia and Wilkes-Barre and other small cities in rural Northeastern Pennsylvania, says Francis Sempa, senior deputy state attorney general. Heroin arrests in the nine-county area he supervises more than tripled between 1996 and 1997, from six to 19. There were six just this past January.
Heroin overdoses shot up as well.
At the end of 1997, there were six overdose deaths in Luzerne County in the span of a few weeks.
"We were shocked," says Luzerne County Coroner George Hudock.
And, for all the personal joy he received in helping to take down Melendez-Rodriguez, Laudermilch says Red is only the tip of the iceberg.
The federal grand jury that indicted Red is still gathering evidence for future indictments.
"There are plenty of people who are standing on the same corner, selling the same product that Red did," says Laudermilch, adding that a recent sweep of 13th and Derry turned over a new hot brand from Philly—Asskicker. "Red was responsible for selling a lot of heroin. But he is not the only one. There are a bunch of them out there. Some bigger than him."
As Bob and Ray watch the dealers run, a car with Delaware plates stops at the intersection, at a stop sign, its blinkers flashing.
"See that car," says special agent Bob. "He's using his signal. To me, that's probable cause to stop the car because the only people around here who use their turn signals are doing something illegal. But try telling that to a judge."
Bob pulls away from the curb and follows a black Jeep with Jersey plates whose two young, white, female occupants appear to be on a mission for drugs. As he drives by the crowd of dealers who by now are jeering at the agents, dancing with sweatshirt hoods drawn tight and hands grasping their members, Bob grouses about the enormity of the drug problem.
It is very difficult to take down bigger players like Melendez-Rodriguez, says Bob, because they are smart enough to stay away from the stash.
And the little guys?
"We could flood the system," says Ray. "We have flooded the system arresting the dime-bag guys, who are making peanuts. But they make bail. They walk."
Keeping the accused in jail is difficult enough, says Bob, inching his car by the two white chicks who clearly look like they've just scored.
Getting the dealers into jail is almost pointless sometimes.
"They tear the signs down here so that the cops won't know where they are. And, when you do arrest these guys, they have no identification, or false identification, so that you don't know if they've killed nine people in Detroit. There is almost no point in arresting these guys. You don't know who they are, so you need to fingerprint them. That means getting a wagon crew, prison security, that takes time. And there are stabbings and robberies and murders to deal with. It is a madhouse up here.
"This is the United States," he repeats. "That it is not incredible at all is most incredible."
As the agents drive around to check out the circus, Bob's point is punctuated by a loud thud and the tinkling sound of breaking glass.
A bottle tossed at the agents' car by some crew punk tired of seeing business interrupted by the cruising cops.
Drugs aren't the only problem flowing out of Philadelphia into rural Pennsylvania.
Dealers are leaving the city, setting up shop where, according to U.S. Attorney David Barasch, they think they will be safer and make more money.
Barasch, whose district covers 3 million people and about half the state, says this is part of a national trend.
"I was just talking to my colleagues in Kansas City about the same thing," he says, knowing full well that he doesn't have to travel very far to witness this phenomenon firsthand.
It's happening in Williamsport, world-renowned as the home of the Little League World Series.
And the mayor there is just about fed up. So fed up that on Feb. 26, he wrote a letter to Ed Rendell, in essence saying Philadelphia is a toxic waste pit breeding human refuse that gets dumped into a long tube ending up in Williamsport.
Mayor Steven Cappelli politely demanded that Rendell help him clean the Philly mess dumped in Williamsport.
"For more than 10 years, the city of Williamsport has experienced a steady migration of Philadelphia natives seeking drug and/or alcohol rehabilitation services," wrote Cappelli. "As one might expect, this large and continuous 'influx' of poor, recovering individuals and their families has placed enormous burdens on the city and service-related agencies."
Williamsport and Lycoming County tried to deal with that, wrote Cappelli, "… however, the narcotics-related criminal activity that accompanies many of those relocated to Williamsport from Philadelphia is a matter of concern to me, and one which requires the assistance of your administration."
Among other things, Cappelli asked that the Philadelphia police better monitor the bus station for dealers, fugitives and other criminals heading up north.
Rendell's office failed to return a call seeking comment.
Archie Rodgers, who grew up not too far from where Melendez-Rodriguez was arrested, knows all about looking for the good life in a small town.
Standing on the street outside his at-home barber shop, Rodgers, a slightly built man with a scar on his face, talks about how he is trying to steer clear of funny business.
He's already seen too much of that.
He claims he used to sell heroin for the Nation of Islam (NOI) in Philadelphia, he says.
Back in the '60s, he says, "there were just a few of us who worked for the Muslims and we broke away from them because why should we sell dope for them when we could sell it for ourselves?"
Rodgers says he and his friends decided to create their own sales unit because "the Nation of Islam was teaching one thing and doing another. And me, I was intelligent enough to realize that I was selling the dope, but not making the money. I wanted to make the money. So me and my friends decided to do our own thing."
Minister Rodney Muhammad of the Nation of Islam in Philadelphia says Rodgers "must have been mistaken" about his relationship with NOI.
"I don't doubt that he sold heroin," says Muhammad. "He obviously is very confused as to who he is selling heroin for, the likes of which can always identify themselves as the Nation of Islam."
The NOI, says Muhammad, "was the number one target" of the federal government's COINTELPRO campaign against black political and religious groups, "which did a lot of unscrupulous things to make it seem as though the Nation of Islam were involved" in drug dealing and domestic terrorism.
Rodgers says he eventually moved to Harrisburg, but not before becoming seriously addicted to his product.
"We had boxes of money in the garage and that just got boring so we started using the drug ourselves. We were heroin addicts in the '60s."
It was a bad scene, says Rodgers, one that he tried to escape.
In the mid-'80s, Rodgers moved to Harrisburg.
"I just got sick and tired," he says. "I got two brothers got killed. I got tired of the way I was living. By that time, I had three kids of my own."
A few of his Philly friends moved out with them.
They tried to go straight, says Rodgers, but old habits die hard.
It didn't help, he says, when the Philly connection started pumping heroin and users out to Harrisburg two years ago.
"We were doing positive things in our lives and then it just became a big insurgence of people trying to get away."
Those fleeing Philly were a bad influence.
Rodgers started going back to his evil ways.
Selling drugs and running hustles.
"It's an open town," he says, squinting behind sunglasses at the blinding winter sun. "A slow town. It isn't used to gangsters."
And he took advantage of a unique business opportunity.
"You ever hear of 'milking a twenty?'" he asks. "You go in a store looking for change. A jewelry store with an open counter. I go in there and spill some change and the person behind the counter helps to pick it up. While they do that, someone else comes in and takes some pieces of jewelry.
"We were pickpocketing," he adds. "People weren't used to it. They had never seen it done. Strong-arm robberies. They weren't used to those, either. A lot of fear was brought up."
Dauphin County Drug Task Force detective David Laudermilch says that things were so bad two years ago that Harrisburg was the state's most dangerous city, based on per capita crime rates.
That's no longer the case, thanks to the present city administration, says Laudermilch. Drugs, however, are creating havoc in Harrisburg, he says.
Rodgers says that as bad as the Philly guys were, at least they were better than the New Yorkers.
"The guys from Philadelphia, the guys that I know, we're dopers. We're not the barbarian drug dealer mafia like the New Yorkers. A lot of the killers are from New York."
Rodgers says that while he generally tries to avoid the New York boys, he cannot ignore them.
"If anything, we see eye to eye," he says. "Some of us are into the same thing. They go together. There's mutual respect."
So far, there's been no rumble for supremacy.
So far, there's been plenty of Harrisburg to plunder.
And a common vision of the locals.
"The people who come here with the wrong intentions, the people who come here to sell drugs, they think the people here in Harrisburg are weak-minded. They're country."
Taking the Colombian bait, those weak-minded country bumpkins "fell into the trap," says Rodgers. "There's a big influx of drugs. There's the AIDS epidemic. They fell into the trap."
Archie Rodgers insists he is trying to get out of the trap.
He is being helped by a local heroin dealer turned minister who was born James Lyles but prefers his street name, Big Dope.
Big Dope is seated inside the auditorium of the First Spanish Church of Harrisburg.
He is attending a meeting called by Neighbors Who Care, a religious service organization created by disgraced Nixon Attorney General Charles Colson. On this day, the group is meeting to discuss a potential upcoming visit by Gov. Tom Ridge.
Big Dope says he would love to have the governor come see 13th and Derry for himself, to see how much trouble Philadelphia is bringing to Harrisburg.
He says he sees plenty of guys like Rodgers, who have moved out of Philly to Harrisburg, York, Lancaster and other small towns in Central Pennsylvania.
"They come here because they're exhausted," says Big Dope.
"They've run out of gas. People are looking for them. They are looking for an escape route. Some place to hide out."
Sometimes, he says, things work out.
"Some of them don't," he says. "They end up going right back to the same thing."
Big Dope says he is trying to keep people on the right and righteous path.
To that end, he has created a book of about 250 autopsy pictures, depicting the end result of drug dealing in Harrisburg.
He totes the book around, to show dealers and addicts what could happen to them. He says he would like to put together a similar book in Philadelphia.
Big Dope, who became a minister "about three weeks ago," knows the drug life well.
His dad was known as Dope.
"Because he sold it," says Big Dope. "But my stepfather raised me."
His stepfather was called Dick Mack.
"Because he was pimping," says Big Dope, who says his life in crime started early.
"I was running numbers for Dick Mack when I was five," he says. "I started selling heroin when I was 13. I got it from some coach at my middle school in Harrisburg."
Big Dope says drugs led him to the good life and then to ruin.
"We were eating off $300-a-dish china. We had crystal, doing-what-we-want type of thing. Then my house burned down because my upstairs tenants were doing crack and burned it down."
Big Dope says he almost died trying to save his most precious possession—the heroin he hid under the floorboards.
It was then, he says, that he decided to give up drugs and work for the Lord.
State Attorney General Michael Fisher hears plenty of stories about plenty of people like Melendez-Rodriguez and Archie Johnson and Dara Singley.
Which is why he is asking the state legislature for an extra $1.5 million in next year's budget to fight the heroin trade where it begins.
In Philadelphia.
"We want to double the amount of agents we have in Philadelphia," says spokesman Sean Connolly. "We have 25 agents now."
The rationale, says Connolly, is that "when you take down a drug organization in a small city or rural county, many times you can trace those drugs back to Philadelphia. If we spread out the additional 25 agents throughout the state, it won't have the same impact as it would if we concentrate them in Philadelphia. We want to choke the problem off at the source."
Small-town law enforcement officers already feeling the burden of the Philadelphia-based heroin trade say they would rather have help locally.
"The crackdowns in Philadelphia scare the bad guys out of the city and into the small towns," grouses Joe McGuire, a detective with the Lancaster Police Department's drug suppression unit. "They start to feel comfortable here."
McGuire, who looks like John Kruk with a Glock, says small departments like his are already overwhelmed and already feel abandoned by the federal government.
Lancaster, says McGuire, is on the extreme western end of the eastern district of the U.S. attorney general. As a result, Lancaster gets less crime-fighting attention.
"Resources from the federal government don't reach us," he says.
It is a serious problem, says McGuire, one that most people in Philadelphia don't associate with what they consider buggy country.
"There are more than 200 cops fighting drugs on the streets in Philadelphia," says McGuire, adding that the officers of the Lancaster drug suppression unit are basically volunteers, working four or five hours each day in addition to their regular police duties.
The drill, says McGuire, usually consists of spotting a drug house, generally in the city's infamous 7th Ward, and then shutting it down.
The trouble, he says, is that they open even faster than they are closed down, leaving the police frustrated even though drug-related crime has been reduced.
It doesn't really matter how many police are in Philadelphia or Lancaster, says the Rev. Edward Maurice Bailey, a 6-foot-10-inch former cokehead who insists on being hugged by everyone who enters his Bethel A.M.E. Church, Lancaster's oldest black congregation.
Bailey says that the people, acting on behalf of God, must make a stand against the drug dealers, many of whom have fled Philadelphia.
Bailey's main response has been to reach out to Lancaster's drug-dealing community, to invite them to prayer and rehabilitation.
But sometimes, he says, it takes more than prayer.
"I believe that we must live in peace with all men as much as possible," says Bailey. "But when you threaten my family, you can no longer have peace. So you have to be removed. And I will do that. Whatever removal means. I will have no tolerance."
No tolerance?
"If you are violent with my child, if you bring violence and drugs to my community, then violence is what you need to answer to," he says. "You will not come to my community and do something violent to my home. You will not walk into my home and do violence and then walk out of there and not feel violence."
Bailey insists he is not frightened by the gun-toting punks who have left Philadelphia for greener pastures in the 7th Ward.
"The ones who are running from Philadelphia are running because they are punks," says Bailey. "They come because it's easy pickings here. All they have to do is shoot one person and everyone will run for cover. But you know what? The guys who are real rough are the ones who stay in Philadelphia."
DEA special agents Bob and Ray know all too well what Bailey is talking about.
Cruising Heroin Central, they are followed by a black Mustang.
They are visibly tense.
Veins bulge.
Muscles flex.
After a few blocks, Bob stops the car.
Working with the fluidity of a good double-play combo, they jerk their Glocks out of their holsters, open the doors and jump out in one swift move.
They point the guns into the passenger side windows of the Mustang and vent some adrenaline.
"What do you want?" Bob screams. "Why are you following us?"
The man, whose car bears a friend-of-police type front license, says he doesn't like people driving through his neighborhood.
"He doesn't like people driving through his neighborhood," Bob repeats, sarcastically, as he sits back behind the wheel, trying to chill.
As they pull into the DEA garage, they are greeted with the big news of the day.
Police Commissioner Richard Neal is resigning.
"I wish the new chief luck," says Bob. "Whoever it is will need it."
