Pubdate: Fri, 06 Oct 2000
Source: Naperville Sun (IL)
Copyright: 2000 Sun Publications
Address: 1500 Ogden Ave., Naperville IL 60540
Website: http://www.copleynewspapers.com/sunpub/naper/
Forum: http://www.copleynewspapers.com/survey/
Author: Bill Bird

DRUG WARRIOR

Feds Appoint Sturn Taskmaster For Regional Narcotics Unit

Is Don Sturn a misguided idealist on a hopelessly quixotic quest? Or is he a
man on a not necessarily impossible mission?

In an era when public opinion polls show an increasing number of Americans
favor the legalization of some or all narcotics, Sturn can make one
electrifying case after another for the nation's need to continue fighting
the needle and the devastating damage it does.

"Two friends I had in college got involved in the drug scene" during the
turbulent late 1960s and early 1970s, said Sturn, who then played football
for North Central College.

"I saw what it did to their lives. One guy used marijuana and LSD" and the
other consumed different hallucinogens, excesses that left both young men
with "severely diminished" mental, physical and emotional capacities, he
said.

"You could literally see the downward turn. They were no longer able to
function as students. One of them died without making it out of college,"
Sturn said.

That defining moment would launch the Wisconsin-born Sturn's extraordinary
odyssey, one that has included battling drug overlords in inner-city New
York and waging covert warfare on narcotics refineries in the mountains and
jungles of Southeast Asia.

He has since come full circle to the Midwest, where the 52year-old
Naperville resident and father of two is now special agent in charge of the
U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration's Chicago Division, overseeing 425
employees and operations in five states. His promotion March 29 coincided
with his 29-year anniversary with the DEA.

Sturn in 1970 earned a business degree from North Central College and one in
criminology in California.

"I thought about becoming an FBI agent, but drugs were such an overwhelming
problem at the time that I decided to go into drug enforcement," Sturn said.

When the DEA was formed in 1973, he became a special agent. He was 23.

His superiors two years later made Sturn part of their historic New York
Joint Task Force of federal and local law enforcement officials. He worked
almost eight years in New York City, where he and members of his team built
countless cases against mostly midlevel drug dealers.

One of Sturn's more satisfying achievements came with the task force's
arrest and conviction of Leroy "Nicky" Barnes, a genuine underworld
"godfather" who ran narcotics-trafficking operations in the city's Harlem
area.

"He was known as 'Mr. Untouchable' because he beat four (criminal
indictments) in a row," Sturn said of Barnes.

"We spent a year and a half on his case," investigating Barnes' operations
and amassing evidence against him, Sturn said.

"We could work no other cases. Our lives were devoted to getting that man."

Their determination paid off in 1976, when Barnes and 22 of his lieutenants
were indicted on myriad charges. All of his associates were convicted and
jailed, while Barnes was sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of
parole.

"The one thing that (experience) did for me was, it absolutely made me want
to leave New York," Sturn said with a half-smile.

"One of the reasons I became a federal agent was because I wanted to see
some of the world," he said.

DEA officials granted him his wish, assigning him to what ultimately would
become a 12-year assignment in Southeast Asia's "Golden Triangle" of
Thailand, Laos and Burma, also known as Myanmar. The area is one of only
four regions in the world growing opium poppies, which are used in making
heroin.

The Thai government and Sturn's DEA team would need 15 years to destroy the
empire of Khun Sa, a ruthless narcotics warlord. Sa was commander of the
ethnic, 22,000-man Shan United Army, a renegade and militaristic band of
opium producers he ran from 1979-94.

Sa and 13 high-ranking underlings were indicted in 1994 in New York, "and
that virtually crippled his operation," Sturn said.

His army disintegrated when Sa fled to Rangoon, where he now lives in exile.

The DEA and Thai police from 1988-94 confiscated and destroyed "in excess of
six tons of pure heroin," Sturn said. That seizure, after being diluted or
"cut" with other substances, would have produced 24 tons of heroin,
generating billions of dollars in sales on streets around the world, he
said.

The DEA-Thai effort dramatically reduced the "Golden Triangle's" opium
production from a one-time high of 400 metric tons per year to only 20 to 30
tons per year today, he said.

Sturn remains politely evasive about the exact nature of his personal duties
as a DEA agent in New York and Southeast Asia.

A DEA news release indicates Sturn "worked on the streets of Bangkok
(Thailand) as well as on clandestine refinery operations in the jungle and
remote mountainous areas near the Thai-Burma border," while a photograph
prominently displayed in his office shows Sturn standing with three agents
clad in combat fatigues and toting machine guns.

Sturn cited agency protocol in refusing to provide much detail about his
work, but hinted the cinematic scenarios spun by the likes of Arnold
Schwarzeneggar, Sylvester Stallone and Clint Eastwood are not as far-fetched
as they might seem.

During the Barnes investigation, Sturn was part of a fourman team charged
with planting a court-approved electronic eavesdropping device in a
Barnes-owned car leasing and storage business.

Sturn said the men, including a lock-picker, donned black clothing and set
out for Harlem at 3 a.m. They skulked across rooftops and lowered themselves
by rope into Barnes' building by prying open a skylight and successfully
planting the listening device without being detected.

All of the work proved for naught, however, and the process had to be
repeated after the device malfunctioned, Sturn said.

Since returning to the U.S. and assuming his duties here, Sturn's new
passion lies in drug abuse prevention. He is convinced narcotics use can be
all but eradicated among teen-agers and young adults through education and
the combined efforts of parents, schools and law enforcement officials.

"The question isn't even debatable to me," Sturn said. "Drugs demean,
diminish and destroy lives. You can't possibly not think about fighting
them."

Sturn said he worries about the rise of susbstances like PMA and ecstasy,
the types of so-called "club drugs" implicated in the recent deaths of three
area youths, including Naperville Central High School student Sara
Aeschlimann.

"I think the deaths of those three young kids opened a lot of eyes," Sturn
said.

Parents and teens alike need to know that while PMA tablets may look as
sanitary and benign as aspirin, they are made under filthy conditions in
basements and garages, and often are cut with other foreign, toxic
ingredients, he said. "Ecstasy does irreparable brain damage," Sturn said.
"Kids who use it are going to have almost the same effects of Alzheimer's
(patients)."

Sturn said education continues to be the most effective way of battling drug
abuse. The DEA, Naperville police and local school officials all will do
their part Oct. 17, during a Designer Drugs 2000 public awareness forum at
Neuqua Valley High School.

"We have an obligation to our children to follow through and fight the
scourge of drug abuse," Sturn said. "Parents need to become educated, and
they have to keep talking to their kids."

"We all have to lead by example." 
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