Pubdate: Sat, 24 Feb 2001
Source: Chicago Tribune (IL)
Copyright: 2001 Chicago Tribune Company
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Author: Cam Simpson

DRUG WAR NETS SMALLER FISH IN CITY

At Daley's Behest, U.S. Shifts Strategy In Fight With Pushers

Disturbed by statistics showing that federal prosecutors here were bringing 
far fewer drug cases than their counterparts in other major cities, Mayor 
Richard Daley persuaded the Justice Department in 1998 to designate more 
lawyers whose sole focus would be prosecuting narcotics cases in Chicago.

But more than two years into the new effort, a Tribune analysis of those 
cases indicates that while prosecutions are up, increasingly the targets of 
the new drug war aren't the kingpins who run these operations, but 
small-time dealers with the types of cases that previously were relegated 
to state court.

And as the debate rages across the country over the effectiveness of the 
nation's drug war, some authorities here, including the chief federal judge 
and the local head of the FBI, are questioning the wisdom of the strategy.

By putting more emphasis on small drug cases, the officials say, resources 
are being siphoned away from the prosecution of fraud, public corruption 
and organized crime cases.

"It is disingenuous to think that the federal courts are playing a 
significant role in the drug war because of this rise in federal 
prosecutions," said U.S. District Judge Marvin Aspen, the chief federal 
court judge for the Chicago area. "It's a shallow political solution to a 
serious problem that is not addressed at all by moving a few state-level 
cases into the federal system."

U.S. Atty. Scott Lassar defends the new strategy, insisting that more 
ambitious drug investigations and non-narcotics probes have not suffered. 
He said his roughly 100 criminal prosecutors are doing more with less every 
day.

By some measures, the new program in Chicago is a success. In fiscal year 
1998, the last full year before the new policy, 55 narcotics cases were 
filed by the U.S. attorney's office. During fiscal year 2000, the number of 
federal narcotics cases had more than tripled to 171.

Those prosecutions included some significant cases. Roy Mosley, the head of 
a major wholesale cocaine ring, for instance, was charged and ultimately 
pleaded guilty to distributing more than 330 pounds of cocaine, although 
prosecutors alleged he was connected to the seizure of another 2,500 pounds.

In addition, prosecutors charged more than 30 gang members and leaders of 
running a cocaine and crack operation in three West Side neighborhoods, 
though that investigation began before the new policy was implemented.

But at least 70 of the 171 cases brought last year involved small 
quantities of drugs totaling less than 2 kilograms, about 4* pounds. And 
the vast majority of them contained no allegation that the defendants 
played a noteworthy role in major drug organizations, the kinds of cases 
that before the policy change were the hallmark of federal prosecutions in 
Chicago.

Of the 70 smaller cases, 56 involved a single kilogram or less of hard 
drugs-cocaine, crack or heroin, an amount that stands in stark contrast to 
the tons of drugs involved in kingpin cases.

They included small seizures made by local police. They also included cases 
where authorities arrested people after arranging undercover sales and the 
prosecutions of couriers-often immigrants-who were paid a small sum to move 
drugs.

The heightened drug effort had its origins in 1998 when Daley, armed with a 
U.S. Conference of Mayors report showing the number of federal drug cases 
in Chicago had declined by 64 percent over five years, lobbied then-Atty. 
Gen. Janet Reno for a bigger local push.

Under orders from Washington, the U.S. attorney's office established a new 
narcotics unit and assigned about 18 prosecutors whose sole job was to 
pursue drug cases.

The new unit also was accompanied by a policy change. No longer would 
federal prosecutors be limited to only those cases that held the promise of 
getting to the heart of a drug organization.

That kingpin strategy, in effect for five years, had produced prosecutions 
that law enforcement officials credited with wiping out the upper ranks of 
some of Chicago's top drug organizations, especially street gangs, which 
control an estimated 90 percent of the area's retail drug trade.

Lassar staffed the unit by reassigning lawyers from the special 
prosecutions division, a section that had handled drug cases as well as 
public corruption and white collar crime. He said the shift hasn't been a 
detriment.

"Other cases have not suffered; we're just doing more work," Lassar said.

But Kathleen McChesney, the head of the FBI office in Chicago, isn't so 
sure. Because the emphasis on drug cases came with no new prosecutors, she 
said other areas have suffered.

She said the new focus has detracted from federal fights against fraud, 
corruption, organized crime and the like, because the U.S. attorney's 
office, in her mind, is already understaffed.

"The cases here in Chicago are wide-ranging and they're complex, and some 
require multiple" prosecutors, she said. "If you have to rob Peter to pay 
Paul, something has got to suffer."

Since the reorganization, the number of prosecutors in the special 
prosecutions unit has dropped from roughly 32 to 16.

Lassar's office, however, said those numbers may not tell the whole story. 
Officials said the people removed from that unit under the new plan were 
doing drug cases before the change, though they were also doing a mix of 
white-collar and public corruption cases.

According to Randall Samborn, Lassar's spokesman, the focus for those 
prosecutors now is strictly drugs.

Thomas Needham, who was the mayor's special adviser for law enforcement 
when Daley complained to Reno, said drug prosecutions should always be a 
top priority.

"We can't do everything in this world," said Needham, who is chief of staff 
to Chicago Police Supt. Terry Hillard. "They [federal authorities] have a 
unique responsibility going after those public corruption cases, but from 
where we sit here at the Chicago Police Department, this is all we hear 
about from those neighborhoods, the fear that grips them from narcotics 
trafficking."

The new strategy also has the backing of the Drug Enforcement 
Administration. It was so difficult for DEA agents working under the old 
system to get federal prosecutors interested in their cases that they were, 
by habit, turning first to state prosecutors, said Don Sturn, the current 
special-agent-in-charge for the DEA in Chicago. The problem with having 
cases in state court, he said, was that agents had a harder time developing 
informants through those prosecutions.

Officials in the U.S. attorney's office agree they are doing more smaller 
cases than in the past. But after initially disputing that the small cases 
failed to lead them up the chain of command, Lassar's office acknowledged 
that so far those cases have rarely led them to drug bosses.

"We may be starting farther down on the chain, and they may not get us to 
the top, but we are still pursuing cases where there is a federal 
interest-and that is a broader net," Samborn said.

Typical of those prosecutions is the case of Elsa Moreno, 33, the divorced 
mother of three who was charged and pleaded guilty last year to receiving 
$100 to keep 200 grams of heroin, the equivalent weight of about 200 paper 
clips, in her Uptown apartment for a week.

They also include the case of Diane Oliver, a 39-year-old without a 
criminal record who lived in a South Side public housing unit. She was 
charged in federal court with two counts of intentionally distributing 
crack cocaine after allegedly selling a total of 10 grams, about the same 
weight as two dimes and a nickel, to an undercover police officer, 
authorities said. She has pleaded not guilty and her case is still pending.

"Those are the people the drug organizations, big or small, put out there 
for you to take down. They understand that's a risk of business," said 
Ronald Safer, a former federal prosecutor in Chicago now in private 
practice. Safer was the lead prosecutor in what authorities have called one 
of the largest narcotics cases in the nation, the prosecution of the 
Gangster Disciples street gang that controlled a $100-million-a-year drug 
empire.

"You could prosecute a thousand of those crimes every day," Safer said, 
referring to the small cases, "but what would you accomplish?"

Aspen and others say cases such as these are better left in state court 
where there is a vast infrastructure dedicated to dealing quickly with 
small and mid-level drug cases. Unhampered by notoriously tough federal 
drug sentencing laws, state judges also have more leeway in the sentences 
they impose.

Critics also say that while small drug cases can be handled in state court, 
complex fraud and corruption cases are handled almost exclusively by 
federal prosecutors.

Safer said making kingpin cases from the types of busts now filling federal 
courts here is nearly impossible because drug leaders are, by design, well 
insulated from the small-time pushers and couriers being prosecuted.

According to Safer and other top drug prosecutors, one critical hallmark of 
kingpin cases is the use of court-authorized wiretaps, because secretly 
listening to the conversations of drug bosses is the best way authorities 
can infiltrate their well-insulated upper ranks.

Just as the number of small drug cases has skyrocketed under the new 
strategy in Chicago, the number of narcotics wiretaps essential in bringing 
down big-time dealers has plummeted.

Records detailing those wiretaps-contained in reports sent to Congress each 
year by federal judges-also provide a window into major cases still brewing 
behind the scenes.

In 1997, the last full calendar year before the new strategy, prosecutors 
here reported using 27 federal wiretaps in narcotics cases. The manpower 
dedicated to them cost $2.11 million, records show.

By 1999, the first full calendar year after the new strategy was in effect, 
prosecutors reported using just 15 narcotics-related wiretaps, with the 
manpower tab dropping to less than $1.5 million, records show. The steep 
decline in narcotics wiretaps here, roughly 45 percent, came at the same 
time that their use grew nationally by 12.4 percent. Statistics for last 
year have not yet been released.

While Lassar and others in his office acknowledge it is nearly impossible 
to target kingpins without wiretaps, they say they cannot explain the 
decline documented in the reports to Congress, though they maintain kingpin 
investigations have not suffered.

But Samborn also predicted a "significant spike" in kingpin cases in the 
coming years because of probes still in the works. He also said more probes 
involving drug organizations have been initiated under the new strategy.

If the quality or quantity of kingpin cases have slipped, Samborn said, it 
is because federal prosecutors here are the "victims of our own success." 
He said Friday that the massive kingpin prosecutions of the past have 
splintered the leadership ranks of Chicago's major drug organizations.

But the drug war being waged by federal prosecutors represents only a small 
segment of Chicago narcotics cases. In Cook County alone last year there 
were 38,000 felony drug cases, said John Gorman, a spokesman for Cook 
County State's Atty. Dick Devine.

A small rise or fall in the number of federal drug cases, he said, "really 
wouldn't affect us one way or another."
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MAP posted-by: Keith Brilhart