Last year, not long after President Bush declared the war on drugs, Gladys Ramos took the battle to her own street.
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Her target was the $10-a-bag curbside narcotics operation flourishing on the 1300 block of North Maplewood Avenue, where she lives with her husband and two children.
Ramos, 34, wrote impassioned letters to city officials and urged her neighbors to organize against the dope peddling that was turning the street into an open market of junkies, prostitutes and gun-toting gang members.
The response was encouraging: On a Saturday evening, in August 1990, some 35 residents, the alderman and a cadre of police crowded into her cozy living room.
”We need help,” Ramos said she told the sergeant. ”We don`t know what to do.”
That night, Ramos recalled, ”there were five cops up and down the street and making arrests on the corner. It was great.”
But the next night, the cops disappeared, and the dealers reclaimed the corner. They remain there today, a scraggly gang of teenagers openly hawking small bags of cocaine and marijuana to passing cars.
For the residents of North Maplewood, they are a menacing, daily reminder of how little has changed since the drug war was declared, a war they were willing to wage but for which they got little tangible support.
”This war has not made a dent,” Ramos says. ”If anything, it`s gotten worse. The kids on the street are selling more freely. They stay out longer at night. They don`t care if you see them. My children see this and I wonder, should I stay here?”
As Chicago`s drug problem spirals and the frustration of Ramos and other residents grows, top city officials have all but conceded that they are losing the war on drugs.
Mayor Richard Daley and police Supt. LeRoy Martin continue to blame the federal government for failing to stem the tide. Meanwhile, local authorities have implemented no effective strategy for halting the flow of narcotics into the neighborhoods and have in many cases squandered resources available to them.
Court and law enforcement records, as well as interviews with dozens of officials, show that:
– Seizures by the highest level drug enforcement unit in the Chicago area have plummeted since the fiscal year ending October 1989. That year, the unit seized 1,550 kilograms of cocaine, 2,639 kilograms of marijuana and 31 kilograms of heroin. This past year, the seizures plunged to 135 kilograms of cocaine, 18 kilograms of marijuana and 2 kilograms of heroin.
– In that same period, arrests by that unit plunged from 264 in 1989, to 124 in 1990, to 79 for the first 11 months of the last fiscal year.
– Chicago devotes a smaller percentage of its police force to full-time narcotics enforcement than any of the 10 largest cities in the U.S.
– Some days, as many as 200 officers are devoted to operations with code names like ”Hammer Down” and ”Iron Wedge,” which generate publicity and dozens of quick arrests but which police acknowledge have little lasting effect. Officials concede that officers are shifted around the city in a shell game based on political pressure and citizen complaints, and that the focus on street level busts is at the expense of long-term investigations.
– Police officials concede that they can identify only a portion of the top narcotics dealers in the city.
– Since the spring of 1990, veteran narcotics officers have been shifted from an elite task force to other non-narcotics beats because of bitter bureaucratic infighting. Many have been reassigned to routine patrol or desk jobs.
Meanwhile, the flow of drugs and their deadly side effects continue.
On Sept. 5, 1989, Bush delivered his speech declaring the nation`s war on drugs. This year, the Bush administration released a federal ”fact sheet”, proclaiming near-victory in the fight and saying that we are ”turning the corner in the inner cities.”
But many local authorities say the problem is as bad or worse than ever.
”I don`t see where the situation is getting any better,” said police Narcotics Section Cmdr. Charles H. Ramsey. ”You can buy just as much dope in Chicago now as you could two years ago. In fact, the price is going down and the quality is going up.”
Ramsey calls the federal drug war, ”a war fought in the media. I`ve heard about it but I haven`t seen it.”
– – –
On a blistering August day in 1989, 15 high-level Chicago police narcotics officers curbed a van along a near-deserted stretch of highway between Kankakee and Chicago.
Bundled like bales of hay and tossed in the back of the van were 500 kilograms of cocaine, the single largest Chicago-bound cache of the drug ever seized.
The officers were part of a colorful, elite crew of Chicago cops who served in one of the most critical roles in the local anti-drug effort. They were detailed to work under the supervision of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. They were charged with intercepting multi-kilogram shipments of dope before they hit the streets and eliminating the city`s top level narco traffickers.
The bust came at the end of a long and dangerous investigation that stretched from Morton Grove to Cali, Colombia, and resulted in the conviction of a major Chicago area cocaine broker.
Yet within a few months, the officers responsible for it were eliminated from the unit.
”Other guys, they get parties and plaques when they leave a unit. But us, it was lepers filing out,” said retired Sgt. Kenneth Brandt, who worked on the unit for 14 years and supervised it during the transition period last year. His DEA superiors ”treated us like we had the plague,” Brandt said.
Over the last two years, the 32-member Chicago Police-DEA task force has been wracked by feuding, conflict and internal investigations, according to court records and interviews with many current and former agents and officials.
Last year, the whole crew was swept out, leaving an entirely new group to learn the rudiments of the high-level drug business. After the purge, when the unit`s old members were reassigned to various non-narcotics-related beats, drug seizures and arrests plummeted, records show.
”It`s not that they`re not good policemen, but they`re working on different levels,” Brandt said of the new officers. ”They have no informants who can get you to the load that`s coming in. If you look at it from a citizen`s point of view, it was terrible.”
DEA Regional Director Kenneth Cloud, who last year took the helm of the Chicago office, which covers a five-state area, maintains that the crew needed to be ”redesigned,” and that the new members are better trained and managed. The unit`s old officers said there were internal investigations into their conduct-one into allegations that the officers falsified reports of a superior`s automobile accident, the other into charges that an officer misappropriated money used to make drug buys. But they said they were never cited for wrongdoing and no disciplinary action was ever taken.
Cloud declined to discuss the cases.
Former officers claim the unit`s restaffing was sparked by colliding egos and ambitions. Tensions between the officers and their superiors ranged from resentment of a DEA order to wear suit jackets and ties on the job, to heated arguments over which traffickers to target, officers said in interviews.
The conflict erupted last year, following a lawsuit brought against the DEA and the city by the unit`s officers, who were owed thousands of dollars in overtime pay. The officers claimed in court documents that they had been threatened and transferred by their superiors in retaliation for joining the suit.
Now, Brandt and other former task force members say, a void has been left in the city`s anti-drug effort.
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”There is going to be a span of two or three years before the unit will produce as it did,” Brandt said.
– – –
The new task force is facing an array of traffickers who are increasingly elusive.
Traffickers from Colombia`s Cali cartel, for example, who have recently emerged as the preeminent suppliers of cocaine to the Chicago area, are especially hard to track because they ”tend to operate like car
manufacturers-through distributorships that are separate enterprises,” said Thomas Scorza, chief of the Drug Task Force in the Chicago U.S. attorney`s office.
”Just as General Motors has agreements with several different car dealers in an area, so the Colombian suppliers have several dealers, and several guys who collect and then launder the money for them,” Scorza said.
Since 1989, the U.S. attorney`s office here has successfully prosecuted five major Cali-based dope rings, seizing about 640 kilograms of cocaine.
The oldest and apparently most successful drug operation in the Chicago area is the heroin pipeline run by the South Side Herrera family and its associates, officials say.
In the 1980s, in an arrangement with Colombian drug dealers, the Herreras began transporting cocaine with their shipments, police say. DEA director Cloud estimates that 1,000 people work for the organization, which has persisted for more than two decades.
With current police resources stretched to the limit, complex, long-term investigations-such as targeting Nigerian white heroin importers and street gangs with interstate drug connections-have fallen almost exclusively to the federal government.
Chicago police officials claim the federal government is slow to provide them with intelligence data about the large-scale trafficking rings. Often, cooperation is replaced by competition between agencies for informants and arrests, officials say.
Although Cloud said cooperation between the agencies is the best it has ever been, Chicago police officials say information is tightly guarded and complain that they can access the DEA`s national data base on drug dealers only infrequently and at the agency`s discretion.
”There`s a lot of problems in sharing investigation information, but that`s not just on their side,” said Chicago police Cmdr. Ramsey. ”That`s probably all the way around. People are just reluctant to share.”
Although 25 officers were added to the Chicago Police Department`s narcotics section this year, the department still devotes only about 200 officers, or 1.3 percent of its 12,100-member force, to full-time narcotics enforcement-less than any of the top 10 U.S. cities, records show. New York City devotes more than 6 percent of its force to drug work.
For the most part, Chicago narcotics officers are relegated to the grinding task of hauling in street corner dealers.
One of the cornerstones of the department`s drug-fighting effort is Operation Iron Wedge, in which some 50 officers a day comb street corners, arresting dealers by the dozen.
But most of the dealers, charged with making $10 and $20 deliveries, are released on personal recognizance bonds and quickly return to the street, according to police, prosecutors and neighborhood residents.
But by that time, the police often have moved on to other neighborhoods.
”It`s hard to keep the pressure up,” says Ramsey. ”You win back ground, and then you turn around and lose it.”
– – –
The residents of North Maplewood wonder how much longer it will take before the war on drugs returns to their street. The strongest among them have begun to give up.
They recite a litany of indignities and violent encounters: the frightening stretch of 20 nights this summer when the block went dark because the gangbangers turned out the street lights; the cursing they endured from teenaged dealers during anti-drug vigils; the constant worry about their children; the way the cops lecture them about community involvement, then disappear; and the night a 25-year-old father of three was beat up after he asked three dealers to leave his front lawn.
Many are now afraid to call 911 for fear of retaliation.
”I think there`s a lot of hopelessness,” said Rev. Mike Irmiter of St. Fidelis Church, 1406 N. Washtenaw Ave. ”A lot of people don`t think it will change.”
Dealers have taken over a corner in front of his church, Irmiter said.
”Usually they`re pretty good about not selling the stuff when I`m standing there,” he said.
”If it was just my wife and I, we would continue fighting,” says Elias Zwierzynski, who bought a spacious house on the block three years ago. ”We do not think that we have a right to doom our son to a childhood where he cannot play on the street. If my son wants to ride his bicycle, I have to drive him 5 or 10 miles to find a nice place to go.
”It is like living under an occupied army. We love the house, and the many good people we have met here, but we are looking at leaving.”
Gladys Ramos continues to do her part.
Last week, she sent a fax to police listing the license plate numbers of the cars that stopped on her corner to buy drugs. She told them about the young prostitutes that strut on the street.
Ramos said that when she called the station an officer told her, ”We`ll get on this right away.”
She hasn`t heard anything since.