Post by blackcrowheart on Feb 19, 2006 21:31:10 GMT -5
Tribal Underworld
Drug Traffickers Find Haven in Shadows of Indian Country
By SARAH KERSHAW
www.nytimes.com/2006/02/19/national/19smuggle.html
ST. REGIS MOHAWK RESERVATION, N.Y. -- He had eluded the authorities for
years. Witnesses against him had mysteriously disappeared. Shots were
fired from his highly secured compound here last year when the state
police tried to close in.
The man, John V. Oakes, like a fast-rising number of American Indian
drug traffickers across the country, saw himself as "untouchable," as
one senior investigator put it, protected by armed enforcers and a code
of silence that ruled the reservation.
After he was finally arrested last May, Mr. Oakes was recorded from jail
talking on the phone with his estranged wife. "I can't believe people
let this happen to me," he said, according to Derek Champagne, the
Franklin County district attorney who listened to the recorded call.
"You can't touch me. I'm on the reservation, and I do what I want."
Investigators described Mr. Oakes as an intimidating trafficker who
concentrated on stealing drugs and cash from a prosperous and growing
cluster of criminals who, like Mr. Oakes, have built sprawling mansions
near worn-down trailers on this reservation straddling the Canadian border.
Law enforcement officials say Mr. Oakes and the drug lords he is accused
of stealing from are part of a violent but largely overlooked wave of
trafficking and crime that has swept through the nation's Indian
reservations in recent years, as large-scale criminal organizations have
found havens and allies in the wide-open and isolated regions of Indian
country.
In the eyes of law enforcement, reservations have become a critical link
in the drug underworld, helping traffickers transport high-potency
marijuana and Ecstasy from eastern Canada into cities like Buffalo,
Boston and New York and facilitating the passage of cocaine and
methamphetamine from cities in the West and Midwest into rural America.
In some cases, outside drug gangs work with Indian criminals to
distribute drugs on Indian and non-Indian lands, and on a growing number
of reservations, drug traffickers -- particularly Mexican criminals --
are marrying Indian women to establish themselves on reservations.
At the Lac Courte Oreilles Reservation in northwestern Wisconsin, for
instance, several members of the Latin Kings gang married Indian women
while a tribal offshoot of the gang built a $3 million crack cocaine
ring moving drugs from Milwaukee into and around the reservation over
the past few years, prosecutors said.
Increasingly American Indians are breaking away to build their own
violent, Mafia-like enterprises, according to an examination of dozens
of court records and interviews with more than 50 federal and local
prosecutors, tribal law enforcement officials and tribal members.
"This is very serious and has created major problems in the community,"
said Clifford Martel, a former senior police investigator for the Red
Lake Nation in northern Minnesota, who was fired in July and said it was
because he had tried to rid that reservation of drug traffickers with
close ties to powerful tribe members.
"The amount of drugs was really impacting that community, our community,
just as if it were Chicago, and big loads were coming in all the time,"
Mr. Martel said.
For traffickers of marijuana, cocaine, methamphetamine, painkillers and
people, reservations offer many advantages. Law enforcement is spotty at
best. Tribal sovereignty, varying state laws and inconsistent federal
interest in prosecuting drug crimes create jurisdictional confusion and
conflict.
The deep loyalty that exists within tribes, where neighbors are often
related, and the intense mistrust of the American justice system make
securing witnesses and using undercover informants extremely difficult.
And on some reservations, Indian drug traffickers have close
relationships with tribal government or law enforcement officials and
enjoy special protection that allows them to operate freely,
investigators say.
[foto] Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times - John V. Oakes has pleaded
guilty to selling drugs to undercover agents.
A Direct Hand in Trafficking
Casino money has also fueled the surge, providing a fast-growing source
of customers and well-financed partners for outside drug traffickers.
And cutbacks in welfare payments in cities have prompted many Indians to
return to reservations, often bringing with them connections to gangs
and drug rings.
Some traffickers have given away drugs to Indians as a way of luring
them into the trade. The recently convicted leader of a Mexican drug
ring had a chilling strategy on five reservations in Wyoming and the
Midwest, the authorities said: targeting tribes with high alcohol
addiction rates and handing out free methamphetamine, recruiting the
newly addicted Indians as dealers and orchestrating romantic
relationships between gang members and Indian women.
The surge in drug-related crime stands in sharp contrast to the great
strides Indians have made over the past several decades, strengthening
their sovereignty and culture, making their way into American politics
and government and -- for a small but rising number of tribes -- growing
rich with new casino revenue.
At the same time, American Indians like Mr. Oakes have capitalized on
the drug trade, carving out a deep piece of the pie for themselves,
after decades in which Indians were typically recruited to help
non-Indian traffickers smuggle drugs across the borders and through the
country.
"They started out solely as mules, then they realized there was an awful
lot more profit in dealing directly" with the upper echelons of
organized crime, said Mr. Champagne, the district attorney. "Why should
they just get paid for bringing it across the river?"
Here on Mohawk land, a reservation of roughly 6,000 people on the United
States side, according to the tribe, investigators estimate that 10 to
15 major Indian criminal organizations, along with outside drug rings,
move more than $1 billion annually in high-grade marijuana and Ecstasy
across the Canadian border, through the reservation and into the
Northeast. Prosecutors say they are catching only about 2 percent of
that contraband.
The drug trade afforded Mr. Oakes a lifestyle that neighbors on this
reservation could barely dream of. Stealing from other dealers was
inherently dangerous -- as Mr. Champagne said, "I was surprised that he
wasn't going to be my next homicide." But for Mr. Oakes the rewards
outweighed the risk: He owned a gated compound on the St. Lawrence
River, with 16 surveillance cameras, a souped-up Lincoln Navigator and
several speedboats.
Yet at his bail hearing Mr. Oakes told a judge that he was supporting
himself solely on a Navy pension.
Mr. Oakes eventually pleaded guilty to selling drugs to undercover
agents, after investigators seized from the compound 17,000 tablets of
Ecstasy, worth $340,000 on the street, two pounds of high-grade
marijuana and several shotguns and rifles. But investigators said Mr.
Oakes was a prime suspect in at least a dozen robberies of drug
traffickers, netting him hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash,
cocaine and marijuana. He is expected to be sentenced next month to 10
years in state prison, the authorities said.
Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times - Spoils of the Drug Trade: John V.
Oakes built a gated compound on the St. Regis reservation with 16
surveillance cameras on the property.
The federal government could not provide comprehensive statistics on
drug trafficking through reservations. But overall crime figures point
to a much higher rate of violence on the nation's 261 federally
recognized reservations compared with the rest of the nation. A 2004
Justice Department report found that American Indians and Alaska Natives
experienced a per capita rate of violent crime twice that of the United
States population. And the number of police officers per capita on
Indian reservations is starkly lower than elsewhere in the country,
other reports show.
Steven W. Perry, a statistician with the Justice Department and the
author of the 2004 report, a 10-year study of crime in Indian country,
said the judicial patchwork that covered Indian reservations had made it
impossible to provide an accurate statistical portrait. Of the 561
federally recognized Indian tribes, 171 have their own courts, and only
71 have their own jails, Mr. Perry said.
Other federal officials say they are aware, through anecdotal reports
and growing concerns reported to them by tribal leaders, of a marked
rise in drug trafficking, particularly involving methamphetamine, and
crimes like murder and robbery that come in its wake.
"It appears there is a very significant crime problem on most of the
reservations that we are aware of," said Chris Chaney, deputy bureau
director of law enforcement services for the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
"I am concerned that it might be escalating within the last couple of
years."
Addiction, Confusion, Corruption
Although much of the drug trafficking on reservations involves moving
the contraband across the nation's borders and from large cities through
the states, the drugs often never leave Indian lands.
At the Blackfeet Nation in Browning, Mont., methamphetamine addiction is
rampant among the 10,000 members of the tribe, unemployment reaches 85
percent in the winter and drug-related violence is widespread.
"It's destroying our culture, our way of life, killing our people," said
Darrel Rides at the Door, a drug and alcohol counselor who uses
traditional healing therapies, burning sage and sweet grass during
"talking circles," to cleanse the soul of the demons of addiction. "A
lot of people, they feel sort of disempowered to do anything about it."
Local law enforcement officials in Montana, including Jeff Faque, the
under sheriff of Glacier County, said that with no jurisdiction over the
reservation, they could not stem the large quantities of methamphetamine
moving through it in a state with one of the highest rates of meth use
in the nation. Mexican gangs based in Washington State are working with
Blackfeet Indians and others to traffic methamphetamine into and across
Montana, the authorities say.
"It's disheartening," Mr. Faque said of his office's lack of legal
authority at the Blackfeet Nation. "I don't think I'll see it solved in
my lifetime."
Addiction and a jurisdictional morass are only two of the problems
associated with the expanding drug trade. Corruption is another.
At the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming, a tribal court judge was one
of 25 people arrested last May as part of a drug ring accused of moving,
over a seven-year period, 30 pounds of methamphetamine, worth more than
$1 million, as well as painkillers and marijuana into and through the
reservation, said Matthew H. Mead, the United States attorney in Wyoming.
The tribal judge, Lynda Munnell Noah, the sister of one of the drug
ring's leaders, was accused of threatening to assault and murder a
Bureau of Indian Affairs law enforcement officer, prosecutors said.
About half of those arrested have pleaded guilty so far; the judge has
pleaded not guilty and is expected to go to trial soon.
At the Red Lake Reservation in northern Minnesota, four former tribal
law enforcement officials and the nation's current chairman said in
interviews that internal tribal politics and resistance among court and
police employees had created enormous obstacles to ridding the
reservation of cocaine traffickers.
Investigators say four or five tribal families are controlling the drug
trade, most of it in partnership with drug gangs from Minneapolis.
Mr. Martel, the former senior police investigator at Red Lake, which
gained widespread attention last March when a teenager killed nine
people and himself at the reservation's high school, said he was fired
after three years on the force because he clashed with tribal leaders
when he tried to investigate suspects. While the federal government and
not the state has jurisdiction over Red Lake, tribal detectives like Mr.
Martel are typically the first to investigate criminals and to notify
federal prosecutors.
Mr. Martel's partner, Russ Thomas, who resigned in October, said Red
Lake police dispatchers "would narc us out," or alert suspects to
criminal investigations.
Eventually, Mr. Thomas said, he and Mr. Martel stopped telling others in
the police department whom they were investigating, worked their cases
at night instead of during the day so they would not be spotted as
easily, and changed cars often.
"We quit using our own people," he said. "We were doing our job with our
hands tied behind our backs."
Tim Savior, who served only three months as the Red Lake police chief
before the Tribal Council voted him out in January, said he, too, felt
that drug-fighting efforts were thwarted by lower-level officials in the
courts and police department with support from tribal politicians.
"I was trying to hold people accountable for their duties and
responsibilities in the department," Mr. Savior said. "Politicians are
trying to control it, and without a separation of powers, law
enforcement is expendable. That's why there's a tailspin on reservations
-- there's no stability there."
Mr. Martel accused the tribal chairman, Floyd Jourdain Jr., of pressing
him to drop investigations of relatives, friends and political
associates, and he contended that he was fired when he refused to back off.
But Mr. Jourdain said Mr. Martel was fired for just cause, after
portraying himself as an F.B.I. agent during an investigation. Mr.
Martel said he was appropriately accompanying an F.B.I. agent, which is
standard protocol. The chairman also said there were numerous complaints
of rudeness against Mr. Martel and that critics like him were motivated
by a political "smear campaign" in advance of tribal elections in May.
Mr. Jourdain acknowledged that his reservation had a serious problem
with crack cocaine dealers, but he said he had no role in allowing the
drug trade to expand. The problem, he said, lies with lower-level law
enforcement employees resistant to change, although he said he had no
proof of any illegal action that could lead to their firing.
"I've done nothing wrong," Mr. Jourdain said. "I've followed all
procedure and gone through the appropriate steps." He also said he was
disheartened that Mr. Savior had been removed as police chief and had
voted against the majority to keep the police chief on.
The United States attorney in Minnesota, Thomas B. Heffelfinger, whose
office prosecutes major crimes on the state's reservations, said one of
the reasons few drug criminals had been prosecuted at Red Lake was that
the tribal leadership, citing concerns over sovereignty, had removed its
two police officers, including Mr. Martel after he was fired, from a
federal drug crimes task force in the area.
The tribe has yet to sign an agreement it received last fall that would
put the Red Lake officers back on the task force, which Mr. Heffelfinger
said would go a long way toward cracking down on the drug trade there.
The agreement, he said, is "adequate" for two other Minnesota tribes, at
the White Earth and Leech Lake reservations, where the federal task
force's work has led to a series of arrests and prosecutions.
'The Black Hole'
In upstate New York and across the Canadian border, the roughly 11,000
Indians living here now have long dipped their hands into the rewarding
till of smuggling, moving goods as varied as diapers and tobacco across
this lightly patrolled frontier, 12 wide-open miles of water and land
separating the two countries. Some here say that smuggling, dating back
to before the days of Prohibition, is a birthright.
While much of the nation's drug enforcement effort has focused on the
Mexican border, the reservation has become a pipeline for the flow of
drugs and guns between Canada and the United States. In warmer weather,
speedboats cruise across the St. Lawrence River, ferrying drugs south
and weapons and cash north; in the winter cars and vans race over an ice
bridge on the river, the authorities say.
A retired special agent here for the Border Patrol's former
antismuggling unit, Edward Barrett, said that when he was working
undercover along the Mexican border in Texas, a drug smuggler told him
that if he could not move narcotics across the southern border, he could
easily do it through Canada and "the black hole," the traffickers'
nickname for the Mohawk land. "It's guaranteed to go through," he said.
On the 14,000-acre reservation, evidence of the drug trade is easily
visible from the million-dollar mansions with high gates and elaborate
fences that are being built in a place with an unemployment rate of
about 50 percent, and where tumbledown government housing was once the
common sight.
Despite the many obstacles, prosecutors have had some success in
combating drug rings here. In November, Lawrence Mitchell, a member of
the Mohawk tribe, pleaded guilty to orchestrating the movement of large
quantities of marijuana across the United States-Canada border. Numerous
times, according to his plea, Mr. Mitchell, 35, arranged for the
transportation of loads averaging 50 to 100 pounds, destined for
Syracuse, Utica and other parts of New York; Massachusetts; and Florida.
Prosecutors say he also laundered tens of millions of dollars in
marijuana trafficking money over three years, through his construction
company and car dealership. He was sentenced in November to 10 years in
prison.
Mr. Mitchell -- who owned two houses on the reservation, one on each
side of the border, until the authorities seized the American house --
earned at least $2.2 million in drug money from 2001 to 2004,
investigators say, but the money trail was hard to follow.
Along with Mr. Mitchell, five other people, including a New York State
Police dispatcher who was accused of tipping off Mr. Mitchell's drug
runners to police presence on the border, have pleaded guilty so far in
the case.
Mr. Mitchell's lawyer, Stanley Cohen of New York City, who also
represented Mr. Oakes and is best known for representing terrorism
suspects, said law enforcement officials had used such arrests to
wrongly portray the reservation as infested with drug traffickers. And
Mr. Cohen objected to investigators' contentions that his clients were
involved in criminal activities that went beyond what they admitted to.
"If they had evidence of more significant or more egregious or more
disturbing activity by either of these clients, they would have proved
it," he said.
Meanwhile, as prosecutors say drug traffickers are doing business in
Indian country at a rapidly growing pace, many tribes are responding on
their own to the drug crime and addiction epidemic.
At the Mohawk Reservation, the tribe spends more than half the revenue
from its casino and other enterprises -- roughly $2 million annually --
on border patrol and other law enforcement. Tribal leaders say they
could fight the trafficking here better than outside law enforcement,
given adequate resources. "We feel like that's our responsibility," said
James W. Ransom, a Mohawk tribal chief. "That's our goal."
The Mohawk tribe has received $5,000 annually from the Department of
Homeland Security and used the entire grant over the last two years to
build a security fence around the new police headquarters, tribal
officials said.
Working with stretched resources and huge barriers, many tribal
detectives across Indian country say they are facing an impossible task.
"If I were a drug trafficker, I'd choose this place," said Brian Barnes,
deputy chief of police for the Mohawk tribe, as he headed out on the
police department's lone working speedboat to patrol the St. Lawrence River.
Gangs Hit Home
In Wisconsin, Paul DeMain, the managing editor of News From Indian
Country, who is married to a member of the Lac Courte Oreilles tribe,
confronted the fact that his own son and stepdaughter were initiated
members of the Latin Kings. After the gang gained a foothold on the
reservation in 1998, Indian criminals set up an affiliate, the Lion
Tribe Set, which ran one of the largest crack-cocaine trafficking rings
in the history of the state, said John W. Vaudreuil, an assistant United
States attorney in Wisconsin. So far, 37 of 40 tribal members have been
convicted and sentenced in the case.
Mr. DeMain took the painful step of reporting his son's activities to
the authorities, he said. His son left the gang, Mr. DeMain said, but
his stepdaughter is serving a 20-year sentence in federal prison.
"It requires reaching out of that little box of self-protection that the
Indian community has always had," Mr. DeMain said. "A reluctance to
engage in supporting the federal government, to call in outside resources."
Darrel Hillaire, chairman of the Lummi Nation in Northwest Washington,
said, "We've got to step up."
"It's not the federal government's fault," Mr. Hillaire said. "It's us,
the leaders. Until it becomes the No. 1 priority in Indian country,
we'll continue to play this blame game, and we'll get nothing done."
Still, there is fierce debate over possible solutions: more money from
the federal government for manpower, or more legal authority for tribes
that insist they know better how to fight crime within their own
borders. Mr. Heffelfinger, who is also the chairman of the Native
American Issues Subcommittee of the nation's United States attorneys but
has just announced that he is stepping down to return to private
practice, acknowledged that drug crimes were "disproportionately high"
on reservations.
But he said tribes with significant casino revenue now had new options
for financing drug addiction recovery and law enforcement programs. Many
tribes have funneled gambling and other business revenue toward those needs.
Mr. Heffelfinger described crime fighting on the Mohawk Reservation as a
"success story" because of the recent partnerships between tribal,
local, state, federal and Canadian law enforcement agencies, which
helped lead to the arrest of traffickers like Mr. Mitchell and Mr.
Oakes. But investigators vehemently disagreed that there was anything
resembling a success story here.
One afternoon, tribal and county detectives were preparing to take what
was their lone speedboat -- they recently obtained another one
confiscated from a drug trafficker -- out for a patrol on the St.
Lawrence River.
They tried to start the boat, but the battery was dead. They spent hours
trying to drag the boat through the mud and up onto a riverbank with a
pickup truck. The detectives shook their heads and said they suspected
that the traffickers were crossing the river at that very moment, with
loads of drugs stashed on their many speedboats.
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Drug Traffickers Find Haven in Shadows of Indian Country
By SARAH KERSHAW
www.nytimes.com/2006/02/19/national/19smuggle.html
ST. REGIS MOHAWK RESERVATION, N.Y. -- He had eluded the authorities for
years. Witnesses against him had mysteriously disappeared. Shots were
fired from his highly secured compound here last year when the state
police tried to close in.
The man, John V. Oakes, like a fast-rising number of American Indian
drug traffickers across the country, saw himself as "untouchable," as
one senior investigator put it, protected by armed enforcers and a code
of silence that ruled the reservation.
After he was finally arrested last May, Mr. Oakes was recorded from jail
talking on the phone with his estranged wife. "I can't believe people
let this happen to me," he said, according to Derek Champagne, the
Franklin County district attorney who listened to the recorded call.
"You can't touch me. I'm on the reservation, and I do what I want."
Investigators described Mr. Oakes as an intimidating trafficker who
concentrated on stealing drugs and cash from a prosperous and growing
cluster of criminals who, like Mr. Oakes, have built sprawling mansions
near worn-down trailers on this reservation straddling the Canadian border.
Law enforcement officials say Mr. Oakes and the drug lords he is accused
of stealing from are part of a violent but largely overlooked wave of
trafficking and crime that has swept through the nation's Indian
reservations in recent years, as large-scale criminal organizations have
found havens and allies in the wide-open and isolated regions of Indian
country.
In the eyes of law enforcement, reservations have become a critical link
in the drug underworld, helping traffickers transport high-potency
marijuana and Ecstasy from eastern Canada into cities like Buffalo,
Boston and New York and facilitating the passage of cocaine and
methamphetamine from cities in the West and Midwest into rural America.
In some cases, outside drug gangs work with Indian criminals to
distribute drugs on Indian and non-Indian lands, and on a growing number
of reservations, drug traffickers -- particularly Mexican criminals --
are marrying Indian women to establish themselves on reservations.
At the Lac Courte Oreilles Reservation in northwestern Wisconsin, for
instance, several members of the Latin Kings gang married Indian women
while a tribal offshoot of the gang built a $3 million crack cocaine
ring moving drugs from Milwaukee into and around the reservation over
the past few years, prosecutors said.
Increasingly American Indians are breaking away to build their own
violent, Mafia-like enterprises, according to an examination of dozens
of court records and interviews with more than 50 federal and local
prosecutors, tribal law enforcement officials and tribal members.
"This is very serious and has created major problems in the community,"
said Clifford Martel, a former senior police investigator for the Red
Lake Nation in northern Minnesota, who was fired in July and said it was
because he had tried to rid that reservation of drug traffickers with
close ties to powerful tribe members.
"The amount of drugs was really impacting that community, our community,
just as if it were Chicago, and big loads were coming in all the time,"
Mr. Martel said.
For traffickers of marijuana, cocaine, methamphetamine, painkillers and
people, reservations offer many advantages. Law enforcement is spotty at
best. Tribal sovereignty, varying state laws and inconsistent federal
interest in prosecuting drug crimes create jurisdictional confusion and
conflict.
The deep loyalty that exists within tribes, where neighbors are often
related, and the intense mistrust of the American justice system make
securing witnesses and using undercover informants extremely difficult.
And on some reservations, Indian drug traffickers have close
relationships with tribal government or law enforcement officials and
enjoy special protection that allows them to operate freely,
investigators say.
[foto] Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times - John V. Oakes has pleaded
guilty to selling drugs to undercover agents.
A Direct Hand in Trafficking
Casino money has also fueled the surge, providing a fast-growing source
of customers and well-financed partners for outside drug traffickers.
And cutbacks in welfare payments in cities have prompted many Indians to
return to reservations, often bringing with them connections to gangs
and drug rings.
Some traffickers have given away drugs to Indians as a way of luring
them into the trade. The recently convicted leader of a Mexican drug
ring had a chilling strategy on five reservations in Wyoming and the
Midwest, the authorities said: targeting tribes with high alcohol
addiction rates and handing out free methamphetamine, recruiting the
newly addicted Indians as dealers and orchestrating romantic
relationships between gang members and Indian women.
The surge in drug-related crime stands in sharp contrast to the great
strides Indians have made over the past several decades, strengthening
their sovereignty and culture, making their way into American politics
and government and -- for a small but rising number of tribes -- growing
rich with new casino revenue.
At the same time, American Indians like Mr. Oakes have capitalized on
the drug trade, carving out a deep piece of the pie for themselves,
after decades in which Indians were typically recruited to help
non-Indian traffickers smuggle drugs across the borders and through the
country.
"They started out solely as mules, then they realized there was an awful
lot more profit in dealing directly" with the upper echelons of
organized crime, said Mr. Champagne, the district attorney. "Why should
they just get paid for bringing it across the river?"
Here on Mohawk land, a reservation of roughly 6,000 people on the United
States side, according to the tribe, investigators estimate that 10 to
15 major Indian criminal organizations, along with outside drug rings,
move more than $1 billion annually in high-grade marijuana and Ecstasy
across the Canadian border, through the reservation and into the
Northeast. Prosecutors say they are catching only about 2 percent of
that contraband.
The drug trade afforded Mr. Oakes a lifestyle that neighbors on this
reservation could barely dream of. Stealing from other dealers was
inherently dangerous -- as Mr. Champagne said, "I was surprised that he
wasn't going to be my next homicide." But for Mr. Oakes the rewards
outweighed the risk: He owned a gated compound on the St. Lawrence
River, with 16 surveillance cameras, a souped-up Lincoln Navigator and
several speedboats.
Yet at his bail hearing Mr. Oakes told a judge that he was supporting
himself solely on a Navy pension.
Mr. Oakes eventually pleaded guilty to selling drugs to undercover
agents, after investigators seized from the compound 17,000 tablets of
Ecstasy, worth $340,000 on the street, two pounds of high-grade
marijuana and several shotguns and rifles. But investigators said Mr.
Oakes was a prime suspect in at least a dozen robberies of drug
traffickers, netting him hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash,
cocaine and marijuana. He is expected to be sentenced next month to 10
years in state prison, the authorities said.
Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times - Spoils of the Drug Trade: John V.
Oakes built a gated compound on the St. Regis reservation with 16
surveillance cameras on the property.
The federal government could not provide comprehensive statistics on
drug trafficking through reservations. But overall crime figures point
to a much higher rate of violence on the nation's 261 federally
recognized reservations compared with the rest of the nation. A 2004
Justice Department report found that American Indians and Alaska Natives
experienced a per capita rate of violent crime twice that of the United
States population. And the number of police officers per capita on
Indian reservations is starkly lower than elsewhere in the country,
other reports show.
Steven W. Perry, a statistician with the Justice Department and the
author of the 2004 report, a 10-year study of crime in Indian country,
said the judicial patchwork that covered Indian reservations had made it
impossible to provide an accurate statistical portrait. Of the 561
federally recognized Indian tribes, 171 have their own courts, and only
71 have their own jails, Mr. Perry said.
Other federal officials say they are aware, through anecdotal reports
and growing concerns reported to them by tribal leaders, of a marked
rise in drug trafficking, particularly involving methamphetamine, and
crimes like murder and robbery that come in its wake.
"It appears there is a very significant crime problem on most of the
reservations that we are aware of," said Chris Chaney, deputy bureau
director of law enforcement services for the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
"I am concerned that it might be escalating within the last couple of
years."
Addiction, Confusion, Corruption
Although much of the drug trafficking on reservations involves moving
the contraband across the nation's borders and from large cities through
the states, the drugs often never leave Indian lands.
At the Blackfeet Nation in Browning, Mont., methamphetamine addiction is
rampant among the 10,000 members of the tribe, unemployment reaches 85
percent in the winter and drug-related violence is widespread.
"It's destroying our culture, our way of life, killing our people," said
Darrel Rides at the Door, a drug and alcohol counselor who uses
traditional healing therapies, burning sage and sweet grass during
"talking circles," to cleanse the soul of the demons of addiction. "A
lot of people, they feel sort of disempowered to do anything about it."
Local law enforcement officials in Montana, including Jeff Faque, the
under sheriff of Glacier County, said that with no jurisdiction over the
reservation, they could not stem the large quantities of methamphetamine
moving through it in a state with one of the highest rates of meth use
in the nation. Mexican gangs based in Washington State are working with
Blackfeet Indians and others to traffic methamphetamine into and across
Montana, the authorities say.
"It's disheartening," Mr. Faque said of his office's lack of legal
authority at the Blackfeet Nation. "I don't think I'll see it solved in
my lifetime."
Addiction and a jurisdictional morass are only two of the problems
associated with the expanding drug trade. Corruption is another.
At the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming, a tribal court judge was one
of 25 people arrested last May as part of a drug ring accused of moving,
over a seven-year period, 30 pounds of methamphetamine, worth more than
$1 million, as well as painkillers and marijuana into and through the
reservation, said Matthew H. Mead, the United States attorney in Wyoming.
The tribal judge, Lynda Munnell Noah, the sister of one of the drug
ring's leaders, was accused of threatening to assault and murder a
Bureau of Indian Affairs law enforcement officer, prosecutors said.
About half of those arrested have pleaded guilty so far; the judge has
pleaded not guilty and is expected to go to trial soon.
At the Red Lake Reservation in northern Minnesota, four former tribal
law enforcement officials and the nation's current chairman said in
interviews that internal tribal politics and resistance among court and
police employees had created enormous obstacles to ridding the
reservation of cocaine traffickers.
Investigators say four or five tribal families are controlling the drug
trade, most of it in partnership with drug gangs from Minneapolis.
Mr. Martel, the former senior police investigator at Red Lake, which
gained widespread attention last March when a teenager killed nine
people and himself at the reservation's high school, said he was fired
after three years on the force because he clashed with tribal leaders
when he tried to investigate suspects. While the federal government and
not the state has jurisdiction over Red Lake, tribal detectives like Mr.
Martel are typically the first to investigate criminals and to notify
federal prosecutors.
Mr. Martel's partner, Russ Thomas, who resigned in October, said Red
Lake police dispatchers "would narc us out," or alert suspects to
criminal investigations.
Eventually, Mr. Thomas said, he and Mr. Martel stopped telling others in
the police department whom they were investigating, worked their cases
at night instead of during the day so they would not be spotted as
easily, and changed cars often.
"We quit using our own people," he said. "We were doing our job with our
hands tied behind our backs."
Tim Savior, who served only three months as the Red Lake police chief
before the Tribal Council voted him out in January, said he, too, felt
that drug-fighting efforts were thwarted by lower-level officials in the
courts and police department with support from tribal politicians.
"I was trying to hold people accountable for their duties and
responsibilities in the department," Mr. Savior said. "Politicians are
trying to control it, and without a separation of powers, law
enforcement is expendable. That's why there's a tailspin on reservations
-- there's no stability there."
Mr. Martel accused the tribal chairman, Floyd Jourdain Jr., of pressing
him to drop investigations of relatives, friends and political
associates, and he contended that he was fired when he refused to back off.
But Mr. Jourdain said Mr. Martel was fired for just cause, after
portraying himself as an F.B.I. agent during an investigation. Mr.
Martel said he was appropriately accompanying an F.B.I. agent, which is
standard protocol. The chairman also said there were numerous complaints
of rudeness against Mr. Martel and that critics like him were motivated
by a political "smear campaign" in advance of tribal elections in May.
Mr. Jourdain acknowledged that his reservation had a serious problem
with crack cocaine dealers, but he said he had no role in allowing the
drug trade to expand. The problem, he said, lies with lower-level law
enforcement employees resistant to change, although he said he had no
proof of any illegal action that could lead to their firing.
"I've done nothing wrong," Mr. Jourdain said. "I've followed all
procedure and gone through the appropriate steps." He also said he was
disheartened that Mr. Savior had been removed as police chief and had
voted against the majority to keep the police chief on.
The United States attorney in Minnesota, Thomas B. Heffelfinger, whose
office prosecutes major crimes on the state's reservations, said one of
the reasons few drug criminals had been prosecuted at Red Lake was that
the tribal leadership, citing concerns over sovereignty, had removed its
two police officers, including Mr. Martel after he was fired, from a
federal drug crimes task force in the area.
The tribe has yet to sign an agreement it received last fall that would
put the Red Lake officers back on the task force, which Mr. Heffelfinger
said would go a long way toward cracking down on the drug trade there.
The agreement, he said, is "adequate" for two other Minnesota tribes, at
the White Earth and Leech Lake reservations, where the federal task
force's work has led to a series of arrests and prosecutions.
'The Black Hole'
In upstate New York and across the Canadian border, the roughly 11,000
Indians living here now have long dipped their hands into the rewarding
till of smuggling, moving goods as varied as diapers and tobacco across
this lightly patrolled frontier, 12 wide-open miles of water and land
separating the two countries. Some here say that smuggling, dating back
to before the days of Prohibition, is a birthright.
While much of the nation's drug enforcement effort has focused on the
Mexican border, the reservation has become a pipeline for the flow of
drugs and guns between Canada and the United States. In warmer weather,
speedboats cruise across the St. Lawrence River, ferrying drugs south
and weapons and cash north; in the winter cars and vans race over an ice
bridge on the river, the authorities say.
A retired special agent here for the Border Patrol's former
antismuggling unit, Edward Barrett, said that when he was working
undercover along the Mexican border in Texas, a drug smuggler told him
that if he could not move narcotics across the southern border, he could
easily do it through Canada and "the black hole," the traffickers'
nickname for the Mohawk land. "It's guaranteed to go through," he said.
On the 14,000-acre reservation, evidence of the drug trade is easily
visible from the million-dollar mansions with high gates and elaborate
fences that are being built in a place with an unemployment rate of
about 50 percent, and where tumbledown government housing was once the
common sight.
Despite the many obstacles, prosecutors have had some success in
combating drug rings here. In November, Lawrence Mitchell, a member of
the Mohawk tribe, pleaded guilty to orchestrating the movement of large
quantities of marijuana across the United States-Canada border. Numerous
times, according to his plea, Mr. Mitchell, 35, arranged for the
transportation of loads averaging 50 to 100 pounds, destined for
Syracuse, Utica and other parts of New York; Massachusetts; and Florida.
Prosecutors say he also laundered tens of millions of dollars in
marijuana trafficking money over three years, through his construction
company and car dealership. He was sentenced in November to 10 years in
prison.
Mr. Mitchell -- who owned two houses on the reservation, one on each
side of the border, until the authorities seized the American house --
earned at least $2.2 million in drug money from 2001 to 2004,
investigators say, but the money trail was hard to follow.
Along with Mr. Mitchell, five other people, including a New York State
Police dispatcher who was accused of tipping off Mr. Mitchell's drug
runners to police presence on the border, have pleaded guilty so far in
the case.
Mr. Mitchell's lawyer, Stanley Cohen of New York City, who also
represented Mr. Oakes and is best known for representing terrorism
suspects, said law enforcement officials had used such arrests to
wrongly portray the reservation as infested with drug traffickers. And
Mr. Cohen objected to investigators' contentions that his clients were
involved in criminal activities that went beyond what they admitted to.
"If they had evidence of more significant or more egregious or more
disturbing activity by either of these clients, they would have proved
it," he said.
Meanwhile, as prosecutors say drug traffickers are doing business in
Indian country at a rapidly growing pace, many tribes are responding on
their own to the drug crime and addiction epidemic.
At the Mohawk Reservation, the tribe spends more than half the revenue
from its casino and other enterprises -- roughly $2 million annually --
on border patrol and other law enforcement. Tribal leaders say they
could fight the trafficking here better than outside law enforcement,
given adequate resources. "We feel like that's our responsibility," said
James W. Ransom, a Mohawk tribal chief. "That's our goal."
The Mohawk tribe has received $5,000 annually from the Department of
Homeland Security and used the entire grant over the last two years to
build a security fence around the new police headquarters, tribal
officials said.
Working with stretched resources and huge barriers, many tribal
detectives across Indian country say they are facing an impossible task.
"If I were a drug trafficker, I'd choose this place," said Brian Barnes,
deputy chief of police for the Mohawk tribe, as he headed out on the
police department's lone working speedboat to patrol the St. Lawrence River.
Gangs Hit Home
In Wisconsin, Paul DeMain, the managing editor of News From Indian
Country, who is married to a member of the Lac Courte Oreilles tribe,
confronted the fact that his own son and stepdaughter were initiated
members of the Latin Kings. After the gang gained a foothold on the
reservation in 1998, Indian criminals set up an affiliate, the Lion
Tribe Set, which ran one of the largest crack-cocaine trafficking rings
in the history of the state, said John W. Vaudreuil, an assistant United
States attorney in Wisconsin. So far, 37 of 40 tribal members have been
convicted and sentenced in the case.
Mr. DeMain took the painful step of reporting his son's activities to
the authorities, he said. His son left the gang, Mr. DeMain said, but
his stepdaughter is serving a 20-year sentence in federal prison.
"It requires reaching out of that little box of self-protection that the
Indian community has always had," Mr. DeMain said. "A reluctance to
engage in supporting the federal government, to call in outside resources."
Darrel Hillaire, chairman of the Lummi Nation in Northwest Washington,
said, "We've got to step up."
"It's not the federal government's fault," Mr. Hillaire said. "It's us,
the leaders. Until it becomes the No. 1 priority in Indian country,
we'll continue to play this blame game, and we'll get nothing done."
Still, there is fierce debate over possible solutions: more money from
the federal government for manpower, or more legal authority for tribes
that insist they know better how to fight crime within their own
borders. Mr. Heffelfinger, who is also the chairman of the Native
American Issues Subcommittee of the nation's United States attorneys but
has just announced that he is stepping down to return to private
practice, acknowledged that drug crimes were "disproportionately high"
on reservations.
But he said tribes with significant casino revenue now had new options
for financing drug addiction recovery and law enforcement programs. Many
tribes have funneled gambling and other business revenue toward those needs.
Mr. Heffelfinger described crime fighting on the Mohawk Reservation as a
"success story" because of the recent partnerships between tribal,
local, state, federal and Canadian law enforcement agencies, which
helped lead to the arrest of traffickers like Mr. Mitchell and Mr.
Oakes. But investigators vehemently disagreed that there was anything
resembling a success story here.
One afternoon, tribal and county detectives were preparing to take what
was their lone speedboat -- they recently obtained another one
confiscated from a drug trafficker -- out for a patrol on the St.
Lawrence River.
They tried to start the boat, but the battery was dead. They spent hours
trying to drag the boat through the mud and up onto a riverbank with a
pickup truck. The detectives shook their heads and said they suspected
that the traffickers were crossing the river at that very moment, with
loads of drugs stashed on their many speedboats.
* Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
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