Drug flow: Orlando, San Juan reporters team up to track heroin

Investigative Reporters and Editors, Inc. The IRE Journal, Mar/Apr 2001 by Curtis, Henry Pierson, Paul, Nora, Reisner, Neil

COVER STORY

Orlando, San Juan

reporters team up

to track heroin

The single-engine plane flying from Bogota to southwest Colombia bobbed in updrafts over the upper Andes. Forests on the ridges a few thousand feet below hid opium poppy fields no larger than baseball diamonds.

The 90-minute flight was the last leg of a 1,900-mile trip in March 1999 to trace how the drug reached Florida and what was being done to stop the flow. I was there because heroin from opium gum produced on these remote farms had killed more than 150 people on my beat in Florida.

One day into the trip, I ate lunch with Colombian President Andres Pastrana, members of a U.S. congressional delegation, the U.S. ambassador and a variety of State Department and military officers behind both countries' anti-drug strategy.

A day later, Colombian National Police pilots offered their version of the war on drugs. The equipment sent them by the United States was second-hand junk, they said. Paid $660 a month, these pilots flew 20-year-old helicopters that couldn't safely reach the high-altitude poppy farms. That meant the cops they carried had to hike for hours, frequently climbing hand over hand up the mountains.

Wanting to show me what they faced, a senior police aide said I could join one of the crop eradication missions if I went to the southwestern town of Neiva. For me, it would be the culmination of more than three years of reporting on heroin abuse for The Orlando Sentinel.

Following the dope

Through a series of coincidences, I broke the story in mid-1996 that teenagers and young adults in Orlando were dying from heroin. The image of heroin at the gates of Walt Disney World drew national attention.

The evolving story took me from covering police in a small Florida county to making repeated trips to Puerto Rico, Washington, D.C., and Colombia.

Teaming up with Jim Leusner, the Sentinel's federal courts reporter, we wrote more than 30 stories that spawned congressional hearings, raised allegations of racism and brought attention to a lack of Coast Guard and U.S. Customs presence in the Caribbean. The publicity helped generate anti-drug funding, increased federal law enforcement in Puerto Rico and changed the way police in Florida investigate overdose deaths.

The edict behind the Sentinel's coverage was to investigate the international influence on local crime. Simply, we were told to follow the dope.

Until then, filing for mileage had been the biggest item on my expense account. Learning to live out of a suitcase for two weeks at a stretch was the introduction to this story without borders.

Arranging interviews in San Juan or Bogota turned out to require much the same skills needed to cover a beat anywhere - common sense, contacts, long hours and luck. I found repeated calls before leaving for a destination essential, as was following up with sources after leaving.

Fluency in Spanish helped, too.

Here's how I stumbled on this story: By the fall of 1995, patrons of Orlando's growing nightclub scene had been dying for a year of heroin overdoses, but the trend hadn't been spotted by police or the medical examiner. At the time, state law didn't require the tracking of such overdoses, and the autopsies were done by a variety of pathologists who didn't consider their separate findings remarkable.

During late 1995 and early 1996, 1 spent my evenings and some weekends writing a profile of Julie Dean, 18, who died from an undetermined overdose. Wanting to write an in-depth story of the local dance scene, I found she was the youngest of that group to die of a suspected overdose.

When heroin was identified as the cause of Julie's death, the finding was startling. State mortality records showed she was Florida's first and only teenage heroin overdose.

The significance of her death and several others I had been following came together a week before the profile was scheduled to appear in a mid-July issue of the Sentinel's Sunday magazine.

Upon hearing that heroin might have killed a 16-year-old boy at a party, I began checking autopsy results on all the suspected overdose deaths of victims younger than 25 in the Orlando area. My search was aided by the state's public records law, which provides access to death records.

Helping me was Carol Gross, office manager for the Orlando's medical examiner and the sort of public employee a reporter prays to meet sometime in a career. Within five days, records confirmed the heroin deaths of five teens and five adults under 23 during the previous year. The story, "Long Out of Sight, Heroin is Back - Killing Teens," ran across the top of the front page on Sunday, July 14, the same day as the magazine profile.

Anger explodes

Public reaction was immediate. Churches held meetings. Politicians staged hearings, and a drug summit was attended by national drug czar Barry McCaffrey. All this happened within three months.

But one quote in the original story drew intense criticism. "Our stereotypical dealer is a Hispanic, usually a Puerto Rican male in his early 20s," said Lt. Ernie Scott, the Orange County sheriff. "All the heroin dealers we have encountered are recent arrivals to Florida from Puerto Rico and from New York and Detroit."