Epidemic on Aisle Six

By Mark Schone, Legal Affairs. Posted November 10, 2004.

At 1:30 p.m. on a Tuesday in July, it was 96 degrees in the shade and there was no shade in a parking lot an hour south of St. Louis. A half-dozen SUVs and pickup trucks formed a semicircle on the asphalt. The air conditioners were on full blast, but the pairs of burly, goateed men inside each vehicle had the windows down and the doors open.

When a white van with two more whiskered men pulled up to the huddle, Sgt. Tommy Wright stepped out of his gold Ford Explorer. He took 1,200 cold pills from a lockbox, laid them on the tailgate of one of the pickups, and counted them. Then he handed the pills to the men in the white van, former drug offenders turned confidential informants. In the biggest, blackest truck, Corporal Eric Burgard shoved Metallica into his CD player. To the crunching chords of "Enter Sandman," the members of the Jefferson County Drug Task Force put on their Kevlar vests and got ready to roll.

White van in the lead, the vehicles rumbled out of the lot and turned onto Missouri State Highway 21. The day's first stop was a small, shabby white home on Castle Ranch Road, a country lane that starts winding through the limestone and sycamore foothills of the Ozarks a mile south of the tiny town of Hillsboro. The task force had been up Castle Ranch many times, and they'd been to this address three months before. In April they busted 43-year-old Jeff Collins for cooking methamphetamine. They confiscated glassware and pseudoephedrine-based cold and allergy pills, the over-the-counter medicine from which meth is made. But getting busted hadn't fazed Collins. Out on bond awaiting trial, he'd agreed to take delivery of 1,200 more pills from the informants in return for cash and finished product.

The informants were supposed to meet Collins around 2 p.m. The posse of unmarked vehicles hid up and down Castle Ranch to block the suspect's escape. But after an hour of waiting for Collins to show, it was clear that he was on what Wright has dubbed "tweaker time," and the posse headed back to the parking lot.

The task force killed another hour by searching a suspected meth lab five miles to the north. The vehicles blocked the gravel drive of another tired wooden house. The inhabitants spilled out, rail thin, bug-eyed, and dressed in as little as possible. A frightened girl in a swimsuit hugged the legs of a middle-aged woman, also in a swimsuit, while a shirtless male answered Wright's questions. As they all stood and sweated in the driveway, a cop handed the woman a printed consent form for a search. She signed.

Then Wright took a cell phone call. It was one of the informants. Collins was home. The pack raced back to Castle Ranch and got there just as the informants, having made their trade, were driving away. "Two guys in a white van!" barked Wright. "Get a car to stop them!" While some of Wright's men launched an imaginary pursuit of the supposed runaways, one officer held Collins down in the dirt and cuffed him.

At 5'6" and 110 pounds, Collins had graying hair that was stiff and unwashed. He had no teeth and a dirty white bandage covered half his right hand. Dust fell from his chest and into his beltless jeans as he was yanked to his feet and began protesting his innocence. "I just got home 20 minutes ago!" he insisted. "I'm just out here working on my van!" Wright smiled. "The first part of that is true," he said. Collins kept denying the existence of the pills and pleading his car repair excuse to one of Wright's deputies as the cop insisted otherwise. After Collins had sputtered on for a few minutes, Wright turned to another of his cops and deadpanned, "Do you want to play the 'Yes, you are!' 'No, I'm not!' game? Go ahead. Say, 'Yes, you are.' It's fun."

The suspect's elderly parents watched from the porch. A black mutt ambled over, and a teenager with a hearing aid yanked it back toward the house. Two members of Wright's task force started pulling pieces of a meth lab from a derelict vehicle in the driveway – punctured cans of starter fluid, crusty plastic funnels. "You're looking at 17 years," Wright told Collins. "You need to help yourself." Wright wanted Collins to agree to become an informant. "I know," Collins said. "I'm thinking."

Biker Gangs to Industry

In the mid-1990s, methamphetamine morphed from the pastime of biker gangs into a major West Coast industry. Mexican rings took over the trade, building so-called superlabs in California. Using tubs of ephedrine smuggled north from Mexico, and vats of legal chemicals like red phosphorus, these factories could churn out 10 pounds of methamphetamine – also known as meth, crank, crystal, or speed – every two days. In 1999, 2,100 labs were busted in California, a third of the national total for busts.

Mark Schone is a senior contributing writer at SPIN magazine. His story "Unfortunate Con" appears in the 2004 edition of Best American Crime Writing.

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