Dreamland (24 page)

The tornado was one of eight that tore through central Indiana that evening. No one died. Still, it was an unsettling introduction and the Man never felt right in Indianapolis after that.

The next day, he bought a used car—a brown Cadillac Cimarron, a model so poorly conceived and designed that many marked it as a seminal event in the decline of Detroit. But it didn’t stand out and cost only two thousand dollars.

Camping out in front of the town’s methadone clinic, he gave away samples of his dope and soon had a client list of desperate junkies avid for the black tar they’d never seen before. Then one day cops stopped him after seeing a couple exiting his Cimarron near the clinic.

“We’ve got reports you’ve been dealing heroin.”

“Check the car,” he replied. “I got no drugs. I was just dropping them off”—he nodded in the couple’s direction—“’cause they needed a ride.”

The cops found nothing. But they told him, “We have a photograph of you and your car. Every time we see you, we’re stopping you.”

So he moved on to Dayton, with a kid he brought in from his Reno store. They hooked up with a dealer, a black guy retired from Delphi, the GM auto-parts company, who seemed to know every addict in town. Sure enough, no one in Ohio had seen this kind of dope.

But he never forgot Daniel’s message and the promise of Columbus. One sunny summer day, after they had been in Dayton a couple weeks, he left the kid with the Delphi retiree and he drove to Columbus. He found a motel off Highway 70 west of town, and called Daniel’s uncle, Chuckie.

They met at the town’s methadone clinic off Bryden Road the next morning. The clinic was a hive of illegal dope trading. Almost anything a user wanted was for sale. He gave Chuckie a few free samples and his beeper number.

That afternoon, Chuckie called.

“That’s some killer stuff you got,” he said. “I gotta whole buncha people want some of that.”

The Man drove back to Dayton and pulled up stakes.

“We were selling a lot,” he told me. “But the thing I didn’t like in Dayton was we were dealing with a lot of blacks. I don’t deal with blacks if I don’t have to. In the long run they’ll rip you off. They’ll hurt your kids. They’ll pistol-whip you.”

Columbus had more white people, it appeared, and a large community of Mexicans in which to mingle. He pointed the Cimarron east again to the vast expanses of central Ohio and the state capital, surrounded by large white suburbs and highways—close to four states and the put-upon region of Appalachia—where up to that point no one had seen much heroin.

What's OxyContin?

Portsmouth, Ohio

One Friday shortly before Christmas in 1997, a reporter from the
Portsmouth Daily Times
called Ed Hughes. Hughes ran the Counseling Center, Portsmouth's lone addiction-treatment clinic. The reporter asked if he could come to the staff's party to write a story about staying sober over the holidays.

Hughes agreed. The reporter interviewed some of the staff, asking especially about the younger clients. Midway through the party, the reporter took Hughes aside.

“What's OxyContin?”

Hughes hadn't heard of it.

“Some of your clients say they're using it.”

The next Monday, Hughes began calling around. His staff told him the drug had started showing up recently, that it contained a large amount of oxycodone, and that users had learned to crush it and snort it.

He called colleagues at treatment centers in northern Ohio, describing what Portsmouth was seeing. No one in Cleveland, Akron, Columbus, or Cincinnati knew anything about OxyContin. Had Hughes made calls into the rest of Appalachia, he would have heard a far different story, one that resembled what was just getting started in Portsmouth.

But at the time, he said, “we didn't realize that we were essentially on the cutting edge of a crisis.”

Around that time, Karen Charles and her husband, Jerry, were making plans to move their flooring shop into a building on Biggs Lane in South Shore, Kentucky, across the Ohio River from Portsmouth.

The Charleses knew that a doctor named David Procter had a practice at the beige metal building next door. In the months after relocating, they saw his business was a lot larger than they'd figured. The traffic, in fact, kept growing. It seemed like no other doctor's practice they knew. Procter's waiting room could no longer accommodate the crowds. Procter's clinic often stayed open well past its posted business hours. People parked along little Biggs Lane all day long waiting to see him.

“They'd eat two meals in their cars,” said Karen.

Many patients were from other counties, even other states. Karen Charles remembers Missouri and Arkansas license plates. Unsavory folks, most of them. They blocked access to the Charles Flooring parking lot. A fight once erupted between Procter clients and a truck driver blocked from making a delivery. On another occasion, someone called in a bomb threat and police evacuated the clinic, along with the Charles's flooring shop and nearby houses. Karen Charles never dared enter the Procter clinic, but she heard he was selling OxyContin.

“It changed everything around here,” she said years later. “It was something else—something I hope to never be around again. I talked to him a few times. I don't know how he expected us to run a business. Little old ladies are not going to come in a store with such riffraff hanging around.”

A reporter from the
Portsmouth Daily Times
eventually wrote a very different story from the one that ran after that Christmas party. The story talked about a new trend in addiction in southern Ohio and neighboring states: opiates, primarily oxycodone, delivered most prominently in that new pill called OxyContin.

About a week after the second story ran, Ed Hughes received a telephone call from a lawyer representing Purdue Pharma. The caller threatened to sue the Counseling Center if Hughes ever said in print that OxyContin was addictive. This startled Hughes, who wasn't quoted as saying that OxyContin was addictive. The Counseling Center was mentioned in the
Daily Times
story, but it was the young clients who said they were addicted to the drug. He wondered how the company, based in Connecticut, had spotted the story in the tiny newspaper.

“Something big was going on,” he said. “How did they know that article showed up in the
Portsmouth Daily Times
unless they were tracking that kind of information?”

The Counseling Center that Hughes ran had begun in a small house seventeen years earlier. Hughes, a recovering alcoholic, felt rehabilitation really involved rebuilding an enslaved person. He believed recovery was possible only with a multidisciplinary approach to treating the addict—“a continuum of care,” Hughes said. An addict in treatment needed a 12-step program, but he also needed help finding housing, with writing a résumé, and with finding child care and clothes for job interviews. These services had to be close by. Addicts usually had no car, no driver's license, and no gas money. Hughes had seen people go back to drugs because they hadn't been able to get to a court date or an appointment with a doctor or a probation officer.

By the late nineties, the Counseling Center had moved into a large new building for outpatients. It also had a small house for men and the only rehab residence in Ohio for female addicts with children. The Center had room for all the alcoholics and cocaine users who came to it. About the time of that Christmas party in 1997, Hughes figured he would spend the next year consolidating and improving the Center's internal workings, rather than expanding to meet the area's need. That had been accomplished, he thought.

Not even close. Portsmouth was about to become ground zero of an almost viral explosion of opiate use and abuse. By the spring of 1998, Oxy addicts were everywhere, mostly young and white. “It was like a wildfire,” Hughes remembered.

This drug scourge had a different origin from others he had seen. In Portsmouth, it began with what came to be called pill mills, a business model invented in town, but growing from the aggressive nationwide prescribing of opiates, particularly OxyContin. A pill mill was a pain-management clinic, staffed by a doctor with little more than a prescription pad. A pill mill became a virtual ATM for dope as the doctor issued prescriptions to hundreds of people a day.

“There were doctors putting a lot of this stuff out on the street,” Hughes said. “There were long lines. This form of marketing the drug to a drug-addicted people, I don't think that had been done before.”

Smack Clans in the Sanctuary

Chimayo, New Mexico

Jim Kuykendall grew from classic Drug Enforcement Administration lineage. His uncle, Travis Kuykendall, retired as assistant special agent in charge of the DEA’s El Paso office. His father, Jaime Kuykendall, worked for Customs and Border Patrol in the 1960s, running the Texas-Mexico border fighting the then-incipient drug gangs. His father’s christened name was James, but he grew up in the small Texas border town of Eagle Pass and married a Mexican woman. Embracing both cultures, he was known as Jaime.

The Kuykendall brothers joined the DEA when it formed from several federal agencies in 1973. Jaime Kuykendall opened the DEA’s office in Guayaquil, Ecuador, shortly thereafter. Jim Kuykendall spent much of his youth there, thinking his dad was some kind of James Bond, but not really knowing what it was that his father did.

In the 1980s, Jaime Kuykendall moved to Mexico. He was Guadalajara station chief for the DEA in 1985 when traffickers kidnapped, tortured, and murdered his agent, Enrique “Kiki” Camarena, a killing that was covered up by Mexican government officials in league with traffickers. The murder traumatized the new DEA and intensified its focus on Mexico. The episode was the topic of a classic book, later made into a movie, called
Desperados
, by journalist Elaine Shannon. Jaime Kuykendall wrote his own book on the Camerena episode,
O
Plomo o Plata? Silver or Lead?

In college in Texas, Jim Kuykendall first studied journalism; but then, working as a campus police officer, he switched his major to criminal justice. One night he had dinner with a DEA agent, an old drinking buddy of his father’s.

“Think about applying to the DEA,” the agent told him.

Other federal law enforcement agencies, the DEA man said, controlled their people from above to an almost stifling degree. Oversight limited the freedom an agent had in conducting an investigation. In part because of the kind of work the DEA did, individual agents had unmatched control over cases and could make them as big as their own abilities dictated. Unlike local policing, DEA agents had the chance to travel and live abroad, and the department would prize an agent like Kuykendall, fluent in Spanish.

That sounded like an adventure. Not long after graduating in 1987, Jim Kuykendall applied to the agency where his father and his uncle were living legends.

He did tours in Beaumont, Texas, and Bogotá, Colombia, before returning to the United States in 1998. He was stationed in Albuquerque, New Mexico, the senior agent in the office. By that point in his career, Jim Kuykendall had seen that his father’s buddy was right: A DEA agent could make a difference, aided by the enormous power of the federal government’s conspiracy laws. These statutes allowed the government to charge a person for involvement in a criminal enterprise even if there was no immediately incriminating evidence—no drugs in an apartment when the cops searched, for example. Wiretap cases were about what was happening at that moment. The conspiracy cases Kuykendall grew to prefer had more to do with what had happened in the past. They did not depend so much on dangerous undercover buys or finding a suspect in possession of lots of dope. Instead, they required agents to go back through the record, cobble together witnesses and reports of past arrests, showing a pattern of, say, a group selling drugs over many years.

Defense attorneys criticize conspiracy cases at times as too broad, sweeping up, for example, everyone a defendant contacts. But Kuykendall found that conspiracy cases appealed to his inner journalist. Conspiracy cases required telling a story. Using conspiracy statutes, an agent learned part of the story of a criminal enterprise as he made a case, then flipped the defendants and came back with more arrests and learned the whole story, or at least most of it. Telling the full story of a criminal enterprise had a lot to do with justice Kuykendall came to believe, for little of what these enterprises really were was apparent on the day of a bust.

Jim Kuykendall had made several cases like this in his career, and as he settled into his job in Albuquerque he would make another up in the small town of Chimayo, New Mexico.

Chimayo, with a population of less than four thousand people, was founded five hundred years ago by Spanish conquistadors. It is twenty-five miles from Santa Fe, in the verdant Española Valley.

The town is known for several things. It is the Lowrider Capital of the World. Residents are obsessed with the dressed-up, low-slung cars. Chimayo’s cherry-red heirloom chiles are powerful and their seeds have been passed down through generations of growers. A small adobe church in Chimayo, built in 1816, attracts thousands of pilgrims and tourists a year. The milk chocolate soil around the church is said to cure illnesses. Some twenty-five tons of it is sold each year to people who rub it on their bodies or simply keep it in small plastic cases. Every night Chimayo residents venture into the hills, dig up more soil, and deposit it at the shrine. Every Good Friday, thirty thousand pilgrims come to the small adobe Santuario de Chimayo, as the church is known, some walking from Albuquerque, ninety miles away.