THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, September 26, 1994 TAG: 9409260099
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: NORTH CAROLINA
SOURCE: BY ANNE SAITA, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: AHOSKIE LENGTH: Long : 179 lines
Scott J. Parker rifled through a number of large envelopes until he came upon the piece of evidence he'd been looking for.
``Here it is,'' the drug task force agent said, smoothing out the plastic bag around a block of crack cocaine seized just after being molded inside a glass jar.
The iridescent rock was small. But its street value is more than $1 million.
The Roanoke-Chowan Narcotics Task Force last winter ``took down'' a drug organization in northeastern North Carolina.
The probe netted 21 arrests, including Jamaican Roderick W. ``Roger'' Black, who was picked up in New York and brought back to the Albemarle area. Last month, Black was convicted of various offenses, including charges under the ``drug kingpin statute,'' in an Elizabeth City federal courtroom.
In big cities like Miami or Chicago, the scope of this drug operation may sound like small potatoes. But here in rural Hertford County, it was a royal harvest.
Some even say that investigations like this one may be what have kept the Roanoke-Chowan Narcotics Task Force from dissolving - like other multijurisdictional drug units around it.
``If it were not for the task force, the safety of the citizens of Hertford and Bertie counties would be considerably less,'' said David Beard, the district attorney for the state's 6B Judicial District.
``We would have more drive-by shootings and more people killing over drugs,'' Beard said.
The Ahoskie-based regional drug task force began shortly after the drug-related murders of a convenience store clerk and a supermarket employee in separate incidents in the late 1980s.
A grant in July 1989 from the Governor's Crime Commission placed six drug task force agents in Northampton, Hertford and Bertie counties.
Soon Gates and Martin counties were added, buying the task force three more agents and an additional two-year grant.
Then in 1992 - the year a state crime agency named the Roanoke-Chowan squad the No. 1 drug task force in North Carolina - the N.C. Division of Crime Control and Public Safety gave an extra year's worth of funding to the Ahoskie-based group. But state officials warned agents that their drug task force would be on its own after that. So task force members began lobbying state and local officials for more money.
So far, the effort has paid off.
Five counties and 17 towns have doubled their annual contributions to the law enforcement group, keeping the task force in operation for a while longer with its current $400,000 budget.
Drug task forces in nearby Dare, Pasquotank and Chowan counties all have dissolved or been absorbed into local police departments.
What made the Roanoke-Chowan communities' gesture seem even more generous was that the contributions came from some of the state's poorest communities. All but two counties' involved in the task force have median household incomes among the lowest in North Carolina. None made the upper half of the 1990 U.S. Census list.
``As tight as times are, especially in our area, they've all worked to continue the task force,'' Beard said.
As one of the only regional drug task forces still officially operating in northeastern North Carolina, the unit also could receive the lion's share of a $250,000 fund earmarked for drug task forces in this year's General Assembly budget.
The windfall would be good news to the current five agents who have spent the past couple of years without any real job security.
``We've been in limbo so much, some have been out job hunting - and rightfully so,'' said J. Wesley Liverman, commander of the Roanoke-Chowan drug unit and one of its oldest members.
Parker, the drug task force's assistant commander, is the other original agent.
The case that made the drug taskforce locally famous began with a phone tip - actually, hundreds of them that accumulated over many months.
Some came from law-abiding citizens concerned about suspicious activities in their neighborhoods. Others were received from drug dealers with a grudge.
Agents methodically built a case that lasted for more than two years. Investigations required undercover policemen to purchase firearms of all types - and about 50 kilograms of crack and powder cocaine worth about $1.25 million on the street.
``The more we dug, and the more Scott worked on the case, the more widespread it got,'' Liverman said, puffing on a cigar inside the Ahoskie Town Hall basement office he shares with Parker.
Drug traffickers monthly were smuggling two to four kilograms of cocaine into Ahoskie by bus lines, car tail lights, radio speakers and suitcases, police said.
``The organization eventually moved to Elizabeth City before we took it down,'' Parker said.
First came the arrest and subsequent guilty plea of Milton L. ``Mickey'' Ivey Jr. of Ahoskie. Ivey, 28, is serving a 26-year federal prison sentence for conspiracy to distribute cocaine base, use of a firearm during a drug trafficking offense and exchanging food stamps for cocaine and firearms.
Months later, about 20 other people from the Hertford County area - including Wayne Shelton Simmons, 48 - were arrested and pleaded guilty to various drug charges. The case became the Roanoke-Chowan area's biggest drug bust.
Investigations climaxed last January when Black, a Jamaican living in New York, was arrested in the Bronx and extradited to North Carolina to stand trial on various drug charges.
In late August, Black was convicted by an Elizabeth City federal jury of operating a continuing criminal enterprise, using firearms during drug trafficking and several counts of transporting cocaine from New York to Ahoskie.
Black, 32, faces two life sentences - one of them mandatory - plus five years. He is scheduled to be sentenced as early as Oct. 24.
The case, Parker repeatedly emphasized, would never have been as successful were it not for the help of local law enforcement officials, the State Bureau of Investigation and the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms staff. All agencies provided manpower and moral support to a task force that has sometimes lacked both.
Covering the painted brick walls of Parker and Liverman's office are dozens of framed documents lauding their law enforcement careers.
Parker, 31, is a Rocky Mount native who started out with the Nashville police force. Liverman has spent 24 years policing his hometown of Ahoskie.
In the first five years of its operation, the Roanoke-Chowan narcotics unit arrested 807 individuals and obtained 436 convictions, mostly for cocaine and crack possession and distribution.
Combined with seizures of marijuana, LSD, hashish and other drugs, the group has collected about $3.7 million worth of drugs from the region's streets.
A majority of those arrested were first offender ``minority males'' age 18 or older. But a sizeable number of people arrested had past criminal records, according to a task force report.
Illegal drug trade flourishes here in this part of North Carolina, which is marked by high unemployment rates. The most recent unemployment figures for the five counties average 7.46 percent, compared to 4.9 percent statewide.
``It's because it's poor,'' Liverman said. ``People haven't got jobs. Some are looking for fast money. And you haven't had that much enforcement going on over the years.''
``We're not giving them an excuse,'' Parker continued. ``There's a lot of poor people in the United States. But they don't have to do drugs.''
Besides making arrests, drug task force agents have helped take some of the burden off local police units.
The intersection of First and Maple streets used to operate as Ahoskie's open-air drug market. Then a new neighbor moved to the corner two years ago: the Ahoskie Police Department.
``By name, it's still `The Corner,' '' Sgt. Curtis Freeman said while standing at the well-known crossroads. ``Now in the area, you've still got it going on. But it's nothing like it was.''
Freeman, Parker and others credit state Representative Howard Hunter Jr., D-Conway, with giving the narcotics unit a voice in the General Assembly.
Hunter helped pass the recent quarter-million-dollar legislative appropriation and continues to push for more money for current and future drug task forces.
``For a long time, most people thought the drug problem was in the urban areas,'' Hunter said. ``But it didn't take long for these things to travel to the rural areas.
``The problem not only exists in our communities, but in our own homes.''
That realization hit this area hard just weeks ago, when 5-year-old Mario Biggs died after his mother, whom police believed to be high on crack, allegedly slit his throat at their Bertie County home. The mother then turned the knife on herself. But she survived.
Windsor resident Tracey Biggs, 25, has been charged with murder and two counts of assault with a deadly weapon for attacking her son and her mother-in-law, who allegedly was beaten with a rolling pin, said J. Wallace Perry, sheriff of Bertie County and chairman of the task force's board of directors.
Dupont Davis, chairman of the Hertford County Board of Commissioners, built the coffin vault used to bury little Mario.
``That's the thing that would have bothered me if I hadn't voted for the drug task force,'' said Davis, a Hertford County native.
Davis was one of three commissioners on the five-member board that last year approved doubling the county's drug task force contribution to $56,000.
His small, white vinyl-sided house in Ahoskie's predominantly black East End is about a mile from the neighborhood where Black's organization used to operate. Davis himself has seen plenty from his porch.
``I don't think they'll ever stop it at all,'' Davis said of the area's drug trade. ``But they can try to minimize it.''
Sitting beside Davis on his porch, Parker had said the same thing a couple of hours earlier. Despite all the task force's work, the agent said, the drug business still is booming.
``And that's depressing,'' Liverman added.
KEYWORDS: DRUG ARREST COCAINE MURDER by CNB