DATE: Thursday, November 13, 1997           TAG: 9711120008

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B11  EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Opinion 

SOURCE: Patrick Lackey 

                                            LENGTH:   84 lines

DEALING DRUGS OVER A PARTY LINE TO THWART DRUG DEALERS, CHESAPEAKE POLICE HOPE TO INSTALL ROTARY-DIAL PAY PHONES IN THE SOUTH NORFOLK SECTION OF THE CITY.

In the late 1970s, the small Iowa town of Mechanicsville had one pay phone, and the city fathers attempted to have it removed.

The phone booth stood on the town square. Teen-agers hung out around it late at night, making dates and whatnot. Some mornings, cigarette butts were discovered on the ground nearby.

There hadn't been any trouble around the phone, you understand, but city fathers feared it could break out at any time. Perhaps a teen-ager would toss a tomato at a passing car.

The tiny company that owned the phone resisted town efforts to remove it. Apparently it was a nice revenue source. As far as I know, it's still there.

It's possible, in fact, that the phone still has a rotary dial. If so, it's ahead of its time, probably the first item ever in Mechanicsville to be on the cutting edge of life.

Yes, the latest trend is to replace touch-tone pay phones with rotary dials so the phones don't beep. Drug dealers cannot use nonbeeping phones to contact customers and suppliers on their digital pagers.

To thwart drug dealers, who use pay phones practically as personal offices, New York City has installed 250 rotary-dial phones on city streets. Touch-tone phones have also been replaced by rotary-dial models in Lansing, Mich., and Dekalb, Ga., two wild and crazy trend-setting cities.

Now Chesapeake police hope to install rotary-dial pay phones in the South Norfolk section of the city. I hope they do. I'll make calls from one for half an hour or so, just because it's something I used to do a lot. As a reporter hard on deadline, I would curse the dial for not spinning back faster after each digit. At the same time, I could relieve tension by dialing each digit aggressively.

The move to rotary-dial phones in South Norfolk might well reduce drug dealing. It's being pushed by police Capt. Lloyd Goodbred, who, in my unsolicited opinion, should either change his name to Wellbred or become a baker.

Goodbred said, ``We get a lot of calls from residents about guys loitering and hanging around the phones. Residents don't feel safe.''

Virginian-Pilot staff writer Liz Szabo wrote, ``By eliminating one of the ways drug dealers do business, police hope to drive them off city streets - and drive up their cost of doing business.'' Of course, when your customers are addicts, higher business costs can be passed on to them.

More important, using nonpay phones leaves a paper trail that can lead to a drug-dealing conviction and jail.

Cell phones are convenient for drug dealers but can be monitored. Also, they become expensive when used a lot. Cell-phone thefts may increase when the dial-tone pay phones are discontinued.

Switching to rotary-dial pay phones is a start in fighting crime, but a surefire way to catch pay-phone-using drug dealers would be to return to party lines.

I know firsthand of an international drug gang that attempted to deal heroin over a party line. Gang members bought a farm house outside Des Moines in the early '70s, apparently unaware that all phones in that rural area were still on party lines.

For the majority of readers too young to have ever used a party line, here's how they work: Perhaps five residences would share a single line. Each residence on the line was assigned a certain ring pattern, two longs and a short for one farmhouse, three shorts, perhaps, for another.

Frequently a resident on a party-line would pick up the receiver to make a call but discover that other parties were already using the line. By law, the resident was supposed to hang up, rather than eavesdrop. But people are human, as they say. In those days, people really knew each other's business.

Surprise! Surprise! A big heroin shipment to the Iowa drug gang was intercepted at the local Post Office by federal agents. The heroin was contained in a statue. How did the feds know to look inside it?

Before the gang's trial, I phoned all the families that shared a party line with it. My hope was that a farmer would say, ``My gosh, they paid $100,000 for a pound of horse? That's crazy.''

Unfortunately, only one person admitted to hearing any part of a call from the drug gang. That man said they had called all over the world, even to Thailand.

Anyway, that's my suggestion for fighting drug dealers: Connect all phones to party lines and end the party.

We'll fight crime and at the same time get to know each other better. Much better. MEMO: Mr. Lackey is an editorial writer for The Virginian-Pilot.

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