49 Indian nationals caught (wrongly?) in USA drug sting

byronic

49 Indian nationals caught (wrongly?) in USA drug sting

ROME, Ga., July 29 - When they charged 49 convenience store clerks and owners in rural northwest Georgia with selling materials used to make methamphetamine, federal prosecutors declared that they had conclusive evidence. Hidden microphones and cameras, they said, had caught the workers acknowledging that the products would be used to make the drug.

But weeks of court motions have produced many questions. Forty-four of the defendants are Indian immigrants - 32, mostly unrelated, are named Patel - and many spoke little more than the kind of transactional English mocked in sitcoms.

So when a government informant told store clerks that he needed the cold medicine, matches and camping fuel to "finish up a cook," some of them said they figured he must have meant something about barbecue.

The case of Operation Meth Merchant illustrates another difficulty for law enforcement officials fighting methamphetamine, a highly addictive drug that can be made with ordinary grocery store items.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/04/na... tner=homepage

Many states, including Georgia, have recently enacted laws restricting the sale of common cold medicines like Sudafed, and nationwide, the police are telling merchants to be suspicious of sales of charcoal, coffee filters, aluminum foil and Kitty Litter. Walgreens agreed this week to pay $1.3 million for failing to monitor the sale of over-the-counter cold medicine that was bought by a methamphetamine dealer in Texas.

But the case here is also complicated by culture. Prosecutors have had to drop charges against one defendant they misidentified, presuming that the Indian woman inside the store must be the same Indian woman whose name appeared on the registration for a van parked outside, and lawyers have gathered evidence arguing that another defendant is the wrong Patel.

The biggest problem, defense lawyers say, is the language barrier between an immigrant store clerk and the undercover informants who used drug slang or quick asides to convey that they were planning to make methamphetamine.

"They're not really paying attention to what they're being told," said Steve Sadow, one of the lawyers. "Their business is: I ring it up, you leave, I've done my job. Call it language or idiom or culture, I'm not sure you're able to show they know there's anything wrong with what they're doing."

For the Indians, their lives largely limited to store and home, it is as if they have fallen through a looking glass into a world they were content to keep on the other side of the cash register.

"This is the first time I heard this - I don't know how to pronounce - this meta-meta something," said Hajira Ahmed, whose husband is in jail pending charges that he sold cold medicine and antifreeze at their convenience store on a winding road near the Tennessee border.

But David Nahmias, the United States attorney for the Northern District of Georgia, said the evidence showed that the clerks knew that the informants posing as customers planned to make drugs. Federal law makes it illegal to sell products knowing, or with reason to believe, that they will be used to produce drugs. In these cases, lawyers say, defendants face up to 20 years in prison and $250,000 in fines.

In one instance, Mr. Nahmias said, a store owner in Whitfield County pulled out a business card from a Georgia Bureau of Investigation agent and told the informant that he was supposed to contact the agent if someone requested large amounts of the materials. When the informant asked if he would call, Mr. Nahmias said, the owner replied, "No, you are my customer."

"It's not that they should have known," Mr. Nahmias said. "In virtually or maybe all of the cases, they did know."

Like many prosecutors, Mr. Nahmias describes methamphetamine, a highly potent drug that can be injected, ingested or inhaled, as the biggest drug problem in his district. While only about a third of the meth here is made in small labs - the majority of the drug used in this country comes from so-called superlabs in Mexico - those small labs can be highly explosive, posing a danger to children, the environment and the police departments that are forced to clean them up. Their sources, he said, are local convenience stores.
"While those people may not think they're causing any harm, the harm they cause is tremendous," Mr. Nahmias said. "We really wanted to send the message that if you get into that line of business, selling products that you know are going to be used to make meth, you're going to go to prison."

Operation Meth Merchant started, Mr. Nahmias said, with complaints from local sheriffs that certain stores were catering to the labs. Prosecutors paid confidential informants - some former convicts, others offered the promise of lighter punishment for pending charges - to buy products in stores in six counties beginning in early 2004, and drop hints that they were making drugs.

Defense lawyers said some of the defendants probably did know what they were doing when they sold the materials. But on several tapes, provided by the government to the lawyers, who played them for a reporter, it was not always clear that the people behind the counter understood.

One recording captures an informant who walked into the Tobacco and Beverage Mart in Trenton, Ga., and asked for Pseudo 60, a particularly potent brand of cold medicine, which contains pseudoephedrine, the key ingredient of methamphetamine. The clerk, Mangesh Patel, 55, said the store no longer carried it. "Police guy came here said don't sell," Mr. Patel said. "Misuse. Public misuse."

The informant replied: "I know what they're doing with it, because that's what I'm going to do with it."

"Yah," Mr. Patel replied, "public misuse."

When the informant found another bottle of pills that he said might work, Mr. Patel told him he could sell only two, under orders from "the police guy." The informant asked if his friend could come in and buy two more. "Yeah," Mr. Patel replied, "But I cannot sell two to one guy."

Defense lawyers say the Indians were simply being good merchants and obeying what they believed was the letter of the law. Several refused to sell more than two bottles of cold medicine, citing store policy. They were charged, prosecutors say, because they allowed the "customers" to come back the next day for more. Prosecutors say that should have made it clear to the clerks that the buyers were up to no good.

In some cases, the language barriers seem obvious - one videotape shows cold medicine stacked next to a sign saying, "Cheek your change befor you leave a counter." Investigators footnoted court papers to explain that the clue the informants dropped most often - that they were doing "a cook" - is a "common term" meth makers use. Lawyers argue that if the courts could not be expected to understand what this meant, neither could immigrants with a limited grasp of English.

"This is not even slang language like 'gonna,' 'wanna,' " said Malvika Patel, who spent three days in jail before being cleared this month. " 'Cook' is very clear; it means food." And in this context, she said, some of the items the government wants stores to monitor would not set off any alarms. "When I do barbecue, I have four families. I never have enough aluminum foil."

According to court records, prosecutors first identified Ms. Patel as the woman who sold two bottles of cold medicine to an informant in Fort Oglethorpe, Ga., because her name appeared on the registration of a van parked outside. But the driver of the van worked for a company, owned by her and her husband, that installs security cameras, and Ms. Patel produced records showing that she was picking her son up at a day care center in Tennessee at the moment she was said to be in Georgia.

Her misidentification has fueled the belief among the Indians that investigators were operating on cultural bias. This corner of the state is still largely white; Indians began moving here about 10 years ago, buying hotels and then convenience stores, and some whites still say, mistakenly, that "Patel" means "hotel" in Hindi.

"They want to destroy all Indian businesses," said Ms. Ahmed, whose husband is in jail. "Because they hate us, or I don't know."

Mr. Nahmias said he was willing to consider evidence of language barriers when the cases went to trial later this year. But he denied singling out any group. "We follow the evidence where it goes," he said.

Still, the case has set off ripples from the green ridges here to the Indian state of Gujarat, the traditional homeland of Patels, where newspapers have carried articles about the arrests.

"We go into temple and they look at you - it's a bad image right now," said Dilip Patel, who owns one of the stores involved. "If I have to go to the City Hall to do some paper, they see me 'Patel,' they look at me I'm a hard man, I'm a bad guy."

Malvika Patel's husband, who has Americanized his name from Chirag to Chris, says his wife's arrest made him think about selling his three stores and leaving the country.

"We are from so much cleaner society where we are from in India," he said. "We didn't even know what drugs were."

Ms. Patel says she has tried to shield herself from the ugly aspects of life here - she does not read newspapers because she wearies of all the crime. Maybe, she said, that was a mistake. "I think you need all this bad knowledge now if you want to live here."

crvlvr

So a store cannot sell legitimate products if it is a certain combination? what kiind of crap is this that the govt is trying to pull? Why don't they arrest the people who are buying the stuff?

lotus blossom

oregon just passed a law that you cannot buy any products containing pseudophedrine without a Rx. Meth is rampant here, and deadly.

__________________
Not all who wander are lost

Geographer

Very often Western organisations assume that all names are the same in structure and likely frequency they fail to undterstand that all Sikhs are Singh or Kaur or that in the punjab Kaur can be slang for a (desirable?) womanthey view both as a family name.

they don't understand that an indian family may have no common family name.

This leads to mistakes and even deaths,at least one case in a Hospital in the UK, there is a need for at least at a government level for us all to understand these things.

crvlvr

All these years the govt was blaming the Columbians fur cocaine. Now that the flavor of the year (meth) can be made from domestic products, they are trying to pin the blame on the store owners? Store clerks have eoungh to deal with, irate customers, armed robbers and now the feds? Ridiculous.

Railway

Glad that NY Times decided to publish this story. Hopefully, it gains national attention.

bijapuri

the charge against the store owners is having knowledge that the materials will be used to make meth.
my job at present ( in San Jose, Ca. USA) is to place drug offenders in treatment. I would guestimate more than 9 out of 10 I see are meth users.
example: This week i have seen 13 offenders, ALL 13 were busted for meth.
It's also true (for now) that Meth is unheard of in India. However, it's quite common in SE Asia, so . . .
Even so, Stimulants have never really caught on in India. It never had much of a cocaine problem, prolly due to supply. In days of yore, the 1970's for example, Dexidrene, of the same class as meth, was freely available over the counter, but rarely abused.

__________________
Focusing your life solely on making a buck shows a certain poverty of ambition. It asks too little of yourself. Because it's only when you hitch your wagon to something larger than yourself that you realize your true potential.
Barack Obama

lookit me!!!: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bijapuri/

Utube fuzzy logic:
http://youtube.com/profile_videos?user=bijapuri&p =r

GoanCanuck

Crystal meth is a BIG problem out here in Vancouver as well. Very nasty stuff.

Nick-H

"A cook"? How the hell is anyone supposed to know that that refers to drugs?

__________________
.


Just one member of the IndiaMike Mod Team

crvlvr

Looks like the store staff & owners can barely understand english.

Here is the list of ingredients.. Would someone buying this make you suspicious if you were the store owner?

* Isopropyl or rubbing
* brake cleaner
* engine starter
* drain cleaner
* matches/road flares
* tablet/rock
* test dip or flakes/crystal
* batteries
* gun scrubber
* gasoline additive
* farm fertilizer
* lye
* cold tablets

lotus blossom

just looks like the shopping list of a stuffy nose coughing farmer who is looking for supplies to maintain his machinery, and unstop some stubborn drains in his old farm house...to make light of a really ugly situation. i worked with meth addicted people for awhile and heard some of the worst stories ever as my stint as a drug counselor.

byronic

The police sting was to find store owners who would be "knowlingly" working with drug dealers to supply the items needed to make methamphetamines. The feds justified selling more than two bottles of sudafed (one of the ingredients) constituted knowing intent. Apparently there was no crackdown on anyone walking out of a store with 100 bottles of sudafed. But there were a bunch of arrests of store owners who knowingly sold more than two bottles of sudafed to one customer (an undercover FBI agent). What rocket scientist thought up that FBI opperation?

What a total waste of tax payer dollars to a total buracratic log jam in the already over stressed court system and waste of person hours in the understaffed law enforcement system.

I myself have been in India and had people talk to me in Hindi, and not known what the heck they were saying to me. Yet I just smiled and said, "Yes Yes."
I could just picture the Indian store owners doing the same and smiling at the FBI officer and saying "Yes Yes." to their tecnical legal jargon. I feel for those stores owners who got put in jail and have all these legal bills now.

dan37_123

hmmmmmmm fascinating, i think i saw a film long ago by woody allen, it think it was banan republic.

thanks
dan

Maheswara_shishya

Im a hindu and love all indians but when i lived in NY some of the convienence store owners and operators were definitly not innocent. In the suburbs where i grew up and purchased beer they knew they were selling to underagers.

Also they would sell these little glass tubes with a fake silk rose in them. They knew damn well that these were used to smoke crack out of.

Now did all 49 of these store clerks/owners know whats going on? Who is to say? Often these chains of convienence stores are owned by one family, and if it was i'd say a large majority of them knew what was up.

Guru Om,
-Daniel

crvlvr

MS, I agree that the store owners should be taken to task if what they were selling is illegal. But the ingredients are quite common - something even you would purchase. Take a look - http://www.state.nd.us/dot/adopt_meth_chem.html. We all know tbat 7/11s are not the least expensive stores. Drug dealers will probably be shopping at Walmart or Costco and buying in bulk. I think the difference is that the mom & pop stores can be picked on by the feds whereas the big chains cannot. I agree with byronic's asssessment. sounds similar to the hundreds immigrants who were jailed post 9/11, http://buffaloreport.com/articles/030701timeline.html