SHERIFF STEPS UP WAR ON DRUGS

He says he's an assistant manager at a grocery and lives with his mom
in the Mount Greenwood neighborhood on the Southwest Side.

Michael Nowakowski, 27, also fit the profile of a typical
crack-cocaine customer during a police sting in Robbins last week.

Nowakowski said he walked 35 minutes from his home to a darkened
parking lot of a public housing complex where undercover members of a
Cook County sheriff's task force were selling fake crack Wednesday
night. He said he learned about the open-air drug market from a friend.

"It's my day off, and I was drinking," he said. "I was
stupid."

Nowakowski was among 14 men and two women--all of them white and from
other towns--arrested by the officers in the predominantly black
neighborhood.

"Crack cocaine is so addictive, it brings people from all walks of
life," Sheriff Michael Sheahan said.

The sting was part of a 15-month drug probe in the south suburb.
Buyers and street-level sellers, most of whom are gang members, have
been arrested. Sheriff's police expect to go after higher-level
targets in a few months.

The operation is part of Sheahan's growing anti-drug effort. He plans
to open a new narcotics laboratory in his Maywood office in January
and is launching a joint task force with Chicago police aimed at drug
dealers and other criminals in hotels and motels, especially near
O'Hare Airport.

The sheriff's narcotics unit was just a "skeleton crew" about four
years ago, said James Malinowski, first deputy chief of the sheriff's
police. Now the sheriff has about 50 officers in the gang crimes
narcotics unit and another 30 law enforcement officers from various
agencies working on a task force funded with an $825,000 federal
grant, Malinowski said.

"The drug problem is worse than you could ever imagine," he said. "So
we have become very sophisticated."

No members of the Robbins police force participated in the Wednesday
night sting, but the sheriff's office is working in Robbins and other
suburbs because their own departments cannot operate a full-scale
investigation, Sheahan said.

Corruption appears to be another unspoken reason for the sheriff to
distance himself from Robbins police. In July, a former Robbins police
detective, James Cooper, pleaded guilty in federal court to shaking
down a drug dealer; his partner, Jerome McGee, remains accused of nine
shakedowns.

So far, sheriff's police have issued 16 arrest warrants for
street-level dealers involved in 28 buys. Eight of those suspects were
in custody Friday. There have been nearly 300 other arrests resulting
from videotaped surveillance of drug deals and reverse stings on
buyers in the Robbins area.

The sheriff's task force also executed a search warrant Wednesday
night at the home of alleged cocaine dealer Kevin Baskin, 32, of Harvey.

Police approached Baskin's car at a business near his home, and he
sped away, officers said. They decided not to chase Baskin because
they did not want to jeopardize other motorists, but he was expected
to surrender by today.

Officers surrounded Baskin's white frame home. Two of Baskin's
children, an 11-year-old boy and 6-year-old girl, were in the home
alone, and they were placed in relatives' custody.

A drug-sniffing dog was taken through the home and stopped at a filthy
bedroom, where police said they found a stack of neatly folded $100
bills and a bag of crack cocaine. A total of 255 grams of crack and
powder cocaine, 35 grams of marijuana, $9,673 in cash and three
handguns also were found, police said.

Sheahan said the payoff for such investigations is the eventual arrest
of higher-level dealers, but it involves thousands of hours of police
work.

"It's very tedious," he said.