THE NEW BOSS

Police Have Shut Down Most Of The Meth Labs In Phoenix, But Now The Drug Is
A Big Import From Mexico -- Cheap, Pure And More Plentiful Than Ever

Phoenix police book suspected meth cook Daniel Watkins outside his
home, where cops seized two ounces of crystal and the makings of a
small-time meth lab.

Mexican nationals at a Nogales port of entry wait for their vehicles
to pass inspections by U.S. border officers. More than 1,200 pounds of
meth have been seized at the Mexico-Arizona border so far this year.

Smugglers stash pounds of meth in secret compartments, like the
insides of a car's electrical system.

Phoenix PD meth-lab supervisor Don Sherrard: "In almost every type of
crime, we're seeing an increased correlation between meth and the crimes
themselves."

You would have thought cops were raiding the stronghold of Pablo
Escobar.

Early on a warm August morning, 38 Phoenix cops, many in black
fatigues with automatic weapons, stormed the home of Daniel Watkins,
looking for drugs.

Instead, after three hours of dissecting the house in northeast
Phoenix, all they found were three handguns and a couple of naked
photos of Watkins' girlfriend.

Later in the day, police finally dug up two ounces of low-grade
methamphetamine and just enough parts of a meth lab to hit Watkins
with charges of manufacturing with intent to sell.

Not much for more than 200 man-hours in police work, not including the
four-month investigation that got them to Watkins' house in the first
place.

Not at all like back in the heyday of clandestine meth labs in
Phoenix, in 1999 and 2000, when big busts were making big headlines
almost every week. Indeed, over the past six years, Arizona has
dropped from fourth highest in the country in the number of
clandestine meth labs to the eighth lowest.

Phoenix reached an all-time high of 164 meth-lab busts in 2000. So far
in 2005, that number is less than 30.

But let's not declare victory in the war on drugs. The meth you can
get in Phoenix today is purer, cheaper and more plentiful than ever,
because at the same time local labs were declining, Arizona became the
leading pipeline for Mexican-made methamphetamine into the United States.

Phoenix police aren't finding many big meth labs to bust because
they're not in Phoenix anymore.

Instead, they are in the Mexican states of Sinaloa or Michoacan, where
bigger, higher-tech, more cost-effective labs create a methamphetamine
that lands on the streets of Phoenix as a more powerful and cheaper
drug than ever.

With the high quality Mexican meth now on our streets, you can stay
wired for most of the day for as little as $20, a fraction of what
it'll take to keep you high on cocaine.

More so than any drug before it, methamphetamine seems to be
generating into a perfect narco storm.

Meth, like NASCAR, ain't just for rednecks anymore. Now that it's
clean like cocaine and readily available -- and far cheaper -- it's
the drug of choice for hillbilly and hipster alike.

Shot into your bloodstream, meth makes you wildly awake, on top of
your game, ready -- at least initially -- for sex.

At first, it seems like the perfect drug for play, for work, for
everything -- particularly if you're a long-distance trucker or a
working mom. Indeed, it's the drug that lets you work and still have
your play because you don't need to sleep. And good luck kicking the
habit.

As such, it's also the perfect drug for crime.

Because you always need more. Because you're amped up and ready for a
fight, 24/7. Because consequences and fear aren't part of the equation.

As whiskey and laudanum fueled the outlaws of 19th-century Arizona,
crank is fueling their 21st-century brethren.

And as police and health-care officials know, the more perfect the
drug, the harder the fight to stop it.

The stranglehold is tight. As Mexican meth flows through Phoenix, it
is wreaking havoc.

Consider:

. Meth is directly associated with increased crime rates.

According to an Arizona Criminal Justice Commission report published
in July, the state continues to rank first in the country in overall
crime rates, with no other state dealing with more property crimes and
auto thefts than Arizona; murder and rape rates are also up.

And extensive computer-assisted research by New Times reveals that
meth-related deaths in Maricopa County have gone up dramatically since
the beginning of 2004 (see accompanying story). Those deaths include
homicides, suicides, car accidents, overdoses, heart attacks and
hemorrhages.

A 2003 voluntary study found that about 40 percent of Maricopa County
jail inmates tested positive for meth. Compare that to figures from
1990 (about 7 percent) and 1999 (17 percent).

"In almost every type of crime, we're seeing an increased correlation
between meth and the crimes themselves," says Don Sherrard, the
Phoenix Police Department meth-lab supervisor.

Phoenix officials have done no work to statistically correlate meth
use to specific crimes, although Sherrard and others say that,
anecdotally, they know there's a connection.

But Tucson Police Captain David Neri has done exhaustive research that
shows such direct links. He has examined crime patterns in
neighborhoods in Tucson and linked the crimes to meth. Earlier this
year, Neri told an Arizona legislative committee that meth is linked
to 56 percent of fraud cases and 27 percent of auto thefts.

One crime where the connection has been clearly established is
identity theft. In 2004, Arizona topped the nation in reports of
stolen identities, and the trend continues this year. Dan Drake, an
assistant U.S. attorney in Phoenix, estimates that more than 95
percent of those cases were linked to meth.

. Meth is putting children in danger.

State officials estimate that more than 90 percent of Arizona Child
Protective Services cases are associated with meth use. Between 2000
and 2002, about a third of children removed from homes with meth labs
tested positive for meth, according to the Arizona Attorney General's
Office. The AG also reports that children from homes where meth is
used are at a greater risk for developmental delays and are more
likely to have been abused or neglected than other children.

. Meth is threatening public health and driving up health-care
costs.

A study earlier this year of more than 7,000 AIDS patients in
metropolitan Phoenix revealed that 30 percent are frequent meth users.
Meth is blamed for a spike in HIV/AIDS; it's become a huge club drug,
promoting unsafe sex by lifting inhibitions.

An analysis by the Maricopa County Hospital earlier this year showed
almost 10 percent of visits to the emergency room were meth-related.
National figures show that meth-related emergency room visits in
Arizona increased 50 percent between 1995 and 2002, according to the
Office of National Drug Control Policy.

. Meth poses serious environmental hazards.

In the past four years, the state has paid more than $4 million for
disposal of contamination associated with meth production, according
to the Arizona Attorney General's Office. A pound of meth yields five
to seven pounds of waste. Meth labs are now being referred to as
"mini-Superfund sites"; even People magazine recently profiled several
families around the country who bought houses that had formerly served
as meth labs, and got sick or were unable to clean up the mess. A few
states have laws requiring sellers to disclose that a house was once a
meth lab. Arizona is not one of them.

. Reports are in that meth is not just a white-trash drug anymore.

Meth is in the workplace. Quest Diagnostic, a company that administers
workplace drug tests, reports a steady increase in meth use
nationally, since 2000. The company publishes a full-color map on its
Web site, showing positive tests, by region. Arizona has a very low
rate of positive tests for cocaine. For meth, however, big parts of
the state, particularly around Phoenix, are bright red -- indicating
the highest rates in the country.

Mexican nationals are sampling the wares they're trafficking across
the border, according to the Drug Enforcement Agency, and local police
report an increase in use among the Hispanic population, generally.

Meth is increasingly popular as a club drug, particularly in gay
nightclubs, where ripped men dance nonstop for hours, chugging liters
of water, looking for a "bump" (an evening's supply of meth). And
they'll find it, typically at an after-hours party, where a dozen or
more gay men will gather to snort, smoke or inject before finding an
empty bedroom to cash in on their increased libido.

And the drug is reaching into a higher economic strata, with the
introduction of purer forms, called "ice" or "G."

"We see guys in from Scottsdale now, and they're like, 'Hey, it's not
meth, it's G,'" says Jeffrey Taylor of Phoenix Rescue Mission, a
homeless shelter that provides comprehensive drug rehabilitation
programs. "They want to be snooty about it, but it's the same damn
drug."

And it's everywhere.

"It's frightening the extent meth, more than any drug before it, gets
so deep into the fabric of society," says Jim Molesa, a DEA agent
based in Flagstaff, who is recognized as a leading authority on
Mexican meth in Arizona. "And now that the market around it has sort
of matured, it's even more dangerous."

Additional stories in this series will explore how current public
policy affects children, and how efforts to put pseudoephedrine behind
the counter at drugstores and shut down local meth labs are simply not
going to solve the problem.

. The Children.

For so many public-policy makers, meth is all about saving the
children. But it's not that simple. There is much to be learned from
past so-called "drug epidemics," particularly the rise in crack
cocaine in the 1980s and 1990s. Public-policy response to crack users
has since proven to be grossly wrongheaded and, in the cases of
families, very often disastrous.

Now, governments are often taking the same punishment-heavy,
short-on-science approach to meth, stigmatizing children with the
junk-science label "meth babies" while destroying families with
get-tough meth laws in situations where, with smarter legislation or
programming, the family might have been saved. For example, while
Arizona mothers with meth convictions usually lose their young
children to foster care, programs around the country that keep mother
and child together while the mother undergoes intensive inpatient
rehabilitation have proven to be much more successful in breaking the
mother of her habit and, thus, making her a functioning parent again.

. The Solutions.

Despite the fact that meth addiction has been such a scourge in
Arizona, state officials have been slow to act -- and their efforts
have been far from comprehensive even when they do. There has been no
statewide public health campaign that targets the drug, nor has there
been a similar effort in Maricopa County for several years. No one
seems to be talking about treatment, and it's extremely hard to find
an inpatient rehab facility that works with meth addicts -- unless, of
course, you can afford the $4,000-per-night tab at Meadows in Wickenburg.

Indeed, police, lawmakers and politicians have been focused on the
quick, dramatic fix of closing meth labs instead of the harsh realities
of treatment and prevention. And while meth-lab busts make for good
headlines, and making it harder to buy pseudoephedrine-laden Claritin-D
is a solution almost everyone can get behind, the plan does little to
confront the reality of addiction in Arizona: Meth is pouring in from
Mexico, and everybody from your boss to your high school kid is trying
it. Forget those pictures Attorney General Terry Goddard likes to show
of dirty babies standing in the middle of a meth house; think, instead,
about your younger brother or sister and the fact that meth, initially,
is fun.

The bottom line:

Meth is a bigger problem in Arizona than ever.

A problem that's overloading our criminal justice system.

A problem that's tearing apart families and stressing the state's
health, social service and child protection agencies.

A problem that has yet to be met with public policy anywhere close to
resembling a solution.

As policymakers flounder, local, state and federal law enforcement
officers try to stem the flow of the drug first into the country and
state, then into the Valley, then into the neighborhoods where meth
houses sometimes still blight local communities.

They are winning the local battle on the labs.

But they are losing the now international war against meth.

Five years ago, the methamphetamine you'd find on the streets of
Phoenix likely had been made in a bathtub down the street.

Now, it's likely being made at a sprawling compound at least a
thousand miles south in Sinaloa or Michoacan.

For decades, the wooded and mountainous areas there have been a
staging area for cocaine coming up from South America.

It's the perfect haven for major drug operations.

Like the mountains of many Third World countries, it is ruled by the
law of the jungle. And over time, the poor and dispossessed there have
come to see local traffickers as heroes.

And why not? For more than a century, the region has been ignored by a
more-often corrupt federal government. If a local boy makes it big in
the drug trade, he very often funnels a hefty portion back into the
community. The fine church or school in this region is more often a
gift from a local narco trafficker than good work by the government.

With the pipeline in place from the narcotics trade, it was easy for
the Sinaloan Cowboys and their neighbors to make the switch to meth.
All they needed were a few chemists and a steady supply of precursor
drugs.

The cooks were easy to assemble. You can find recipes with a quick
Google search. Or passed on from a fellow tweaker. The primary
ingredient, pseudoephedrine tablets, is readily available -- by the
barrel.

"It's coming from China, from Hong Kong, primarily," says Steve
Comber, the assistant special agent in charge at the Phoenix field
office of the DEA. "All you need is a broker with an international
license. Then it's shipped in from China and then diverted to the labs."

Mexican labs will create as much as 70 pounds of crystal meth per
batch, putting their American counterparts to shame. An average meth
lab in Phoenix will make an ounce. "It's enough for themselves and 10
of their closest friends," says Phoenix PD's Don Sherrard. "That's
what most Beavis-and-Butt-head labs are."

Then the drug is sent to the border in ever-more-creative
vehicles.

Sometimes it's hidden in fruit bound for the United States. Very often
it's taken to a custom body shop and built into a car or truck
(traffickers have even modified eight-cylinder engines into
six-bangers with two cylinders for drug storage).

Increasingly, U.S. drug-enforcement officials say, traffickers are
using undocumented immigrants as drug pack mules.

Often, such deals go down in the Sonoran town of Altar, the farming
village southwest of Nogales that has morphed into the primary staging
area for Mexican nationals hoping to hike across the desert into Arizona.

"It's just a simple deal there," says the DEA's Molesa. "[The
traffickers tell undocumented immigrants:] You carry this backpack,
we'll pay for your coyote.

"There is 350 miles of continuous border here and all sorts of roads
connecting us to Mexico," Molesa says. "It's perfect for
traffickers."

And it's not just geography that makes Arizona and its Mexican
sister-state of Sonora a great pipeline for meth.

It's the professionalism of the drug traffickers along the
route.

For years now, drug officials say, the Arizona drug corridor has been
controlled by what is likely one of the most peaceful and businesslike
drug consortiums in Mexico's history. While both the Juarez pipeline
to the east and the Tijuana pipeline to the west are fraught with
sometimes spectacular violence, the Mexican drug lords along the
pipeline to Phoenix work with chamber-of-commerce efficiency.

"We've generally been lucky that way because they are smart enough to
know that murders get people fired up," Molesa says.

That luck may not hold out.

On a late Saturday afternoon in mid-October -- a typical Saturday,
according to border and customs officers -- about 350 vehicles are
inching north toward Grand Avenue, the main drag of Nogales, Arizona.

Five lanes of cars stop and go through entry wells as officers inspect
undercarriages with mirrors and peer into back-seat windows.

Here, drugs in the meth pipeline come to a screeching stop.

Here, if you're running the stuff, it's time to start acting.

"If it doesn't look good, we search it. We're looking for something in
our mental files," says Richard Gill, the chief customs and border
protection officer at the Dennis DeConcini port of entry on Grand.

Such as wild eyes, nervousness, a slip in the story.

Many of the mules, Gill says, are "highly religious people, looking
for protection, something to calm themselves." Often, a mule is
carrying a photo of the Virgin Mary of Guadalupe, maybe on a keychain
or in his or her wallet or purse.

Someone up from the south might be dumb enough to pray to Santo
Malverde, "un santo de los trafficantes," the patron saint of
smugglers who is a folk hero in the mountains of Sinaloa.

But the dead giveaways have gotten few and far between.

In 2003, there was 31 percent more meth seized at the Arizona border
than in 2002, says the DEA's Steve Comber.

In 2004, the amount seized shot up another 37 percent.

"The success we've had in seizures is a combination of more personnel
at the border and better enforcement techniques," Comber says.

Or, more likely, drug officers say, there's just a lot more of the
drug coming through in recent years.

"Prior to three or four years ago, we didn't see meth at this port,"
Gill says. "Now, we're the major port in the country for meth
trafficking.

"God forbid any gets past us."

Obviously, plenty has.

Because the successes at the border don't seem to be translating into
any sort of a drop in price or product in Phoenix.

"Meth is cheaper now for better stuff," Molesa adds. "The market tells
the truth."

About 8,200 cars -- and an average of nearly 26,000 passengers --
drive through Nogales ports of entry from Mexico every day.

Another 18,000 people, including Mexican nationals, U.S. citizens --
mostly Arizonans -- and foreign tourists walk through the turnstiles.

This says nothing of the tens of thousands walking across the border
in the vast desert west of here.

And with those tens of thousands of drug-mule opportunities come
trafficking methods that are increasingly difficult to detect.

"If you can think of it, they're doing it," Gill says.

Gill shows off a couple of seized vehicles parked outside the port of
entry as five Mexican nationals are standing by, waiting for officers
to complete searches of an Astro van and an old Chevy Caprice.

A muscled-up 2003 Ford truck -- the equivalent in Sonora of the
Escalade with spinners -- was seized just a few days ago. Thanks to
drug-sniffing dogs and some keen observations by "post-rovers,"
officers found a secret compartment built above the truck's axle, and
deep enough to store at least five pounds of meth.

A sedan is parked alongside the truck, its entire dashboard ripped
out. Behind the dash, smugglers rigged switches to open and close the
compartments, where drugs had been stored.

"The high-dollar stuff, like meth and cocaine, is coming in the
high-dollar vehicles," Gill says. "It makes it hard to pick out the
smugglers. Now, they're using [Mexican] doctors and lawyers and
dentists to bring the stuff over. "

This world of high-dollar vehicles driven by mules with doctorates is
a far cry from what's going on up the road in Phoenix, where, despite
law enforcement's best efforts, meth labs have not been made extinct.

You don't necessarily need a big, high-tech Mexican lab to make good,
clean meth.

You just need a "conversion lab," the latest in local meth-lab
technology, in which dirty meth is cooked to make it purer.

But there is a reason you don't see many of those in American houses
anymore.

Smarter drug traffickers have learned you don't cook where you live.
They've also learned that you draw a lot of attention by blowing up a
house in an American neighborhood.

Take the incident this summer at 3325 North 80th Lane in west
Phoenix.

According to police reports, Sergio Carbajal, a 32-year-old Mexican
national, was the only person in the Peoria house.

Also in the house was a freezer full of two five-gallon jugs
containing some sort of extremely volatile fluid.

Apparently, the fluid was so unstable that when Carbajal either turned
on a light or unplugged the freezer, the spark created triggered an
explosion that literally blew the roof off the place.

Witnesses said the roof went up with a 60-foot plume of smoke and
fire.

Shards of glass from windows were shot like bullets a football-field's
length down the street.

Somehow, Carbajal survived the explosion, running from the house with
his entire body ablaze. He ran to a garden hose and put out the flames
engulfing his body before collapsing on a neighbor's yard.

When police and firefighters arrived at the scene, they noticed what
appeared to be a latex glove lying in the front yard. As they got
closer, they realized it was no glove at all.

It was the skin from Carbajal's right hand -- his fingernails still
intact.

That was June 22. Carbajal is still hanging on for his life in a
drug-induced coma at the Maricopa County Burn Unit, where his wife
apparently paid him a visit. According to Phoenix Police Detective
Travis Bird, the lead investigator in the case, she didn't believe the
body in the bed was that of Sergio Carbajal. There was nothing left of
him she recognized.

"His family never made an effort to contact me," Bird says. "I don't
think they want to contact me. They know what happened. They know why
he was here."

The meth trade is thick with ghoulish Sergio Carbajal-like
stories.

Which leads to the conclusion that it's better to let the
professionals in Sinaloa do the serious cooking.

Even if you don't have your hand directly in the meth pot, you can get
burned. The cost of meth addiction to innocent bystanders is high, and
it's growing every day.

Almost all child endangerment cases in the Valley are now
meth-related, says the Arizona Attorney General's Office. One state
worker, who asked not to be identified because of the secrecy
associated with cases involving Child Protective Services, describes a
grim situation, multiplied by the dozens:

Not long ago, police raided a meth house (rather, a double-wide
trailer), and removed the children -- four under 8 years of age. The
children were covered in meth residue. Their toys and clothing had to
be thrown out. The oldest hadn't been going to school; none of the
kids had been bathed in at least a week. The chemicals used to cook
the meth were right outside the window.

The state worker knows of malnourished babies, covered in insects and
insect bites. She continues: "Dirty diapers on the floor, rotting food
on the floor, no clean and safe food for children to eat. If there are
pets, frequently pet waste is around. There may be weapons around,
because some meth houses have some pretty interesting security systems."

The big joke is that meth makes you want to clean the house, but this
woman says she's never seen a clean meth house. Meth is used as a
weight-loss drug, she says, and jokes, "Our internal belief is that
it's also a fertility drug." Meth won't increase fertility, but it
will lower inhibitions -- and that leads to so-called "meth babies,"
taken into state custody all the time.

Domestic violence shelter professionals report that meth use is
spreading among both abusers and victims. It is almost always
associated with cases of identity theft, and increasingly with
property crimes.

Emergency room workers see the destruction meth causes on a daily
basis.

Steve Stapczynski, chair of Emergency Medicine for Maricopa Integrated
Health System, reports the prevalence of meth addiction at the county
hospital.

"A 64-year-old woman came in recently with abscesses all over her body
and her arms from dirty injections, these boils, these pockets of
pus," Stapczynski says.

The addicts he sees are not using clean materials, he
adds.

"What they inject hasn't been sterilized. And then they don't realize
what's happening to them. They tend to ignore it because they're high
on methamphetamine." As for the woman, "We cleaned her abscesses, and
then she didn't want any treatment or help. Which is pretty common,
because they don't want to get off the drug. It's used to the
exclusion of everything else in their life. They're not making
rational decisions."

Stapczynski continues, "We've had a patient or two come in with sexual
hyperstimulation, someone who masturbates for days at a time. They get
raw to the point that they just have to finally come in, or they get
arrested for doing this in public. They'll come in and the skin
[either the penis or vagina] will be broken and raw and foul-smelling
from the bacteria down there. You walk into the room and get
physically nauseous. It's like it destroys their sense of
self-preservation.

"The other thing that is surprising is the number of times meth comes
up in drug screens, whether it's for car accidents, or other types of
injuries.

"We see that something just isn't right with that patient, and then
the meth will show up. Its prevalence is amazing to us at times.
People you wouldn't think [would be on it], and it will show up."

His conclusion: "It is placing an additional burden on the emergency
room. It contributes to car accidents, pedestrian accidents, assaults
and other violent crimes."

It also contributes to property crimes and identity
theft.

In December 2002, Paul Waldman, 43, a photographer, left his Tempe
apartment for a trip out of the country. Just the day after he left,
his parents, who were watching the apartment, discovered Waldman's
place "had been trashed."

A checkbook was gone; two bad checks had already been written. Two
$100 savings bonds that his father gave him when he was a boy had been
stolen. An autographed baseball, signed by Roberto Clemente, gone.
Four antique cameras -- one belonged to his grandfather, another to
his dad -- gone.

Police never caught the person who actually broke into Waldman's
apartment, and three years later, Waldman's still dealing with credit
card companies and other businesses that say he owes them money. The
cops did catch Rodney (nicknamed "Robney") Richards, who wrote the bad
checks, after a tweaker snitched on him, according to Matt Shay, a
detective with the Phoenix Drug Enforcement Bureau.

According to Shay, Richards, 38, was a north Phoenix meth cook with
several different storage lockers filled with stolen property,
including several motorcycles, an ID-making machine (he used it to
make fake Arizona driver's licenses) and equipment for three different
meth labs. Shay says Richards had a team of about 20 burglars working
for him.

Shay says Richards could have ended up in prison for life, after
police linked him to 24 victims, but he got a reduced sentence of 10
years.

Waldman is still angry. He never got any of his possessions back. The
only things the police recovered were the two savings bonds, which are
still in police evidence. He'll get them eventually.

"They've become a different kind of item to me," Waldman says of the
bonds. "It's weird. I know they'll appreciate over time, and at some
point I'll give them to my 2-year-old son. But, to me, they've become
this item of loss."

A lot of other people were at a loss after "Cindy" and her friends got
done with them.

Dan Drake from the U.S. Attorney's Office offered Cindy's story as an
example of a meth-related identity theft, but only under the condition
of anonymity because she's "cleaned up her act," he says. Her story
draws parallels to Leonardo DiCaprio's character in Catch Me If You
Can.

Cindy was busted in 2003 for identity theft. She served just six
months, and is now on probation. In the summer of 2003, Cindy and her
then-boyfriend were doing an average of a gram a day of meth each, a
habit that cost $500 to $700 a week. They fueled the habit via a small
team of people who stole mail all over the Valley. Bank statements,
bills or credit cards would earn a team member a few dollars or some
meth.

Then Cindy and her boyfriend would get to work.

"Everything you need [to commit identity theft] you can get from the
Internet, whether it's bank information or somebody's date of birth,"
Cindy says. "It's a lot easier than people think. People are afraid to
give out their social security number, so we [would] try to get their
date of birth. Well, it's much easier to get your birth date. And
those cluster mailboxes in neighborhoods are a joke. All you need is a
crowbar."

She adds, "After a while, it was a thrill just to commit the crime. I
was getting off on the actual crime before I was even getting the cash
to go out and buy more dope."

Now she works with law enforcement officials like Dan Drake, helping
them unravel other identity-theft cases.

"I think the guy in Catch Me If You Can was a lot better than I was,"
she says. "And he probably wasn't all doped up, either."

The meth pipeline from Mexico ends in Phoenix at places like Rosemonte
Drive, a quiet street near I-17 in north Phoenix that runs up to the
gates of North Canyon High School.

Police have visited the home at 1944 East Rosemonte Drive 82 times in
the past three years.

The reports detail everything from fights to burglaries, fires,
trespassing, missing persons, domestic violence, shots fired, and
forgery complaints.

The grass is green on Rosemonte, with the exception of Joel Bartak's
house. In the front yard of the two-story home, wilted shrubs and
brown patches of grass lie unkempt. The stained blinds, slightly drawn
in a second-story bedroom window, appear to have melted.

The pink stucco is chipped and blotched with blue paint in some spots.
Dozens of cigarette butts litter the front porch. A broken window on
the side of the house is boarded up with plywood.

Since September 2000, at least 17 people have been arrested at the
address, including Bartak. Police suspect that Bartak, who could not
be reached for comment, is involved with the Aryan Brotherhood since
he's been renting his house to white-power skinheads for the past
several years.

The house saw its most illustrious bust with the meth-related arrest
of Brotherhood kingpin Robert "Chicago Bob" Ryberg in July of last
year.

This year alone, according to Shay, the Phoenix Drug Enforcement
Bureau detective, there have been three search warrants served there
for possession of meth for sale and identity theft. Police have
investigated reports of stolen property, recovered a stolen vehicle,
and answered an aggravated-assault call ("Joel got beat up by one of
the Aryans," Shay says) -- just since January.

It's no wonder the woman who answers the door across the street from
Bartak's house won't let her kids play in the front yard anymore.

"If I would've known about that house before we got here," says the
woman, who doesn't want to be identified, as her two kids stand beside
her behind a screen door, "we never would have moved in here."

Other neighbors, including Jannah Heisey, who's lived in the
neighborhood about three years in a house about 100 feet down the
block from Bartak's, echo the sentiment.

"I've certainly considered moving," Heisey says, as her 18-year-old
son, Sean, plays a first-person shooter game on the home computer. "We
probably will sometime in the next year.

"It's a shame, really, because this is such a beautiful
neighborhood."

Heisey says she's caught a skinhead digging through her trash late at
night, "probably trying to commit identity theft." That was the last
time she called the cops. "Now," she says, "all the neighbors are
buying paper shredders."

Those who've stayed, at least.

Heisey says that at least four homeowners on Rosemonte have sold in
just the past month. Two other houses are currently for sale.

According to Shay, Bartak's been served notice that he must clean up
the property and bring the building up to code. If Bartak doesn't tidy
up a bit, then the county can, and will, seize the property, and shut
down the meth operation on Rosemonte Drive for good, Shay says.

"You hear these people all the time say that meth isn't their problem,
tweakers aren't their problem. It's a border issue, it's somebody
else's issue," the cop adds. "Yeah? Well, take a look at that
neighborhood. Pay a visit to Rosemonte Drive.

"If it isn't just like your neighborhood already," he warns, "it will be."