ROME, Georgia When they charged 49 convenience store clerks and owners in rural northwestern 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 informer told store clerks that he needed the cold medicine, matches and camping fuel to "finish up a cook," some of the Indians said they figured that he must have meant something about barbecue.
The case of Operation Meth Merchant illustrates yet another difficulty law enforcement officials face in combating a highly addictive drug that can be made at home with ordinary grocery store items.
Many states, including Georgia, have passed laws recently restricting the sale of common cold medicines like Sudafed, and around the country, the police are telling merchants to be suspicious of sales of charcoal, coffee filters, aluminum foil and kitty litter. Walgreens agreed last week to pay $1.3 million for failing to monitor the sale of over-the-counter cold medicine that was purchased by a methamphetamine dealer in Texas.
In many cases, defense lawyers say, the biggest problem is the language barrier between an immigrant store clerk and the undercover informers who use 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."
Hajira Ahmed's husband is in jail pending charges that he sold cold medicine and antifreeze at their convenience store near the Tennessee border. "This is the first time I heard this - I don't know how to pronounce - this meta-meta something," she said.
But David Nahmias, chief federal prosecutor for the Northern District of Georgia, said the evidence showed that the clerks knew that the informers 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 or $250,000 in fines.
Like many prosecutors, 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 methamphetamine here is made in small labs - the majority of the drug used in the United States comes from Mexican "superlabs" - those small labs can be highly explosive, posing danger to children, the environment and the police departments that clean them up. The sources for those labs, he said, are local convenience stores.
"While those people may not think they're causing any harm, the harm they cause is tremendous," 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, Nahmias said, with complaints from local sheriffs that certain stores were catering to the labs.
Prosecutors paid confidential informers - 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. The informers dropped hints to indicate that they were breaking the law.
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 defense lawyers who played them for a reporter, it is not always clear that the people behind the counter understood.
Investigators footnoted court papers to explain that the clue the informer dropped most often - that they were doing "a cook" - is a "common term" used by methamphetamine makers. Lawyers say that if the courts could not be expected to understand what this meant, neither could immigrants with 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 in July. "Cook is very clear; it means food."
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," Malvika Patel said, "I have four families. I never have enough aluminum foil."
According to court records, prosecutors first identified Malvika Patel as the woman who sold two bottles of cold medicine to an informer in Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia, 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 Malvika Patel produced records showing that she was picking her son up at day care in Tennessee at the moment she was alleged to have been 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; people began moving here from India 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 Ahmed, whose husband is in jail. "Because they hate us, or - I don't know."
Nahmias said he was willing to consider evidence of language barriers when the cases go to trial this year, but he denied targeting any group.
"We follow the evidence where it goes," he said.
Still, the case has set off ripples from the green ridges here to Gujarat, the Indian state that is the traditional homeland of Patels, where newspapers have carried stories about their 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 United States.
"We are from so much cleaner society where we are from in India," he said. "We didn't even know what drugs were."
Malvika Patel says she has tried to shield herself from the ugly aspects of life here - she doesn't 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," she said.
Newshawk: http://www.napnt.org/amphetablog.html
Pubdate: Friday, 05th August 2005
Source: The International Herald Tribune (France)
Author: Kate Zernike The New York Times
Copyright: 2005 The International Herald Tribune
Website: http://www.iht.com
Email: letters@iht.com