The Drug Era in the Federal Record

THE 1990s, AS ASSESSED IN APRIL 2001

The late twentieth century's defining criminal economy in South Bend was the drug trade, and as with Fort Wayne the honest documentary base is the federal record rather than any single famous trial. The National Drug Intelligence Center's Indiana Drug Threat Assessment, published in April 2001 from the reporting of the decade just closed, records the shape of it for this city in the words of the agencies that policed it. The Drug Enforcement Administration's Indianapolis District Office reported crack cocaine prevalent in Gary, South Bend, and Fort Wayne. The South Bend Police Department reported that crack-related investigations, arrests, and seizures had increased in 1999, and that crack retail distributors and abusers were committing an increasing number of robberies, homicides, larcenies, and burglaries. Of the powdered cocaine shipped into the Fort Wayne and South Bend areas, roughly eighty percent was converted to crack, according to the two departments' reporting; the supply reached the city, the department reported among others, from source areas including Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, Brownsville, and Florida.

The assessment also carries the era's largest stated South Bend case, and it is printed here exactly as the document leaves it — an indictment, which is an accusation, with no disposition stated in the assessment: a federal grand jury indicted ten South Bend residents alleged to have participated in a major cocaine and crack distribution ring over eight years, distributing 4,950 kilograms of cocaine across northern Indiana, southwestern Michigan, and the Chicago area. No outcome for those ten defendants is given in the federal assessment, and none is supplied from elsewhere. That is the documented structure at the century's end: an importing trade fed from the named source cities, a conversion and street trade run locally, a city department measuring the harm in the offenses it attributed to the trade, and one large federal accusation standing unadjudicated in the document that reports it.

Sources:

1. National Drug Intelligence Center, Indiana Drug Threat Assessment (April 2001), Cocaine section — DEA Indianapolis District Office reporting; South Bend Police Department reporting; the federal grand jury indictment of ten South Bend residents
2. National Drug Intelligence Center, Indiana Drug Threat Assessment Update (May 2002)