Investigators have also recovered 300 pills, digital scales, paraphernalia and several guns.
Overall, 49 people would be arrested from June 19 into last week by officers from the Kokomo Police Department Drug Task Force. More arrests are expected.
The wide-scale investigation into Kokomo’s meth market has been conducted simultaneously with the undertaking and aftermath of Operation Law and Order Part 1, a largely federal case that’s led to the dismantling of a vast drug ring that stretched from Macon, Georgia, into Kokomo homes.
But it’s the sheer quantity of arrests and seizures within Part 2, an operation enabled almost exclusively by the work of confidential informants, that’s turned heads.
Wasn’t the meth epidemic over, replaced by an opioid crisis?
Not quite.
“We’ve always had a meth problem,” said Howard County Chief Deputy Prosecutor Ron Byal, who heads Kokomo Police Department Drug Task Force cases, on Thursday.
Now, though, that meth comes from Mexico, eliminating the formerly ubiquitous meth lab and making the problem harder to recognize until arrests are made.
Shipped by cartels across the border —specifically to Texas, California, Nevada or Arizona, said Byal — packages containing the highly-addictive drug are then often mailed or FedEx’ed to Kokomo.
Detailing that shift is the number of meth labs — zero — reported to the Howard County Health Department in 2018, according to James Vest, the department’s director of environmental health.
In 2012, that number was a 38. By 2017, it was down to one, found in a vehicle.
“Mexico. It’s all Mexican. And everybody around here has learned, because of the changes in the law, that it’s much harder to cook your own,” said Byal, referring to the regulation of ingredients like Sudafed. “It’s just easier to go buy whatever is being shipped in here.”
And in Mexico, he added, “they make it in such large quantities that the quality is a whole lot better than what you would get if you cooked it up in a one-pot jar in your bathroom.”
But where Part 2 has led to a significant number of local busts by local officers, it was Part 1 that perhaps best details the scope of Kokomo’s drug market.
A citizen tip, in that case, set into motion a drug investigation that culminated in around 130 local and federal law enforcement officers conducting multiple raids in the early morning hours of May 1, dismantling an alleged drug and firearms ring with ties to criminal activity in Georgia.
Fifteen people, most of them Kokomo residents, now face federal charges following the multi-agency, four-month-long investigation – which involved phone wiretaps, remote cameras near a main suspect’s home and the apprehension of alleged Georgia-based hitmen in March.
Starting at 6:05 a.m. May 1, federal agents from multiple agencies, alongside local law enforcement, executed warrants at 13 locations across Kokomo and Macon, Georgia.
Officers ultimately seized more than 17 pounds of meth, 2 pounds of cocaine, 2 ounces of heroin, 122 grams of Fentanyl, 6 ounces of marijuana, two money counters, 12 vehicles, $37,000 in drug money and 24 firearms – including a sniper rifle and two assault rifles.
(It’s worth noting that while some of the street dealers arrested in the recent six-week sweep of Part 2 arrests received drugs from the hierarchy dismantled during Part 1, many of the cases were unrelated.)
Byal and Howard County Prosecutor Mark McCann acknowledged Thursday that federal officers, specifically from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, arrested suspects out of Las Vegas who were allegedly mailing meth to Kokomo, in conjunction with the operation.
And while some of the suspects arrested in Kokomo took Megabuses or Greyhound buses to Georgia, often transporting the drugs back to the city in carry-on bags, the Deep South dealers would also receive product after it had traversed through a border state.
“The investigation began here, and they arrested people who were out there,” said Byal. “There’s different branches to all this stuff. And it just keeps going in more and more directions.”
“And that’s how that started was from here,” added McCann. “You just get going this way, up the ladder like most cases do, and all of a sudden that got the attention of the feds and it became not only a local case but a nationwide case.”
In recent months, though, the local approach has relied heavily on old-school police work — flipping people into becoming confidential informants with the promise of judicial gifts like a lenient sentence — and not the wiretaps and high-tech camera work allowed only through partnerships with federal agents.
Probable cause affidavits affiliated with Part 2 arrests detail a common occurrence: a confidential informant (C.I.) meets with a dealer, purchases drugs, returns and gives the drugs to an officer so they can be tested. The informant and their vehicle are searched to ensure no drugs were stolen, an interview is recorded, and finally a warrant is issued for the dealer’s arrest.
And often, it would come with more than expected.
“Approximately 30 people were charged … (after) C.I.’s made controlled buys off those 30 defendants,” detailed Byal. “We got warrants for those 30 defendants, and when we went to serve the warrants it seemed like just about very house we went to we not only got the guy that had the warrant, but there would be other people in the house that either had drugs on them or had other warrants out for them.
“So our 30 suddenly becomes 50, because we’ve rounded up all these other people that showed up at these houses.”
But could it all make a difference?
Maybe for a bit, said McCann.
“Disorienting them in a way, disassociation or disorganization of wrecking this system buys us a little time,” he explained. “I’m confident in saying, yeah, it has an immediate impact, maybe a short-term impact, but long-term, with the addicts we have and the users out there, the demand ... would need to change in order to make an impact.”
One unintended impact, however, is being felt at the Howard County Jail.
Data provided to the Tribune by jail officials shows an average population of 444 inmates at the Howard County facility through July 26. In comparison, the average through July 2017 was nearly identical, at 451; the total year average last year was 442 inmates.
Howard County’s fixed-bed capacity is 364, requiring a significant portion of the jail population to sleep on portable bunks.
With measures like work release and changes in the local court system underway, officials had hoped to see a notable decrease in jail population numbers.
But it’s likely that Operation Law and Order Part 2 has played a role in the maintained level of jail overpopulation — at least during the summer months.
“Common sense would tell me that,” remarked McCann. “I don’t think we’d make 50 drug arrests in six weeks normally. There would be some, but not 50. Ten, 20, 30, probably.”
But it’s an unavoidable price to pay for what’s become an unprecedented series of drug investigations in Howard County, leading to busts across the country.
“The range of the investigation is probably the biggest,” said McCann. “As far as with the feds and with the local stuff and the people involved and the connections out west and just this whole thing, it’s probably” the biggest drug operation in local history.