Teenage Wasteland
It doesn’t matter what time it is. Do you know where your children are? If you live in Plano, one of Texas’ toniest suburbs, they may be strung out on heroin somewhere. Or on trial for distributing it. Or dead.
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Except in life-threatening cases or death, hospitals are not required to notify parents of emergency room admittances if their child is sixteen or older, so often parents had no idea what sort of trouble their children were getting into. There were few obvious signs to look for, since many addicts—unless they had graduated to needles for a stronger high and had been shooting up for a substantial amount of time—often maintained their grades and a healthy, clean-cut appearance. And many parents refused to believe that their kids were using drugs in the first place. “For parents, the denial is incredible,” Alexander says. “I had one man push me to the wall after I’d saved his son’s life and tell me that I’d faked the drug test, that it couldn’t be heroin. He told me it would ruin his son’s chances of getting into college.”
SERGEANT AUBREY PAUL is well liked by his undercover officers, a boisterous, tight-knit bunch whose long hours working together have forged an intense camaraderie. With short brown hair, a clean shave, and the rigid posture of a onetime military man, 35-year-old Paul is more buttoned-down than the other undercover narcs, although he can easily transform himself from cop to civilian with a quick shift in body language. Slouching in the seat of his pickup with an easy smile, drawing out the cadence of his native Louisiana, he is equally convincing as a good ol’ boy looking for the next high.
In the summer of 1997 Paul taught what he knew about undercover work to Margaret Owens (not her real name), a then-28-year-old police academy recruit he hoped could lead them to the teenagers dealing heroin in Plano’s high schools. “That subculture is very difficult to penetrate,” Paul explains. “When we sent an undercover officer into the schools in 1986, he could hang out in the smoking lounge with the kids in the Molly Hatchet T-shirts and say, ‘Hey, do you know where I can get some weed?’ But now everyone looks the same, and its harder to tell who’s using and who’s not. It has gone further underground. You can’t go up to a group of football players and say, ‘Hey, where can I get some heroin?’”
Owens seemed like the perfect candidate: a willowy blond who had grown up in the suburbs of North Dallas, she looked the part, her body still slight enough to be a teenage girl’s, her face youthful and freckled across the bridge of her nose. Paul and the other undercover officers taught her the tricks of the trade and then enrolled her at Plano Senior High using doctored copies of her original high school transcripts. They bought her the props she would need: a cell phone, a red convertible, and an apartment a few blocks away from school. She was also given a new name, a different driver’s license and social security number, and a cover story: Her parents in Southern California had become exasperated with her wild behavior and had sent her to Plano to live with her uncle (played, when necessary, by Paul) until she straightened herself out.
“I would sit in the mall for hours studying the other girls, watching what they wore and how they talked and what music they listened to,” Owens recalls. “I had to forget everything they’d taught me at the police academy, where they drilled it into us to stand ramrod straight and speak with authority, and remember what it felt like to be seventeen and unsure of yourself again.” She streaked her hair with highlights, put extra foundation on her face so that her skin would break out, and painted her nails with intricate designs that she hoped would spark conversations with other girls. For the first day of school, she carefully picked out an outfit: baggy hip huggers that flared slightly at the bottom, silver thumb rings, and a snug, short-sleeved shirt. “I thought I could feel their eyes burning into the back of my head, thinking, ‘She’s too old. She’s too old,’” Owens says. “I was sure the lines around my eyes were going to give me away.” During classes, she affected a disinterested gaze, alternately drawing in her notebook and staring out the window, listening in on conversations where she could. Cigarettes weren’t allowed on school grounds, but she kept a pack of Marlboros in her purse and left her bag open alongside her desk so that they were within easy view. It was a good trick: Girls approached her after class and asked if they could bum a cigarette, and by the end of the day, she was beginning to collect names. “They bought it,” she wrote in her journal that night. “I’m a teenager.”
New students were the norm rather than the exception in Plano’s sprawling senior high schools, and she easily became friends with students who had access to a wide array of drugs. She began buying pot and then chiva from them after school; friends were kept at arm’s length so that they wouldn’t ask too many prying questions, and she avoided parties where it might be considered odd that she wasn’t using the chiva that she was so often in search of. Friends sometimes took her along to buy from bigger dealers, and when they dashed out of the car to trade money for caps, she quickly wrote down dealers’ license plate numbers and addresses on the soles of her shoes. “She played it off real well,” explains Jonathan Kollman, who unknowingly led Owens to other dealers and was prosecuted with evidence that she had gathered. “One time someone sold us empty caps, and she got real mad, just like a junkie would.”
Owens transferred to two other schools during the course of the academic year, gaining the trust of students with a few simple overtures: mouthing off to teachers, wearing revealing clothes that pushed the rules, even getting her tongue pierced in Deep Ellum with some acquaintances. Her act went over well with everyone except for one boy, the older brother of a girl she bought drugs from. When the girl told Owens on the phone that her brother thought she was a narc, she laughed it off easily enough, but privately it sent a chill through her.
The arrests came on a drizzly gray Monday morning in March, when dozens of squad cars pulled up to Plano’s high schools after the bell rang for first period. Students were pulled out of class and handcuffed in the principal’s office, and they looked bewildered as they were led outside. All told, 38 people were hauled off, 19 of them students—a major victory for Paul and his officers, who had nabbed key members of the Pineda family, the city’s top heroin dealers, the previous week with the help of state and federal law enforcement agencies.
As news of the undercover operation in Plano’s high schools broke on several Dallas TV stations, the undercover officers were elated, and Paul planned to take Owens and his crew out for a steak dinner to celebrate. Early that afternoon, however, he got a tip that a car heading south toward Dallas would be coming through Plano along Central Expressway carrying several pounds of methamphetamines: the drug that law enforcement officials fear will soon rival heroin in North Dallas. Paul knew his department had a job to do, and in the end, there was no celebration that night, only fast food and the droning sound of traffic, as his officers hunkered down in unmarked cars by the side of the expressway, waiting to fight this next battle.
ON A BRISK TUESDAY EVENING THIS OCTOBER, Paul and I drove down Central Expressway to Dallas, where he promised to show me a spot where Plano teens were now coming to buy heroin. Heroin is currently much harder to come by in Plano after the police stings, teenagers had told me, but in Dallas, black tar was easier to find than pot, and even China White—a stronger, more refined heroin from Asia—was becoming readily available. Paul is keenly aware that even his department’s monumental successes are short-lived, but he remains fiercely committed to his task. “If we hadn’t aggressively pursued these dealers,” he observes, “many more kids would have died.”
Rounding the corner of a gas station in a well-to-do neighborhood, we spotted three teenagers in a white Volkswagen, its engine running, parked toward the rear of the lot. Paul read its license plate numbers over the police radio to a dispatcher back at headquarters, who confirmed that the car was registered to a Plano address. A few moments later, after a dealer drove by, the Volkswagen lurched out of the gas station and began the strange cat-and-mouse game that many users had previously described to me. Weaving down side streets, the Volkswagen followed the dealer until he abruptly turned his car into an alleyway and stopped, leaving the motor running. The Volkswagen driver leapt out of the car, handed over cash, and shoved what was handed to him into his pocket; then they both sped off into the night. We briefly tailed the dealer until he lost us in a maze of side streets. “They’re here every night,” Paul said after we had lost sight of him. “We’ll catch up with him sooner or later.”
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