Criminals ‘commuting’

• By ALLEN M. JOHNSON JR.
• Advocate New Orleans bureau
• Published: Nov 23, 2008 - UPDATED: 12:00 a.m.

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NEW ORLEANS — Following a recent drugs-and-guns bust in St. Bernard Parish, narcotics officers asked a suspected drug dealer why he moved from eastern New Orleans to the suburbs.

“He said he felt safer outside the city,” Warren Rivera, a spokesman for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration in Metairie, said, repeating reports by the St. Bernard Parish Sheriff’s Office. “It’s pretty bad when the drug dealers are saying that.”

Acting on a tip by off-duty National Guard troops, the sheriff’s raid on the safety-minded suspect’s Chalmette home turned up 13 pounds of cocaine, four AK-47 assault rifles and $80,000 in cash. The DEA was not involved in the bust, but federal agents were obviously impressed by the size of the bust and the changing demographics of their moving targets.

Since Hurricane Katrina destroyed thousands of homes here in 2005, known drug dealers here have taken up residences as far away as Houma or East Baton Rouge Parish, said Lt. Kurt Vorhoof, a Louisiana State Police narcotics investigator based in Metairie.
For drug deals, they — “for lack of a better term” — commute to New Orleans, Vorhoof said.

In ways both small and large, hurricanes are changing the shadowy landscape of the  illegal drug trade in southern Louisiana,
according to interviews with agents of the DEA, FBI, State Police and prosecutors with the U.S. Attorney’s Office in New Orleans.

All of the law-enforcement  officers confirmed aspects of a local criminologist’s general theory of storm-related “crime migration.”
Some raised provocative points of their own.

Peter Scharf, a research professor at the Tulane University School of Public Health, said that hurricanes are changing the nature of violent drug crimes in southern Louisiana and that regional strategies are needed to meet the threat.

First, the mass evacuation during Katrina forced New Orleans drug dealers and users to find new supply sources in host cities like Houston.

Second, criminals are more mobile, post-Katrina. Consequently, “commuter murders” are a new phenomenon, Scharf said.

Authorities investigating drug-related murders in Baton Rouge and elsewhere are advised to look beyond their own city limits, as New Orleans police have done since Katrina, the professor said in a Sept. 10 interview.

In an e-mail response,  Sgt. Don Kelly, a spokesman for the Baton Rouge Police Department, said:

“The methods, tactics and patterns of drug dealers are constantly changing and evolving. They were doing so before Katrina and they were continuing to do since. It’s an ongoing cat-and-mouse game,” Kelly said.

“While the Houston-New Orleans drug transportation corridor may have strengthened with the post-Katrina relocations, it is certainly nothing new.”