Justice deposes the ruling king of cocaine wars June 4, 1985 Say farewell to one of Dade County"s most treacherous outlaws. His name is Conrado Valencia Zalgado, but he is better known as El Loco.

He was the original cocaine cowboy-a drug runner, machine gunner, bond jumper, high roller, master of disguise. In his prime, he made Pacino"s Scarface look like Tommy Tune, but now Conrado"s day is pa.s.sed, his luck evaporated.

On May 22, a Dade County judge ordered El Loco to prison for the next century or so, thus closing a wild saga in our cavalcade of crime. For once, the good guys actually won.

Valencia was the bullet-headed, bare-chested maniac who hung from a speeding Audi and fired a submachine gun at rival c.o.ke peddlers on the Florida Turnpike Extension six years ago. When the cops caught up with the car, they found a dead Colombian named Jaime in the trunk.

Conrado, of course, professed total surprise.

Three months later, the late Jaime"s friends retaliated, blasting two of El Loco"s soldiers in the infamous Dadeland Ma.s.sacre.

South Florida"s image never fully recovered from that summer of 1979, and the torrent of national publicity that followed. Those of us who covered the cocaine wars imagined Dodge City reborn-each day seemed to bring a new atrocity, a new corpse (35 drug killings in one six-month stretch).

Along with their precious powder, the Colombians imported an astounding brand of violence. The crimes were almost impossible to solve-suspects and victims alike possessed an impenetrable array of fake names and phony pa.s.sports. Among these alien gangsters, El Loco was a king.

After the turnpike shootout, he was charged with attempted murder and tossed in jail, but not for long. Conrado came up with the proverbial cash in a briefcase-$105,000 to be exact-posted bond and immediately disappeared.

He moved his family and his cocaine network to Los Angeles, where he became a laid-back Valley guy. He began calling himself Max, and cruised the Topanga Hills in a red 1948 DeSoto convertible (vanity tags, of course). He was having a swell time until some smart cops went through his garbage and found a phone bill with lots of calls to Miami.

From then on, El Loco"s days were numbered. One summer night in 1982, Conrado Valencia opened the door to a girlfriend"s apartment and wound up sucking on a gun barrel. A Los Angeles policeman was on the other end.

A few days later Metro-Dade detective Al Lopez and I went to California to see the legendary Loco. He was clanging around the Los Angeles County Jail in body manacles, and he was in a crummy mood. The cops out there had thrown the book at him; the cops back in Dade County were waiting their turn. El Loco didn"t want to talk. Not to me, not to Lopez, not to anybody.

A California judge gave Conrado 30 years in prison, and last month he returned to Miami to face, at long last, the charges from the Turnpike shootout. He was convicted swiftly and on May 22, acting Circuit Judge Norman Gerstein sentenced "Jose Ramon Ruiz" (one of Conrado"s many aliases) to 125 years.

Even if Loco escapes, which is always a possibility, he will find a different world awaiting him. The bloodiest era of the cocaine cowboys seems to be over, and flamboyant enforcers are less in demand. The word"s gotten back to South America: Low profile means more profit.

True, cocaine is more plentiful now than in the summer of 1979, but at least the malls and highways are a little safer. These days most drug killers are polite enough to do their work in private.

Maybe that"s the best we can hope for.

Adios, Conrado. Don"t bother to write.

Dade"s latest drug fight all wet-pa.s.s it around November 5, 1985 Everybody sing: Ninety-nine bottles of-on the wall, ninety-nine bottles of-. Take one down, pa.s.s it around ...

Congratulations, Dade County. No longer are we merely the Murder Capital of America; now we"re the Specimen Capital, too.

First it was a couple hundred Miami police, proudly lining up to give samples to prove they"re drug free. Not to be outdone, the Hialeah police followed suit. Next came the idea to test firefighters and even garbage collectors.

If they keep going at this rate, they"re going to need a tanker truck to haul all this stuff away.

Lester Freeman of the Miami Citizens Against Crime has come up with the nuttiest scheme of all: All 52 MCAC members-staid bankers, lawyers, civic leaders, media honchos-are to have their exalted urine screened for drugs this week.

Curiously, the results will be reported anonymously, no names attached.

So much for this week"s bizarre contribution to the national news: Miami"s most prominent citizens cheerfully urinating into a cup to prove they"re not whacked out on dope.

The point of this distasteful little charade? "A leadership demonstration," they say.

This isn"t leadership, it"s vaudeville. Is there another place in the civilized world where the Catholic archbishop has to urinate into a cup to prove he"s clean?

As a member of MCAC, that"s what the Rev. Edward McCarthy is going to do this week. Talk about trying the Lord"s patience.

Who"d have expected such embarra.s.sing publicity from the same folks so obsessed with purifying South Florida"s image? Welcome to Miami. Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled ma.s.ses-and how about some urine, while you"re at it.

True, this kind of drug testing has become quite the national rage. The military uses it, and major league baseball wants to make it mandatory.

But a preplanned ma.s.s urinalysis is nothing but a gross publicity stunt. It doesn"t prove you"re honest. It doesn"t prove you"re competent. It doesn"t even prove you"re drug-free.

All it proves is that you know how to hit a cup.

Experts have contended that this kind of a.s.sembly-line testing can be unreliable, error-p.r.o.ne and unfair.

"The issue has become preposterous," says Dr. John P. Morgan of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York. "It"s like hunting Communists."

Dr. Morgan, who has written and testified extensively on ma.s.s urinalysis, says the most common type of test is flawed by "stunningly high false-positive results." The odds of a mistake are frequently compounded, he says, by incompetent lab work.

"G.o.d forbid you take the sample and mix it up with somebody else"s. Or suppose you mismark one of the cups," adds Erich Gressmann, a toxicologist at the Dade County Medical Examiner"s Office.

No wonder the MCAC doesn"t want its members" names on these jars. There"d be h.e.l.l to pay if Frank Borman"s specimen somehow got mixed up with that of, say, rock musician David Crosby.

Even if the urine test is done correctly, it might show that you haven"t snorted cocaine during the last 48 hours, or smoked a joint in a couple weeks, or dropped diazepam since yesterday morning. And that"s all it shows.

And n.o.body in their right minds (Chuck Muncie being the possible exception) is going to voluntarily give a urine sample while he"s flying high.

Ma.s.s urine testing is no way to get rid of crooked cops, and it"s certainly no way for South Florida"s civic pillars to demonstrate "leadership."

If they"re so darn proud, maybe they ought to take the test in public. They could rent the Miami Beach Convention Hall, charge admission, maybe auction off a few celebrity specimens.

Call it Bladder-Mania.

Everybody sing ...

"Cocaine" tea has bitter taste of controversy January 13, 1986 As I write this, I"m wired to the gills on cocaine. Speeding like a bug-eyed banshee. Flying first-cla.s.s on the David Crosby Express.

That"s what urinalysis shows.

The only trouble is, I haven"t touched any cocaine. Not a single toot. Is the test wrong? Technically, no.

But it"s not right, either. Here"s what happened and why it ill.u.s.trates a hazard of drug-testing mania.

Last week you probably heard about Health IncaTea, a Peruvian product sold in health food stores. Health Inca is an herbal tea made from coca leaves. "Just one cup leaves you feeling up," the box promises. The leaves are purportedly "decocainized" to remove the cocaine-the same process used for Coca-Cola.

However, the Journal of the American Medical a.s.sociation recently reported that Health Inca Tea was not cocaine-free, and that traces of the drug turned up in urine samples of 36 tea drinkers.

The amount was quite small and not considered harmful for normal persons (Andean dwellers have been chewing coca leaves for centuries with no ill effects). But, as you might expect, some stooge in California drank 80 tea bags" worth of Health Inca and complained of "severe agitation." Surprise, surprise.

The reaction to the journal article was predictable.The DBA and FDA immediately announced plans to rea.s.sess the legality of Health IncaTea, and wholesalers yanked crateloads out of circulation. Meanwhile, health food stores were inundated by consumers who generously offered to buy up all remaining coca tea bags (no doubt to keep them from the hands of impressionable youngsters).

The controversy was too crazy to pa.s.s up. The other day I bought one of the last boxes of Health IncaTea from Beehive Natural Foods in South Miami. Dr. Lee Hearn, a well-known Miami toxicologist and drug expert, offered to test my urine after I drank the tea.

Honestly, this is not great stuff. My sister remarked that it smells like old lawn cuttings, and the taste is not dissimilar. The only way to choke it down is with honey.

Last Tuesday I drank less than two ounces. A day later I stopped by Dr. Hearn"s lab to give a urine sample-sure enough, the test revealed minute but detectable traces of a cocaine metabolite.

The big experiment began: On Wednesday I drank five cups between 8:30 P.M. and 11:30 P.M. That"s 35 ounces of tea. G.o.d hasn"t invented the bladder that can hold 35 ounces of hot tea, so it was a long night.

According to the journal report, each tea bag contains 4.8 milligrams of cocaine. Five tea bags are roughly equivalent to one line of street cocaine.

After the first cup, I felt slightly peppy and that"s all. Pulse: normal. Frankly, I get more of a buzz from a can of Pepsi.

Even after five cups I wasn"t exactly hanging from the ceiling by my fingernails. I wasn"t grinding my teeth. I wasn"t paranoid and I wasn"t euphoric. I wasn"t even doing my party impression of Robin Leach.

What I was, was bloated. Slept like a log. Pulse: normal.

The experiment continued: Thursday, 6 A.M. Groggily I aimed for the little bottle. Then the ultimate etiquette question of the 1980s: Exactly how does one carry a urine sample?

I tried an inside pocket of my coat, but then I thought: What if I get in a messy car accident? People will think I"m bleeding this stuff.

Next I tried the glove compartment, but then I thought: What if the top of the bottle comes unscrewed? It would ruin my new ZZTop tape, not to mention the auto warranty.

So I put the sample in my briefcase, which contains nothing of value, and drove to Toxicology Testing Service. On Friday Dr. Hearn called with the news: "A good strong positive."

Under both the common EMIT drug screen and the more sophisticated gas chromatography ma.s.s spectrometry, my urine tested positive. It showed cocaine and two related substances, benzoylecgonine and methylecgonine, the latter in such concentration that the test went off the scale, Dr. Hearn said.

"There was a bunch of cocaine," he said. "We found a complete pattern of someone who uses cocaine...a very high positive."

Except that all I had was coca tea, a legal product, purchased and consumed legally.

"It"s not decocainized," Dr. Hearn a.s.serted. The amount of cocaine in Health IncaTea probably isn"t enough to get you high, he said, adding, "The only thing it can do is get you in trouble."

Why? Because many companies and branches of the military automatically fire, discharge or refuse to hire anyone whose urine shows benzoylecgonine. Courts, employers and DUI prosecutors have long recognized this as proof that someone has used illicit cocaine.

But, as shown, that"s not necessarily so.

An expert witness in many drug trials, Dr. Hearn had never heard of Health IncaTea before last week. Most drug labs hadn"t. It isn"t known how many other such products are floating around.

Dr. Hearn plans more tests on the Health Inca brand. When he called the health food store to order a box, the price had jumped from $7 to $24-the true spirit of free enterprise!

I told my boss that I failed the drug test but he refused to fire me, even though it would have made a better ending to the column.

The real ending is not so funny.

With consternation Dr. Hearn described the current case of a U.S. Air Force man in Panama. The Air Force wants to dump him because his urine tested positive for cocaine. All along, the serviceman has insisted that he"s never used the drug.

What he has done, he says, is drink a blend of coca tea, purchased regularly (and legally) at a small Panama shop.

Last week Dr. Hearn called Air Force investigators and told them to go find a box of that tea.

This time it"s not a lark. This time a man"s career is at stake.

TV drug raids rated a "G"-for goofy December 5, 1986 The other night, while watching Geraldo Rivera attempt his now-famous undercover TV drug deal, I found myself sort of wishing that some crazed doper would do us all a favor and shoot him.

Not kill him or anything truly serious-maybe just a flesh wound to the b.u.t.tocks, though the irony of such an injury would have been lost on most viewers.

In case you missed the action, Rivera hosted a two-hour doc.u.mentary that included live drug busts from several cities, including Pompano Beach and Miami. The audience got to see real-life footage of cops pulling their guns, busting down crack-house doors, handcuffing squirming suspects and seizing relatively minuscule amounts of dope.

I can"t say it wasn"t exciting-drug raids are. Whether staging one for a national television audience is smart law enforcement or self-serving hok.u.m is another matter.

In Houston, for example, the big take was less than a gram of cocaine and an ounce of gra.s.s; on the positive side, a reporter there says it was the first time in recent memory that the sheriff had bothered to show up at a crime scene.

As expected, Rivera"s toughest critics were those most intimate with the narcotics business. Lou Garcia, a retired smuggler I"ve known for several years, tuned in to Geraldo"s performance Tuesday night and quickly became disgusted. "It was a joke," he said. "I didn"t finish. I switched over to HBO."

The problem wasn"t the subject matter, but the show biz approach. Rivera gets so excited by the sight of his own face on camera that he darn near hyperventilates. You want to put a cold compress on his forehead and make him lie down for a while.

The program"s goofiest moment came when Geraldo announced that he was going undercover to do a drug deal himself. The first time, he looked like he was on his way to a casting call for Pirates of Penzance. You had to see this getup to appreciate it. As luck would have it, the drugs turned out to be fake, too.

The next time, Geraldo waited alone in a "plush" Fort Lauderdale hotel, where he posed as a cocaine customer from New York.

(Of all the police departments in the country, leave it to the Broward Sheriffs Office to go along with this nutty scheme. Imagine how they must have explained it to their liability lawyers: "OK, guys, what we thought we"d do is get one of the most recognizable TV journalists in America and let him go into a room to buy a kilo of c.o.ke from a bunch of armed criminals, just for fun...") So guess what happened. The bad guy recognized Geraldo. And why not, since this time his entire disguise consisted of Brylcreem and a pair of sungla.s.ses. He might as well have worn an ABC blazer and had Barbara Walters on his arm.

Anyway, after a bit of bl.u.s.ter the deal gets done, the cops burst in and Geraldo gets the last laugh. Afterward, a Broward detective chortles at the hapless c.o.ke peddler: "You"re now the most famous dope dealer in America." Make that the dumbest dope dealer in America.

The apparent message of this little escapade is that any media yahoo can do a drug agent"s job, though I"m not too sure. Last week a c.o.ke dealer opened fire on three DBA agents in Miami, and I"m kind of sorry Geraldo wasn"t there to see how the part is really played.

Maybe Media Vice Cops will become an exciting new weekly series. I"m sure that Nick (Prime-Time) Navarro, the Broward sheriff, would happily sign on as celebrity technical adviser.

Personally, I"d tune in anytime to see Jane Pauley try an undercover drug deal. Granted, it would have to be an unusually perky drug deal, but I bet the Nielsens would be monstrous. Likewise Dan Rather could probably be persuaded to score a dime of black-tar heroin, if he were careful not to get beat up.

Pretty soon they"d all be lined up to take a turn undercover in the fast lane-Peter Jennings, Tom Brokaw, all the big shots, with the possible exception of Irving R. Levine. I don"t think smugglers go for bow ties.

From Michigan, direct to you: drug-free urine March 27, 1987 The job of a U.S. postal carrier grows more perilous every day. A bottle of urine arrived in Wednesday"s mail. The package was open; fortunately, the bottle was not.

I don"t know whose urine it was, but I know whose it is now.

Mine. I paid for it--more precisely, the newspaper paid for it. And with all due modesty, I think this little gem belongs in the Expense Account Hall of Fame: "Two ounces of urine-$19.95."

People all over the country are buying other people"s urine. The reason is to decoy drug tests, implemented by many companies to identify employees who have recently used marijuana, cocaine or other substances.