Part I here.
The drug sting was going exactly as planned until the moment an undercover police officer from Chandler, Ariz., was shot through the chest.
Detective Carlos Ledesma died a short time later. Two of his fellow officers were badly wounded, and two of the suspects died in the shootout that erupted without warning inside a south Phoenix home in July 2010.
Narcotics detectives from the suburban Chandler Police Department were running a “reverse sting,” a controversial and dangerous tactic in which the police pose as the sellers in high-dollar drug deals. When the sale takes place, the police seize the cash and keep it for their agency’s use under Arizona’s forfeiture law. The expected haul from the operation that night was a quarter-million dollars the suspects agreed to pay for 500 pounds of marijuana.
Reverse stings have long been a lucrative staple for Chandler police.
The operations follow a predictable pattern. They are put together by confidential informants, who are sometimes paid on commission to find people willing to pay cash for large amounts of marijuana. Once a buyer is found, police get the marijuana from the department’s evidence room and pose as sellers. After the drugs and money are exchanged, the agency’s SWAT team moves in to make the arrests and take the money.
Most of the reverse stings run by Chandler police take place far outside the city’s boundaries, most often in Phoenix. Of the 20 reverse stings the agency staged in the year leading up to Ledesma’s death, only four had any connection to Chandler, court records show.
The operation Ledesma died in followed the pattern precisely until the shooting started.
The deal was put together in a day through an informant Chandler police used for about two months, according to a heavily redacted police report on the shooting.
The informant contacted narcotics detectives on July 28, 2010, and told them he had been approached by the representative of several prospective buyers who wanted to purchase 500 pounds of marijuana and had “cash on hand.” The price they eventually settled on was $250,000.
The operation was planned that afternoon, according to the police report. One detective would accompany the informant to the sale location, a house on West Maldonado Drive in south Phoenix. Two others, including Ledesma, would be in a second car with the marijuana in the trunk, acting as delivery men.
About 6:30 p.m., a single undercover detective and the informant arrived at the house. Ledesma and another detective were in the delivery vehicle nearby, waiting for a call that the money had arrived.
Had the deal gone as planned, it would have been one of Chandler’s biggest cash seizures in a year, according to city and court records. Only two other forfeiture cases brought in more cash for the agency; both were reverse stings in Phoenix.
Of the $3.2 million Chandler police raised through forfeitures in the 12 months prior to Ledesma’s death, more than $2.7 million came through reverse stings.
With so much money at stake, police have an incentive to gear law enforcement toward crimes that will result in forfeitures, and to take chances they might not take if they could not profit from their efforts, said David Harris, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh whose areas of expertise include criminal law and police procedures.
The prospect of a big payoff has a corrupting influence on police priorities, Harris said. It entices police to go outside their city boundaries to put together high-dollar transactions, sometimes to the detriment of targeting less lucrative but more damaging street-level crimes within their communities, he said.
“You are left at a minimum with the question of would you do this, would you be engaging in these high-risk activities, were it not for the money at stake?” Harris said. “Would seizing their money just to bring them down be enough for you to commit the personnel and resources, and put those people at risk, just for that if you didn’t have the money there?”
Commander Dale Walters of the Chandler Police Department says the answer for his agency is “yes.”
“Would I go over to west Phoenix to seize 500 pounds (of marijuana) and arrest a number of drug organization key players in doing so? You bet. A hundred times over,” Walters said.
But a review of large marijuana busts made by Chandler police shows marijuana traffickers are rarely targeted in traditional undercover operations outside the city’s boundaries. Chandler police went outside the city only twice to stage traditional stings targeting dealers willing to sell large amounts of marijuana during the year-long period reviewed by the Goldwater Institute.
Coming Tomorrow: Part 3: The risky ‘reverse sting’ bust goes bad
Mark Flatten is an investigation reporter for the Goldwater Institute, an independent government watchdog based in Phoenix, Ariz.
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