Griffin daily news. (Griffin, Ga.) 1924-current, March 10, 1977, Image 19

Griffin daily news., March 10, 1977, Page Page 19, Image 19

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Newspaper Page TextInvestigative journalist Greene team traced heroin trail By James H. Dygert (Editor’s note: In May, 1972, Robert Greene of Newsday and two fellow reporters, Knut Royce and Les Payne, took up residence in a villa outside Istanbul. Their mis sion: to trace the flow of heroin from rural Turkish poppy fields, through processing centers to the network of traffickers in southern France and, ul timately, to the United States where the heroin epidemic was burgeoning. After seven months — and with the help of 11 other reporters — the Greene team finally publish ed 32 Pulitzer Prize-winning articles.) Bumping along the dirt road in a 1956 Dodge taxi driven by a Turk named Genghis Husseyin, Robert Greene and two fellow reporters from Newsday drove into the tiny village of Degirmendere, deep in the Turkish hills 400 miles from Istanbul. They were carrying guns, partly to pose as hunters, but also to impress the villagers. The villagers decided to be friendly. They let Greene and his companions stay for a cou ple of days and learn what they had come to learn — how Turkish farmers cultivated the poppy to get opium for sale to smugglers, starting the heroin trail that ended in the veins of American addicts. It was June, 1972, time for the last legal opium harvest before the new government prohibition took effect, a ban that Turkish authorities had agreed to impose under pressure from America. Greene and his cohorts rose with the villagers at 4:30 the next morning for a breakfast of hard bread, cheese, a soup containing yogurt and chicken entrails, hot milk, and tea. At 6:30, they went to the poppy field with the village women while the men remained at the tea house to play cards. The reporters watched as the women made cuts in the round pods of poppies with small sharp knives, stooping over the short plants as their wrists flicked. Opium gum oozed from the cuts. It would be left overnight to congeal into a clay-like form, then scraped from the pods the next day. The hardened gum would then be collected into round loaves for sale to From the book, “The Investigative Journalist,” by James H. Dygert, (c) 1976 by James H. Dygert, published by Prentice-Hall, Inc. smugglers and shipment to chemists who would convert it first to a morphine powder and then heroin. Opium, as Greene and the others learned, is only one fruit of the poppy. Its oil was used in cooking, its leaves for salad, its seeds on bread. The pods were fed to livestock, and the stalks became part of the ceilings in the village huts. Aside from the village’s age old tradition of defiance of the central government, the pop- SPECIAL PACKAGE OFFER living Col o/} , 4ft 1- 11X14 I 2 - Bxlo’s I ’ S X 7’ S I 8 - Wallets I * 0-lv $ 13.951 PORTRAITS BY THE FAMOUS Studios $3.00 Deposit Required. Balance of $10.95 Upon Delivery At Store No Age Limit — Work Guaranteed No Extra Charge For Groups. No Limit In Family. No Hidden Charges. NO CHECKS PLEASE I Food Giant I 1459 N. Expressway - Griffin, Ga. March 11 (Friday) Thru Hours: March 13 (Sunday) 10-1 4 2-6 - Sunday 12-4 py was too valuable a crop to be discontinued. The villagers told the reporters about hidden caches of poppy seeds that would be planted if the government ban were to be lifted, or needed to be violated. When Green ask ed for a look, a large bag of small, grain-like seed was shown him. He took a picture of it with a Polaroid camera. Greene also snapped pic tures of the opium loaves and the villagers, who were delighted to get some of the prints. A camera, he realized, was better for winning friends than a gun. Early in May. with the deci sion made to go full steam ahead, Greene, Knut Royce, and Les Payne took three week courses in Turkish. In Turkey, they rented a small villa on the outskirts of Istan bul, arranged for a housekeeper, and hired Genghis Husseyin as driver and interpreter. Between visits to poppy fields, they contacted underworld sources to learn how the smuggling was done. Illegal opium was bought from the poppy growers, the team found, by collectors who often were prominent businessmen or powerful politicians. Greene and his crew were able to identify several collectors in the villages and provinces of the poppy farming region. One of the largest was a member of the Turkish parliament. Collectors, the Greene team learned, were financed by patrons in Istanbul. These were wealthy merchants who, in addition to legitimate business pursuits, arranged for clandestine export of raw opium or morphine powder to the French labs. Many had close connections with in fluential business and govern ment leaders. They dealt with Corsican gang leaders operating on France’s Mediterranean coast and hired smugglers to deliver them the opium or morphine from the storage depots in Turkish villages. To compile a list of patrons, the reporters pieced together scraps of information picked up in restaurants, bars, hotel lobbies, and brothels. These tidbits had limited value, however, and the team had to turn down one chance to inter view a patron because his price was $40,000. Then, one rainy summer afternoon, a tall man with wraparound sunglasses and only half a thumb on his left hand came to their villa and offered them details about every patron in Istanbul except himself. Greene had no doubts about his visitor’s knowledge. He recognized him as an exporter-importer known to police as a mastermind behind illegal drug shipments out of Turkey for 25 years. The patron gave the reporters names, routes, prices, dates of shipments, political con nections, fine points on how the system worked. There was no Mr. Big, he said. “Ev- eryone is a chief.” Narcotics, he said, was the most profit able business in the world. The interview completed, he walked to the fireplace and ignited his pile of notes with a gold-plated cigarette lighter. “If the wrong people found me with this,” he said, “it would mean my death.” He returned twice more, each time bur ning his notes. He never asked for anything in return. Two smugglers told the reporters that a Bulgarian government agency guaranteed safe shipment of opium and morphine through Communist Bulgaria for smugglers who agreed to run guns to leftist guerillas in Turkey on their return trips. A police official in Istanbul con firmed their story. Bulgaria, the reporters had learned, lay on the main land route used by smugglers. Greene and Payne went to Istanbul, where the team made plans to travel over the land smuggling route through Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and Austria to Munich, Germany, and on into France. They con cocted an experiment to see for themselves how easy it was to smuggle heroin past border guards and customs of ficials. They put some white powdered sugar, which looks like heroin, into two clear plastic bags and packed them in their suitcases in easy view of anyone who checked their luggage. At the Istanbul airport customs inspection station, a man put out his hand, said, “How about something for the boys?” and accepted a dollar, but no one checked the reporters’ suitcases. In Vien na, airport porters wheeled the suitcases through a door marked, “Nothing to Declare,” without opening them. The team rented a car and, with the powdered sugar still in their luggage, drove south to the Yugoslavian border at the small Austrian village of Spielfield, a key en try point on the smuggling route. They were stopped by the Yugoslavs, but no one looked inside the car or in spected the trunk. In September the Greene team set up shop for the French phase of their in vestigation in a seaside villa on the southern coast of France near the heroin labs of Marseilles. Greene went often to Paris to track down leads developed in the United States and Turkey, and Payne made frequent trips to Munich. Meanwhile, a second team of reporters headed by Washington correspondent Anthony Marro began delving into the American end of the heroin trail. In France, the Greene team abandoned its cover pretenses. Greene realized at once that the French authorities suffered no delusions about his team’s true purpose. Their phone was tapped and they were followed by police. Baggage was twice Studying reading URBANA, 111. (AP) - The University of Illinois has estab lished a new center for the study of reading comprehension that will examine how children acquire their reading skills. “When we think of reading comprehension, we think of the books in our sociology or liter ature courses,” says Professor Richard C. Anderson, who will direct the project. “But, a lot of tasks require following direc tions or looking things up in an index or a catalog.” The ability to use reference materials is crucial to people in many fields, Anderson explains. “A cook or mechanic must be able to read with good com prehension to perform ade quately on the job.” Anderson says that children are not equipped with good reading skills, but must develop them. Researchers at the center will look at how children ac quire these skills, and how they move from translating symbols into speech to reading for com prehension. Most of the chil dren to be studied will be from grades three through eight. Beep! Beep! Doctor, go to delivery room at hospital You have 3 women who need to see you immediately. Could This Be You? Beepers Available Mobile Telephone & Pager, Inc. 850Everee 227-0909 misrouted, and film in the suitcases was later found to have been exposed. The team began to docu ment ties between the heroin underworld and politicians. As French gendarmes dogged his steps in Paris, Greene began to wonder if he had more to fear from the govern ment than the underworld. What bothered French authorities the most was the team’s acquisition of evidence about ties between the govern ment and the underworld. These traced back to Presi dent Charles de Gaulle’s use of gangsters for counter terrorist help against right wing opposition to De Gaulle’s granting of independence to Algeria. When the two reporting teams met back in Long Island in December to write their series, they had been to 13 countries. Fourteen re porters had taken part in the seven-month investigation. Arrests of heroin dealers, con gressional hearings, and a cut off in aid to Turkey followed publication of the articles, but Greene is skeptical about the probe’s accomplishments. 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