Nick Reding

by Methland: The Death;Life of an American Small Town

  “Here we are,” Loya said, “the most technologically advanced nation in history, and we have thousands of people writing hundreds of thousands of names in notebooks. We pass a law, and then we basically tell these huge companies that they’re not responsible for complying. It’s stunning.”

  In reaction, the cottage meth industry has become more efficient than Loya ever imagined. Beavis and Butt-Head labs have become more like midlevel operations, he said. Smurfing has become an industry in its own right. Having developed not just local but also national distribution chains, Smurfers drive from state to state and region to region buying cold medicine and selling it to increasingly productive and organized networks of batchers. Locally, Smurfs pay pharmacy employees to ignore the fact they are stealing cold medicine.

  “CVS or Walgreens employees,” said Loya, “make more in two minutes of pretending not to notice theft than they make in a week of standing behind the counter. It’s a no-brainer.” As a result, Loya said, lab numbers are still down compared with their all-time highs in 2004 and 2005, but production is way up.

  What’s more, Loya’s sources indicate that cocaine seizures along the Mexican border are at a twelve-year high, noting that the last time cocaine was so heavily consumed was in 1996, when Haislip’s law briefly depressed the DTOs’ meth market. Loya attributes the increase in cocaine seizures this time to his own hard-fought success with getting the Mexican government to limit pseudo imports. What Loya fears, though, is that local meth producers will keep the market alive while the DTOs, flush with money from a booming cocaine business, will have time and capital not only to recover from a temporary setback, but to become even stronger.

  “I mean,” Loya said, “I’m stuck in a time warp. It’s twelve years ago all over again, with the Mexicans biding their time with cocaine till they can figure out a way to get back the part of the meth business we just took away. Will they go to Canada for pseudo, or North Korea, or Colombia? Who knows. My guess is Canada. What’s certain is they’ll go somewhere. Because the addicts are here. The money is here. The Smurfs are keeping everyone high while the Mexicans reorganize.”

  Loya noted that the DTOs will never abandon the meth business—no matter how good the cocaine market—since, with meth, the DTOs control manufacture, distribution, and retail. Meth is a peach of a business. It’s also possibly, as Patricia Case once noted, “the most American drug.” Coupled with the American mania for work, it’s as though meth’s ever-reassorting genome is a part of our own. As Loya’s friend Bill Ruzzamenti, another former DEA special agent in charge, once said to me, “Meth truly will never go away. It can’t. It’s too big a piece of what we are.”

  While Loya waits to see what the DTOs will do next, he continues to privately negotiate with pharmaceutical companies and the retail chains that sell their wares, in order, as he put it, “to make them see what’s at stake.” The hope is that if NARCS will take the pressure off state legislatures, they might amend their meth laws to look more like what Loya and DEA had in mind all along.

  “You know,” said Loya, “I’m sympathetic to big business. I’m not trying to make things hard for them. I just say to CVS via the lobbyists, ‘Look, your clerks are in cahoots with crooks. We’re going to take them down, and you’ll look bad. Do you really want your company to look like a criminal organization?’ ” Loya paused. “I say that, and I try to stay calm while freaking houses are blowing up in Jefferson County. But I can’t stay calm anymore. So then I just yell.”

  A few days before we spoke, Loya told me, he’d had a meeting with the vice president of NARCS. Loya listened while the man reiterated that clerks and pharmacists in the employ of CVS and Rite-Aid aren’t police officers. They should not, said the NARCS vice president, be expected to tell customers that they can’t buy cold medicine. If someone was shoplifting, the man wanted to know, would the clerk apprehend, cuff, and jail the shoplifter? No—he’d call the police, as he should. And anyway, he went on, the pharmacies aren’t legally obligated to do anything more than what they’re doing. Drugs and drug manufacturers are police business, not theirs. The Combat Meth Act makes that very clear, he told Loya.

  “After all these years, and all these meetings, and all these conferences,” said Loya, “I started to do something that I’ve never, ever done: I started to get up and walk out. Midsentence. It was like I just . . .” Here Loya paused. His first street buy, as a twenty-year-old agent with the California BNE, in San Francisco in 1968, was meth. He’s been contending with it ever since. “It was like,” he went on, “something finally broke.”

  But Loya didn’t get up to leave. He remained seated. Then he stopped listening. He let the vice president talk, and he tried not to hear a word of what he said, instead summoning all the patience he could muster from the deepest reaches of his soul. Finally, said Loya, the man’s mouth stopped moving. That’s when Loya started to explain, one more time.

  In April 2008, Nathan Lein was elected to the Oelwein city council. He won, said Clay Hallberg, in a landslide. The Ninth Ward, where Nathan lives in a small white house across the street from a former meth lab, is no longer just his home—it’s now his charge, too. In May, Major graduated from community college in In dependence with a degree in machinery repair. Bob, the leader of the Sons of Silence, was arrested along with his daughter—Major’s ex-girlfriend, and the mother of his son, Buck—for manufacture of methamphetamine with the intent to distribute. Bob and his daughter await sentencing. Buck’s half sister, Caroline, is in foster care. Buck begins kindergarten in the fall.

  Lori Arnold was released from the medium-security federal work camp for women in Greenville, Illinois, on June 3, 2008. She moved to Chandler, Arizona, to live near one of her brothers. One week later, she took her first mandatory urine analysis, to test for illegal substances in her system. She failed, and was sentenced to five years’ probation.

  The last time I called Roland Jarvis, in July 2008, he was sitting in the living room of his mother’s two-bedroom house. It had been more than three years since we had watched Goodfellas in that same room and Jarvis began unwinding the strands of his two-decade struggle with meth. I was glad to hear his voice, after my calls had gone unanswered for over twelve months. At one point, I had heard a rumor that he or his ex-wife had committed suicide.

  “No,” he said, “no one’s committed suicide.”

  Aside from that, it was strikes and gutters, as some people say in Oelwein: ups and downs, goods and bads. Jarvis’s middle son had finally received a new kidney and was doing well. Jarvis’s mother, though, would be headed back to jail soon, this time for driving drunk. His two daughters were doing well, too; one had graduated from Oelwein High that spring. He’d been fishing with them at the town lake just the other day.

  “Same old, same old,” said Jarvis.

  I asked him if he was clean.

  “Not really,” he said. “But I’m still here.”

  When we hung up, I thought about a trip I’d taken in the summer of 2005. I was still looking for a town to write about then. I’d been to Oelwein twice that summer, spending about a month there. I’d been driving a lot, too, dropping into towns I’d read about in newspapers, asking people to talk to me about meth. I spent a lot of time in emergency rooms, in courtrooms, and in county jails. One weekend, I drove five hundred miles from Kentucky to Iowa, then back again. The problem is that I wasn’t sure what I was looking at, exactly, or even what I was looking for. So like everyone else, I went to California.

  I started out in San Diego, where I met Tony Loya. Then, for a week, I drove around the Central Valley, finally ending up in San Jose. Along the way, I tried to insinuate myself into every town with a motel vacancy. The Central Valley was just as Steinbeck had described it: hot, flat, and dusty, the cool, distant mountains a promise, or maybe just a mirage. It felt like Iowa in the summer, or the Dakotas, or even Missouri. I didn’t know what I was looking at when I saw how some of the canals in the most isolated parts of the valley ran
red. Later, a DEA agent told me that, in addition to providing water for the most prolific farm country in the nation, the canals were dump sites for red phosphorus from meth superlabs hidden among the orange and pecan groves.

  At the end of that trip, I took a late-afternoon flight from San Jose to JFK Airport, in New York. Three hours after takeoff, looking at a map in the back of an in-flight magazine, I reckoned us to be over eastern South Dakota, heading for Iowa. At that point, the plane would have been at the nadir of its arc, where it would remain for a short while before beginning the long, smooth descent. With the sun slanting low in our wake, the land was awash in the refracted warmth of the day’s dying light. In the glow, and from thirty-five thousand feet, it was impossible to see the little towns below.

  At that height, too, we were caught in the temporal netherworld that is specific to late-afternoon and evening transcontinental flights. The curvature of the earth was clearly visible. Ahead, to the north and east, the air was blue and dark. Behind, to the south and west, the air glowed red. It was truly as though the night were pushing itself across the vast contours of the land, driving the day before it. Below us, though, in Sioux Falls and in Algona, the light, along with the notion of possibility, remained.

  Fifteen minutes later, even the largest of the land’s features began to fade as the plane moved east. My mood soured. I didn’t want to go back to New York. Instead, I yearned to return to Missouri for the first time in years. We were too far north to see St. Louis, so I searched for the Mississippi among the tiny, sparse points of light visible against the opaque land. At least the river, I thought, might give me some fleeting connection to my home.

  Moments later, I found what I was looking for in the growing darkness. With my eyes, I followed the glowing river north, knowing that one of the tiny clusters of light must be Oelwein. Suddenly I knew what I was looking at, and where I needed to go.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Of all the people to whom I’m indebted for help in making this book possible, the people of Oelwein, Iowa, are at the top of the list. Without their willingness to let me into their lives, and to stay embedded there—at times annoyingly, I’m sure, like a tick—Methland would have never been. Nathan Lein and Clay Hallberg’s intelligence, candor, and abiding sense of humanity make them truly remarkable people. I’m also deeply obliged to Mayor Larry Murphy for letting me watch at close range as he whittled away at Oelwein’s troubles. In a time when the word “hero” has been overused to the point that it’s lost all meaning, Larry serves as a reminder of what a hero looks and acts like. Thanks also to Jamie Porter, Jeremy Logan, Tammy Hallberg, Tim Gilson, Charlie Hallberg, Alan Coffman, Jan Boleyn, and Mildred Binstock.

  There are other Iowans, too, to whom I owe my deepest gratitude. Chief among them are the addicts, former addicts, and traffickers who have let me use their stories in the making of this book. It takes tremendous courage to open one’s life to public scrutiny, especially a life that has in some ways been defined by crime. In that capacity, I’m grateful to Roland Jarvis, who spoke with me over the course of nearly four years in the hope that others would not fall prey to the addiction that has monopolized his life for two decades. Thanks to Lori Arnold for the many letters she sent me from federal prison. Her willingness to talk—and to act as a sounding board for my own understanding of meth trafficking in America—was crucial to the making of this book. Many thanks also to the Cooper family—Joseph, Bonnie, Buck, and Thomas, a.k.a. Major—who, along with Judy Murphy, were elemental in my understanding of how meth affects not just parents and their children, but communities. And finally, thanks to Jeffrey William Hayes who took the time to write hundreds of pages of letters to me from Leavenworth Prison.

  Tony Loya has been battling the country’s meth problem for thirty-seven years. Like Larry Murphy, Nathan Lein, and Clay Hallberg, Tony is an indisputable—if unheralded—hero. He was also invaluable in providing insight into the trends that have de-fined the meth epidemic since 1972, the year he made his first drug buy as a young agent with the California Bureau of Narcotics Enforcement. If anyone will ever succeed in curtailing this epidemic, it will be Tony.

  A number of state and federal narcotics agents, police officers, and sheriff’s deputies helped me a great deal, at times leveraging their careers to do so. In that regard, I’m deeply indebted to Bill Ruzzamenti, Craig Hammer, and Rich Camps in California; Sergeant Tom McAndrew in Iowa; Sergeant Alex Gonzalez in Alabama; and Phil Price and Sherri Strange in Georgia. Thanks also (wherever you are) to Rudy, the meth dealer turned federal in formant whose life story was as enlightening as it was chilling.

  Anton Mueller at Bloomsbury is an outstanding editor. Over the last two years, I wrote the first half of Methland four times before finally getting it right. Or at least before shaping it into the form in which it now stands. Though I was—to put it politely—less than enthusiastic each time Anton read my latest effort and instructed me to start over, I’m glad now that he held his ground. An editor with patience, a strong stomach, and an enduring passion for his author’s book is a rarity these days indeed, and one for which I feel extremely fortunate and grateful.

  Thanks also to my agent at ICM, Heather Shroder. She not only sold this book at a time when no one seemed interested in the meth epidemic, but she also guided it through a potential disaster when the initial publisher, Houghton Mifflin, merged with Harcourt Brace. Had Heather not found a new home for me and my book at Blooms-bury, I’m not sure what would have become of us.

  No one was more valuable in the making of this book than my mother and father. The genesis of Methland dates to 1999, and was defined for five years by one failure after another—all before I ever began writing. My parents’ willingness to believe that I would succeed despite repeated setbacks stretches the bounds of comprehension. Through it all, they refused to do anything less than support me wholeheartedly. It seems only fitting that, while reporting for this book, I got to see for the first time the small town of Algona, Iowa, where my father was born and raised, and which he left over half a century ago. Everywhere I went in Iowa, in fact, and among the many people I met, I caught sight of the forthright generosity of spirit that defines my parents.

  Most of all, I’d like to thank my wife, Kelly, who helped me at every stage of this process. It was she who encouraged me to write a book proposal for Methland in 2005. Later that year and all through 2006, the only thing that made being away from home for weeks at a time any easier was knowing that Kelly would be there when I got back. She was patient and kind while I wrote Methland, and thoughtful in her criticism as it neared completion in 2008. As a wife, a friend, and a mother to our child, she is everything and more that I could ask for.

  Finally, I’m indebted to the two residents of tiny Greenville, Illinois, who inspired this book. I met them—a white meth-addicted felon and a black army sergeant recently home from Afghanistan—in a bar in November 2004. Over the course of several nights, it became clear to me that two people who were so different on the surface were in fact united by circumstances beyond their control. One of the facts of their lives was the huge sway methamphetamine held over their town. I’ll never forget the moment when, in talking to them, I saw this story for what it is. In gratitude and in hope, Methland is dedicated to them.

  A NOTE ON SOURCES

  Much of Methland is a retelling of events as they were related to me over the course of four years by the people of Oelwein. Interview isn’t really a word that applies here. During the weeks and months that I spent in town, nothing was ever spoken into a tape recorder, or written in a space below questions plotted on note cards. Rather, the people in this book shared the stories and the facts of their lives with me at the same time that we shared the day’s events. We cooked dinner and watched movies, drove back and forth to the grocery store, shoveled snow, and did chores around the house. They graciously permitted me to play pool and hunt pheasants with them, go to parties and to work, eat with them in restaurants, stop by the post
office on the way to the doctor, and call on neighbors. The telling of past events unfolded simultaneously with the living out of present circumstance, thereby—I hope—adding a depth and texture that is otherwise unattainable.

  In the absence of a tape recorder or video camera, I was forever excusing myself to write notes whenever there was an appropriate moment. Each night, I’d take these handwritten notes and expand them into scenes, while the memories remained fresh. Outside Oelwein, too, I employed this same live-in reporting strategy whenever possible. In Independence, Iowa, the former addict and meth cook Thomas, a.k.a. Major, preferred to talk while playing Frisbee golf, in which the players throw plastic discs of different shapes and weights (heavier ones are “putters,” while lighter discs, because they fly farther, are “drivers”) toward a basket affixed to a tree. When Major and I played, it allowed him to escape, however briefly, from the scrutiny of his parents, with whom he lived. So, too, did Major’s parents seem to appreciate any chance to leave their home, where they were not only overseeing the informal, in patient rehab of their meth-addicted son, but where they were also helping to raise their grandchild, Buck. When I talked to Major’s parents, it was normally over lunch or a beer, preferably in a place where they could both smoke. Seeing them briefly outside their home made clearer still the complexity of their circumstances.