Heroin

In his hot bedroom on North Fourth Street, Tomas "June" Vasquez lay naked and sweating just after dawn yesterday. A shotgun lay under his bed, but he did not bother to retrieve it. As Vasquez awakened, narcotics agents burst into the bedroom and roused him from his slumber. They did not have to break down the door of the brick rowhouse. They merely knocked, and his wife let them in. It was a surprisingly ginger arrest for a man labeled the number-one target of what the U.S. Attorney's office called the largest single federal narcotics roundup ever in Philadelphia.

For more than a year, a drug ring peddled $3.75 million worth of heroin in a Kensington neighborhood. Yesterday, the suspected suppliers and dealers got busted. Federal, state and local agents swooped down with indictments and arrest warrants around the neighborhood of A and Somerset streets. Altogether, 27 were indicted by a federal grand jury. By noon, all but 10 were in custody. "This is not the arrest of one dealer," U.S. Attorney Michael R. Stiles said at a press conference.

Gerald J. Kauffmann, 39, was bound over for trial last week on charges of possession and sale of controlled substances during a preliminary hearing before District Justice James W. Speers. The case of Kauffmann, a resident of the 2000 block of Spring Mill Road in Whitemarsh, goes to Montgomery County Court. Similar charges against Kauffmann's wife Donna, 30, and brother-in-law, Ronald, 34, both of the same address, were dismissed during the proceeding Thursday after four witnesses failed to appear.

For six days, Roland "Pops" Bartlett behaved in a manner befitting a monarch. Bartlett, long thought to be an "untouchable" kingpin in the drug world, remained calm and businesslike as he listened to former top aides Darryl Cherry, Lorenzo Werts and others testify against him in his trial in U.S. District Court. Wearing smoked aviator glasses and impeccably tailored conservative business suits, Bartlett heard how he wielded violent power in running the "most lucrative, long-running, undetected" heroin empire, which he called "The Family," in North Philadelphia, Germantown and nearby counties.

A Camden city man was caught trying to smuggle 10 bags of heroin concealed in a paperback book to an inmate at the Camden County Jail, authorities said yesterday. Joseph Czarnecki, 19, of the 2000 block of Howell Street, was arrested Wednesday and charged with possession of heroin and possession with intent to distribute. He was being held in the Camden County Jail yesterday after failing to post $7,500 bail. Sgt. Philip J. Dollarton, a spokesman for Camden County Sheriff William J. Simon, said that at 6 p.m., Czarnecki walked up to the visitors' desk and presented a corrections officer with a set of long underwear and a copy of Mario Puzo's novel The Fourth K for delivery to an inmate.

North Philadelphia restaurateur Pedro Jiminez yesterday was sentenced to 14 years in prison, without chance of parole, by U.S. District Judge William H. Yohn Jr., for trafficking in heroin. Jiminez, 32, a Dominican national, ran El Esfuerzo, a popular neighborhood restaurant on Lehigh Avenue, his lawyer said. He was convicted by a jury in September of being part of a group that supplied more than 2.2 pounds of heroin to dealers in the area of 2nd Street and Lehigh Avenue, a neighborhood targeted for drug sweeps in Operation Sunrise.

A Burlington City man who supplied a fatal batch of heroin to a 16-year-old Arkansas girl was sentenced yesterday to 10 years in prison. Patrick R. Courtney, 32, of the 800 block of Route 130, was the first person charged in Burlington County under a new state law that makes a drug supplier liable if someone dies as a result of using the drugs. "I'm very sorry that it all happened," Courtney told Burlington County Superior Court Judge Cornelius P. Sullivan before he was sentenced.

Federal drug enforcement agents have charged two New York men with attempting to smuggle $500,000 worth of heroin to three drug rings operating in Camden. The suspects, Paul Rivera, 39, of the 1500 block of Fulton Avenue in the Bronx, and Jorge L. Agudelo, 36, of Elmhurst, were arrested late last week on drug distribution charges. Rivera posted $500,000 bail and was released yesterday after a brief hearing in U.S. District Court in Camden. Agudelo was denied bail. The arrests capped a five-week investigation of the two men, Detective Fred Davis of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration said yesterday.

Heroin producers in Afghanistan, some of the principal financiers of al-Qaeda and other terrorists, have never been so brazen or so wealthy. With a bumper crop of opium poppies under cultivation, Afghan narco-barons have begun stamping their brand names on the 2.2-pound bags of heroin they smuggle out of Central Asia to buyers in Moscow, Amsterdam, London and New York. Sacks of high-quality Afghan heroin seized last week in Tajikistan carried the trademarks Super Power and 555. Some of the sacks, hidden inside foil-lined containers of instant cappuccino mix, even included the addresses of the labs in Afghanistan where the heroin had been refined.

The movement to ease the awful pain of some deaths from cancer is showing signs of life. Not inconceivably, the present Congress could make the decisive move: Permit doctors of terminally ill patients who have failed to respond to lesser drugs, to give injections of heroin. It has been a very long fight, and Mrs. Judith Quattlebaum of Washington has led it, unflaggingly. It was more than 10 years ago that she undertook to organize a committee to bring to the attention of Congress, which passes laws regulating the use of drugs, the plight of Americans who suffer great pain of the kind that could be alleviated by such injections of heroin as are routinely administered in Great Britain to those who are certain soon to die. What Mrs. Q. keeps running into is a)

Dozens injured in Ky. bus crash LOUISVILLE, Ky. - A bus carrying students on a college campus visit veered out of control and crashed on a Kentucky interstate Tuesday, and nearly three dozen people were taken to hospitals, authorities said. Thirty students from Waggener High School in Louisville were taken to hospitals with various injuries, along with four adults aboard the bus - including the driver, said Jody Duncan, a spokeswoman for Metro Safe, the emergency management agency for Louisville and Jefferson County.

A rash of heroin overdoses has Camden law enforcement authorities worried that drug users may be at risk from unusually potent drugs. Camden County Prosecutor Warren Faulk and Camden County Police Chief Scott Thomson reported Friday night that three people experienced overdoses from midnight into the early morning hours Friday. All three survived. One man appeared to have overdosed twice. While investigating the overdoses, Camden County police charged Shadid Fauntleroy, 24, of Berkley Street, with possession, distribution, and other drug offenses.

HACKENSACK, N.J. - After several arrests, a 22-year-old man vowed last August he was going to straighten out. A month later, he died of a heroin overdose in his grandfather's Paramus home, Bergen County's 12th fatal overdose in three months. On Feb. 8, a 21-year-old volunteer firefighter from Glen Rock died in his parents' house 24 hours after leaving left rehab. In March, two months after his arrest for burglary, a 20-year-old died of a heroin overdose in his father's Montvale home.

FLEMINGTON, N.J. - There are no heroin kingpins in Hunterdon County, according to prosecutor Anthony Kearns, and he wants to keep it that way. Most people don't associate the mostly rural county of 130,000 with drug trafficking, but as the number of young prescription pill addicts turned heroin junkies balloons throughout the state, Hunterdon has become a battleground. The number of New Jerseyans between 18 and 25 who are in treatment for heroin addiction jumped 12 percent from 2010 to 2011, records show, and Hunterdon felt the brunt of that boom.

Ten alleged heroin dealers operating in Chester County have been arrested following a yearlong police operation, the District Attorney's office announced Monday. The arrests targeted activity in Phoenixville, East Pikeland, West Goshen, New Garden, Avondale and other locations. In Phoenixville, the investigation started after the parents of a 22-year-old women found her dead from an overdose. Police were able to identify the man who allegedly sold her the drugs as Joseph McIntosh, 31, of Philadelphia.

Three Lancaster County residents were arrested Tuesday in the alleged importation and distribution of thousands of dollars worth of heroin in Lancaster and Berks Counties and Philadelphia. Jennifer Galarza, 35, of Lancaster, considered the leader, was charged with seven counts of delivery of heroin and one count of criminal conspiracy, according to a spokeswoman for the state Attorney General's Office. Investigators have called her a significant source of heroin in Lancaster County.

A Hatfield Township man was charged with drug possession and related offenses after he allegedly sold heroin to police. Harley Duval, 19, was allegedly involved in two heroin deals last month with Lansdale police. He was being investigated by Lansdale officers with the Montgomery County District Attorney's Drug Task Force. He was arrested Thursday. Police said he also was in possession of four hypodermic needles, glassine bags, a glass pipe, and two bags of heroin. Duval was arraigned before District Judge Kenneth Deatelhauser of Souderton.

A Montgomery County man, who allegedly made straw purchases of handguns in exchange for heroin, was arrested Friday and charged with numerous weapons counts. Michael Veneziale, of Hatfield, bought 15 guns during a three-year period, investigators said. One of Veneziale's buyers, Jose Torres, was later shot dead by police in Kensington as Torres pointed a gun at officers. After his arrest, the 25-year-old Veneziale admitted he bought a 9mm Glock for Torres in exchange for three bundles of heroin, said Tasha Jamerson, spokeswoman for the Philadelphia District Attorney's office.

Their guitars gently weep Famous pop musicians are no more likely to die at age 27 than at any other age, a recent study indicates. The fact that several rock stars - such as Amy Winehouse, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Brian Jones, and Kurt Cobain - died at 27 makes that age seem very unlucky. But this study found that fame and a rock-and-roll lifestyle can raise rockers' risk of death at any age. The researchers compared the deaths of 1,046 famous musicians with data from the U.K. population.