Heroin

Camden County prosecutors said Tuesday a 12th person was sickened by heroin apparently laced with a powerful opiate after a rash of overdoses sent 11 people to the hospital over the weekend. Camden police are trying to find the source of the heroin - which they suspect is laced with fentanyl, an extremely powerful painkiller given to terminal cancer patients - by working with those who have overdosed. Most of them said they purchased the drug, known as "Hellfire," in the North Camden and Whitman Park neighborhoods, according to the county Prosecutor's Office.

The incidence of syphilis is at an all-time low in Philadelphia and most of the nation, thanks to consistent use of condoms, a concerted public health effort - and the increased use of heroin. In what appears to be an ironic twist, the re-emergence of heroin, a highly addictive opiate, has played a part in helping eradicate syphilis, a sexually transmitted disease once common among drug addicts and those who engage in unprotected sex. The reason: Heroin decreases sex drive.

DESPITE an impassioned pitch by a defense attorney, a federal magistrate Friday ordered that Philadelphia Police Officer Jonathan Garcia remain in federal custody pending trial. Garcia, 23, was charged this week with distributing heroin and using his department-issued gun during drug deals. He has pleaded not guilty to all charges. Assistant U.S. Attorney Kevin Brenner said Garcia, who is likely to face additional gun and robbery charges, was a danger to the community and a flight risk and should not be released on bail.

Gloucester Township police arrested a Haddon Heights man on drug charges Friday night after allegedly finding 78 bags of heroin in his possession. According to police, officers were conducting bike patrols about 9 p.m. when they saw a suspicious vehicle parked in the lot of the Ivanhoe Apartments, in the 400 block of Black Horse Pike. They were talking with the driver when a second man came out of an apartment building and approached the car. Police said that man, Peter Fareri, 21, had the drugs.

Two men who died Monday in the same Coatesville rooming house and a third who was hospitalized after being found unconscious there early yesterday might have been the victims of some unusually strong heroin, police said. Curtis Mitchell, 46, and Mark Ferguson, 34, were found dead Monday afternoon in a room Mitchell had rented in the rooming house in the 300 block of West Lincoln Highway. A Coatesville police source said police surmised that the two overdosed on heroin. Ferguson, who has no known address, was found with a hypodermic syringe in his arm, the source said, and Mitchell was found with a tourniquet around his arm. Police were called to the same rooming house again early yesterday morning after Jeff Nebesho, who also lived there, was found unconscious.

Federal authorities said they busted a major heroin operation and seized 25 pounds of the narcotic - with a street value estimated by the Drug Enforcement Administration at $25 million to $35 million - during a raid at a Marlton apartment. William Tomakloe, 37, a citizen of Ghana in West Africa with an address in the 300 block of Manor Lane, was arrested Thursday and is being held without bail in the Gloucester County Jail, federal authorities said yesterday. He has been charged with various counts of importing and possessing heroin; the charges carry prison terms of 10 years to life.

Thirty-six people have been indicted on racketeering charges in an investigation targeting a major heroin ring in Camden linked to a violent street gang, officials said Friday. All but four of the defendants named in the indictment that a state grand jury handed up Wednesday were in custody as of Friday, authorities said. The charges grew out of a multiagency investigation dubbed "Operation Billboard" aimed at a drug network linked to Ñetas, a street gang with roots in Puerto Rico.

Federal agents have dismantled what they said was a high-volume heroin ring that routinely funneled pounds of the drug from New York to sell on Philadelphia streets. By Thursday, 15 of the alleged ring members were in custody, according to U.S. Attorney Zane David Memeger and Vito Guarino, acting special agent-in-charge of the Drug Enforcement Administration. Agents were hunting for five more suspects, including the alleged ringleader, Francisco Javier Acosta-Cruz, 49, a Dominican living in Philadelphia.

An accused rogue Philadelphia police officer, who was charged in June on federal drug and gun counts, was indicted today on additional charges of a Hobbs Act robbery and carrying a firearm during a crime of violence. Jonathan Garcia, 23, was on-duty as a patrolman when he allegedly tried to rob a suspected drug dealer of $2,030 and prescription pain medications. The suspected drug dealer turned out to be an informant for the FBI. Garcia, said federal prosecutors, used his patrol car and all his police trappings on June 19 to illegally stop and arrest the suspected drug dealer and searched the man's car. Garcia confiscated $2,500 and 100 oxycontin pills, but when he returned to his 17th district headquarters, Garcia submitted paper work showing he seized only $420 and 90 pills.

It was difficult to determine what Raphael Nzelibe found harder to swallow: the 30 parcels of heroin that authorities said he tried to smuggle into the country in his digestive tract, or the five-years-plus prison term he got yesterday for his troubles. Nzelibe looked grim after his various entreaties to U.S. District Judge James T. Giles were rejected and he was sentenced to 63 months in prison and fined $2,500 for his conviction as an "alimentary canal drug smuggler. " "I think you should not only have your stomach examined, but you should, in a sense, have your head examined for putting heroin in your stomach," Giles told Nzelibe, who had complained of a host of physical problems.