ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, July 7, 1996 TAG: 9607080085
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DIANE STRUZZI STAFF WRITER
note: above
DETECTIVES began their investigation unwittingly.
They had heard about open drug-dealing at raves, the all-night dance parties where mostly young people gyrate to rapid-fire backbeats and computer-generated light shows. In February 1995 the officers went to see for themselves, attending a party at the Olympic Roller Skating Center in Vinton.
On that bone-chilling night, investigators stumbled across their first arrest: Christopher Schrader, an elite member of the dance-club drug circuit. They saw him exchange some pills with a fellow raver.
News of the bust traveled quickly. Parents became outraged. They recounted the tales they had heard - that drugs, in particular hallucinogens, were readily available. Getting high was a matter of hooking up with the right person in the parking lot.
The parents held anti-drug rallies. They called local political leaders. And soon, police stepped up their investigation.
The raves were unlike the street-level crack trade detectives were used to. The party atmosphere - with its flashing, multicolored lights, deafening music and crowds of youths sucking on pacifiers and wearing surgeons' masks filled with Vicks Vaporub - was a confusing environment, ideal for dealing and using drugs. The ravers also were young, predominantly white and suspicious of any outsider.
For some, the presence of drugs gave the parties an air of big-city sophistication. Those who had experienced raves outside Roanoke brought back the chemical highs that spirited dancers beyond the beat. Hallucinogens such as Ecstasy, LSD and the animal tranquilizer ketamine personified the "peace, love and unity" message the parties touted. Stimulants such as crystal methamphetamine gave some the extra energy to dance all night long.
Since most of the parties were held in Roanoke, city undercover officers began monitoring the scene. Each arrest they made heightened paranoia among ravers. Any new face was assumed to be a ``narc.''
So the detectives relied on informants to infiltrate places they could not convincingly fit in. Many who worked for the police were first-time offenders willing to turn against their friends for a favorable mention in court and a reduced charge.
Christopher Schrader refused to snitch. But a few months later, vice officers busted a young man who did.
`I ain't going to rot in jail'
Easy money has a price. One man began paying up in May 1995 after Roanoke undercover detectives arrested him selling LSD outside a rave at a downtown Roanoke nightspot.
His choice: Set up his friends or face possible jail time. He took two weeks to think about it. Then he went back to the guys who busted him.
"I know [the police] are using me," he said last summer. "But right now they got me where they want me. I ain't going to jail. I'm too much of a free-bee person. I ain't going to rot in jail."
He is not being named in this story because he fears retaliation from people he informed on.
Four months after his arrest, he sat by the pool where his mother lives. He already had set up five of his friends and was poised to set up another. But he hadn't left the drug business altogether.
The portable phone in his lap rang once. It was a friend inquiring about an LSD buy the informant brokered. It will get the informant a free sheet of acid - about a 4-by-4- inch square that can be divided into about 100 individual ``hits'' and make him as much as $500 at a party.
"Power. I was over that kick early," he said of dealing. "I wish I could go out on a date on Friday and have a normal life. But I have to look at reality. I'm not a paid ... informant now. My money only comes through hooking people up."
And selling is only a phone call away.
The phone rang again.
"If you want to go with them, get some money up or stuff," he said, rattling off prices, weights and delivery times as fast as an auctioneer. "Buy a half sheet [of LSD] and I'll give you 2 grams of crystal [methamphetamine]."
The informant has a rough-and-tumble punk look. Tattoos punctuate his body. A bleached-blond tuft caps a buzz haircut.
The night he was arrested, he said, he was in a friend's car looking at some drugs. Roanoke detectives swarmed around.
They found 50 hits of LSD inside a calculator, and one ketamine capsule. Once snorted, ketamine is said to create an intense altered reality. Because possession or distribution of the tranquilizer is only a misdemeanor, detectives focused on the LSD. The informant said he walked away with others taped to the back of several colorful postcards promoting upcoming raves.
"I was scared," he said. "But I was happy in a way. I was like, `This is what being busted is all about.'''
Fellow ravers quickly ostracized him. Even before he began informing, they believed he was a snitch.
So the young man sought revenge and began working with Roanoke police.
"I wouldn't do my friends, I'd just do the people who owe me money," he said. "All of these people I gave so much free drugs to - I wanted to bring down the rest of them with me. It's weird being on the other side of the team.
Roanoke vice detectives will not confirm that he worked undercover for them. The Police Department's policy is not to talk about specific informants because it would put them at risk.
Those who cooperate with police sign a contract saying they will not use or sell drugs or get into trouble with the law. But that meant little to the informant.
The life of a double agent enchanted him. He talked of a set-up as if it were an episode of the TV show "Cops." He worked the press in a vain attempt to clear his name as a snitch and get back in the good graces of other ravers. He got arrested for stealing drugs in a nearby locality.
Throughout, the informant survived by providing the market what it desired: information to cops, designer drugs to ravers.
"I could sell ice cubes to the Eskimos," he said.
Paying the price
Like the informant, Chris Schrader had a choice: Help the police and stay in the scene, or save himself and get out. It wasn't one he had to think about.
"I could have done damage to the rave scene," Schrader said. "I could have done damage to Ecstasy - where it came from. But I knew that I got myself into it, and I was going to take it like a man. I have certain morals. I don't believe it's right to wear a wire and go and buy something from [friends]."
Schrader has a little more than two weeks left on his nearly year-long work-release sentence. He spends his nights in a cell he shares with up to two dozen other inmates, and for which he pays $52.50 a week. During the day, he attends community college and works at a food store.
Gone is his soccer scholarship at Greensboro College. Gone is his freedom and his right to vote.
"I packed him up for school," Schrader's father testified during his son's sentencing hearing. "I watched his first soccer game in September [1994] and then heard [in] November that he wasn't doing well. He had dropped out and was living in Roanoke."
It was just after 11 p.m. when officers first went inside the rave at the Olympic Roller Skating Center where Schrader was busted.
Detectives had to wind their way through a line of traffic along Washington Avenue in Vinton. Partyers milled about in the frigid air. Inside, a vice detective saw some girls in the bathroom sniffing white powder from the floor. As the detective went to get help, she noticed two men exchanging some pills. One of them was Schrader.
When detectives approached him, he threw a plastic bag down on the floor. In it were five pills of Ecstasy, a drug that intensifies a person's sensory perception and can send him on a four-hour high.
He was charged with selling the drug and faced up to 40 years in prison. He pleaded no contest. A judge later reduced the charge to an accommodation sale, meaning that he did not sell the drug for profit. It dramatically shortened his maximum sentence.
"My favorite drug was more," Schrader said about himself in describing the height of his drug activity. "The only thing I didn't do was heroin and smoke crack."
Ecstasy was Schrader's specialty, and he and a friend quickly took hold of the local market. He traveled to Philadelphia, New Jersey and Atlanta to bring back the pills.
His freckled face and chin-length auburn hair belied the drug-dealing image and the title he earned from fellow ravers, who referred to him as "The Man."
Schrader didn't just sell drugs, he sold an experience, say those who knew him. He took care of his friends, sometimes giving the drug away. He was so knowledgable about Ecstasy, he said, that he could tell where a pill originated by its color and shape.
The drugs soon took over his life. He indulged in his stash. And he got hooked - psychologically if not physically.
At his arrest, Schrader said, he was high on three doses of Ecstasy. He wrote and signed a statement for police proclaiming the attributes of the drug and confirming that he freely gave it to people.
"Ecstasy makes everyone happy and love each other ... I love to give people ecstacy [sic]," he wrote. "Extacy [sic] has changed my life and many others.
There was money at the top: Thousands could be made in a night. There was popularity: Meeting girls was as easy as the offer of an Ecstasy pill.
But status is fleeting in the rave scene. The night of his arrest, someone stole $1,000 and 20 hits of Ecstasy from his apartment, Schrader said.
"A lot of people in the rave scene say they're your friends, but they aren't," he said.
One afternoon, Schrader said, he was "jacked" on crystal methamphetamine during a family counseling session. In the presence of his father, his counselor gave him an ultimatum: Go to a Newport News rehab center, or be involuntarily committed.
An hour before leaving for the center, Schrader said, he snorted a line of crystal meth. It would be his last, he said. In his room he left an ounce of the powder along with 30 hits of Ecstasy, worth a total of $2,000.
"It got to the point for me where I'd done everything, tried everything, gone as far as I wanted to, further than I ever wanted to," he said. "I'm still picking up the pieces and trying to get back there. I don't know if I ever will."
Reality check
One morning last fall, just before noon, the informant sat in his mother's darkened basement and watched a documentary on neo-Nazis. The only light came from the changing hues of the television set and a doorway that led upstairs.
"All I do is wake up and think about drugs; I go to bed and think about drugs," he said, slumped into the couch that doubled as his bed. "It's not good. But [business] really slacked off. This time last year, everyone was on a quest for acid [LSD]."
The market has stabilized. The new drug is Special K, a specialty of the informant's. But in Roanoke it can be difficult to get.
Several days before this visit, the informant had been arrested for breaking into a business to steal drugs. Roanoke police cut him off. But he parlayed his drug knowledge into freedom once again, informing for another jurisdiction.
"I'm not going to sell anymore," he said. "I'm just going to get the stuff for my own personal consumption. Every kid thinks they can sell drugs and do it different and not get busted. It's all about luck."
The informant's mother knows about his drug habits. It's all a part of growing up, she said.
"Years ago, I did drugs," she said. "I'd be high on pot and tripping [on LSD]. ... After I'd done it all, I decided I didn't want to do it anymore. I hope the same thing for [my son]. One day he'll wake up and realize he don't need no chemicals in his body."
In November, the informant pleaded guilty to possession of LSD. The judge was made aware of his cooperation with police. He was sentenced to two years' probation, which includes random drug screenings and 75 hours of community service. If the informant successfully completes that and does not get into additional trouble, the charge will be dismissed.
Now the informant is holding down a minimum-wage job. He says he's been sober since January. His breaking-and-entering charge was reduced and he was sentenced to six months of house arrest. He said he no longer works as an informant.
"Right now, I just want to live," he said. "I don't want to take nothing for granted anymore. I might have got out of some jail time, but I got life. Everyone still thinks I'm a narc."
Clean and sober
Every day before he returns to his cell, Schrader strips and is searched. He pulls on the blue pants and blue shirt the jail gives him. Then he enters the trailer for work-release inmates.
"I look out the windows and see two sets of barbed wires," he said. "That's what I wake up and see every morning."
But Schrader has beaten the odds. He is clean and sober. He has regained the weight, self-respect and hope he lost during his drug-dealing days.
This past semester at school he earned a 4.0 grade-point average, despite the jail's security rule that bans work-release inmates from bringing in books. Next year, he wants to get into a four-year college.
"His whole outlook has readjusted and changed," said his father, who asked that his name not be published. "He had an opportunity to take the same direction as the informant and chose not to because he really wanted to disassociate himself with that [rave] environment."
Schrader looks at the past in disbelief. "How was I so stupid?'' he asked. "I was bringing the best drugs to people. How can I be proud of that now?''
When he looks at the future, he focuses on his conviction. "It's hard being a convicted felon," he said. "It's hard now, spending the night in jail, having no social life. I can't really have any friends right now because I don't have any time to spend with them."
Schrader made a conscious decision to move from recreational user to professional dealer. For 120 days, dealing was his vocation. Now, he says, he'll spend much of his twentysomething years making up for that.
"It's terrible," Schrader said. "I wish people could understand. But I found preaching doesn't do any good. Even my good friends who watched me become this horrible person turned around and are doing Ecstasy now."
Family has been the foundation for his new beginnings. He just celebrated his 20th birthday. When he is released at the end of July, father and son plan on taking a trip to set goals.
"I have a lot of guilt for what I did," Schrader said. "I feel I got a lot of people hooked on drugs. I wish I could go back and do things differently. I think about how I'll never put myself in that situation again. There's no way in heck I'll end up like some of the people in jail."
LENGTH: Long : 259 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: 1. Psychedelic lights silhouette people dancing to technoby CNBat the Iroquois Club on Salem Avenue in Roanoke.
2. Dancers bask in light from a mirrored ball at the Iroquois.
color.
File 1995