Turning Up The Heat On Ice Dealers

Anthony Williams, the new Drug Enforcement Administration Special Agent In Charge, is determined to stop the flow of crystal meth into Hawaii, and praises cooperation from other law enforcement for several recent busts

Wednesday - May 12, 2005
By Chad Pata
E-mail this story | Print this page | Archive | RSS |

Del.icio.us

Recent DEA busts since Williams took over have produced a gun with a silencer, 12
pounds of ice and one million dollars cash

He followed this dream straight out of the Air Force, signing up with the DEA in 1987. His first mission was to pack up his fledgling family and move to New Orleans to fight the ultra-violent Colombians and their cocaine pipeline.

“Thank God I don’t have to do that anymore, but I do miss it,” says Williams, who never saw himself being the guy behind the desk.

“That is the fun part of the job,” he says. “You have a menace in the area and you put the cuffs on him. That is a good feeling. When you see the kids and others held hostage by this guy’s activities and they see him going away, that has a lasting impact on them.”

Williams had such an impact himself that he was promoted to be the resident agent in charge in Bombay, India, where along with fighting the heroin smugglers of Asia, his family learned the true value in life.

“There they saw poverty, real poverty, so they don’t get hung up on material possessions,” says Williams who along with his wife Pamela now has three kids, Omari, Jazmine and Miles. And they all traveled everywhere with their dad, stopping crack in Norfolk or ecstasy in Houston, and even battled some cocaine suppliers in Jamaica before finally becoming the DEA’s chief of special agent assignments in Washington, D.C.

But before the cherry blossoms could bloom this spring, he found his family heading to Hawaii to spearhead the decadelong, battle against ice, which by every measure — lives ruined, families torn apart, innocent citizens victimized by addicts to feed their addictions — we’ve been losing.

But as far as his family is concerned, all the moving is over.

“My daughter is the mouthpiece of the family and she tells me she’s not leaving Hawaii, so that tells you we are happy here,” says Williams.

This commitment toward family and children is the fire from which he burns. When he speaks about drugs, it always filters back to the children.

“When I was in training at the DEA Academy in Alexandria, Va. “We had cowboys who just wanted to kick doors in, but I recall saying that I’m in it to try to make a difference for the children.”

That is the scale by which he measures our ice epidemic, not by the number of addicts, but by the number of kids their addiction impacts.

“You look at the size of the population here, the drug problem is big,” says Williams, for whom this is his first large-scale experience with crystal meth. “But it is not out of control. Still, any time you have children using marijuana or maybe used to facilitate transactions of ice, then to me that’s big.”

Despite his law enforcement credentials, he believes that the only way to win the war on drugs is information, not eradication.

“I don’t think we could ever say we eliminated drugs,” says Williams, “but I think the most important thing to do is educate the public, the youth, to the dangers of it. Once the demand diminishes, that will put a pretty good cap on the distributors.”

While his utopian wishes may have to wait, the problem he faces now must be dealt with head on. In the latest bust, the most disturbing find to him was the cache of weapons.

Page 2 of 3 pages for this story < 1 2 3 >