Street Smart

; When Detroit police raided an East Side drug den last week, they came away with nine rocks of cocaine and one telephone beeper. In two earlier police raids the haul included 89 captured rocks of cocaine, eleven packs of heroin, a dinner plate used for dope cutting -- and three beepers. Such inventories highlight a trend that authorities are noticing around the country: the telephone beeper or pager, long used as a stay-in-touch device by doctors, plumbers and electricians, is now the gadget of choice for the dope industry as well. "Beepers," says Los Angeles Deputy District Attorney Curtis Hazell, "are the single most common tool of the drug trade."

Inexpensive ($10 to $60 monthly to lease), easy-to-acquire beeper services allow street-smart drug dealers to keep in touch by public telephone. By staying mobile, dealers can remain one step ahead of the police or rivals who might be hunting for them. These days, with drugs moving by land, sea and air, the paging device is likely to turn up anywhere. "It's not uncommon for pagers to wash up onshore," concedes Ann Director of the Telocator Network of America, the Washington trade association that represents radio common carriers. Nor is it that unusual for beepers to be found in schools among both suspect students and those who are merely trying to be hip. Says George Vaughn, chairman of the Detroit school board's safety and security commission: "If a kid is wearing a beeper, that's supposed to mean that he knows what time it is, that he knows what's going on."

Although pagers can provide tone or voice messages, many drug merchants prefer the digital version that displays a caller's return telephone number. They are also partial to pagers that vibrate silently rather than giving off an audible signal. Dealers sometimes use fronts to sign with a paging service to thwart easy tracing. But not always: "We do get some strange or spooky clients in here," says one Miami beeper salesman. "I've never seen so many people who didn't have driver's licenses, even though I just saw them drive up in a Mercedes."

Police use beepers too, and they sometimes provide unexpected leads. When an unfamiliar number mysteriously appeared on Miami Police Detective Juan Garcia's digital pager, he dialed it and received an order for 35 lbs. of marijuana. Garcia promised to deliver the goods, went to the designated meeting place and arrested four eager buyers who showed up with $13,000 to make their purchase.