The new timber cops.

A cadre of smart, determined professionals is closing ranks to try to brighten the Forest Service's tarnished enforcement image.

A late-April dump of snow had closed down of the most logging traffic coming ou of the Sierra Nevadas near Grass Valley, California. That was a disappointment. I'd wanted Ken Carlton, a veteran Forest Service special agent with whom I was riding, to show me how thieves work a timber sale.

So, on to Plan B.

"Ken," I said, "let's check a few Forest Service pickups to see if the TSAs [timber-sale administrators] are taking care of their paint."

That was a loaded suggestion, and he knew it. I was talking about tracer paint, the special tree-marking spray used by the Forest Service to discourage illegal marking of timber-sale boundaries. It has a way of ending up in the hands of amber thieves.

We cruised slowly into the motor-pool areas of two ranger districts on the Taho National Forest, and Ken got out and carefully checked the gear boxes of a doze or more Forest Service pickups. At our first stop, just one unsecured can of th paint showed up in a pickup. But at a the second ranger station Ken found about a dozen cans, worth hundreds or maybe thousands of dollars to timber thieves, i the Delta carrier of a Forest Service Dodge 4x4.

"It definitely shouldn't be there unlocked," he affirmed. "But a few years ago could have filled the back of a pickup with unsecured tracer-paint cans, so thi is progress."

He got on his cell-phone to clue in the local uniformed Forest Service LEO (law-enforcement officer) for a little more belt-tightening on the district.

Yes, this is progress. Though immense quantities of Forest Service logs are still being stolen, our ranger-station drive-through nevertheless illustrated that things are gradually improving.

To verify that fact, you can drive to east Sacramento in California's central valley and locate a smoked-glass and petunia-bedecked concrete colossus known a Howe Place. Here, behind a chunk of bulletproof glass and a locked door, is one of two nerve centers for a gung-ho new Forest Service assault on log theft. The other is in Portland, Oregon.

Called until recently the "Timber Theft Task Force," this self-contained Forest Service operation revved up 1991. Considering the timber-theft gloom of three years ago, I'd say the Task Force popped out sort of like a cluster of daisies in a garbage dump.

According to law-enforcement veteran Richard Grandalski, who heads the Sacramento operation, the Task Force "went national" last March, expanding its mission to serve the entire Forest Service. This may explain the organization's bureaucratic new title: "Sacramento Office of Law Enforcement and Timber Theft Investigations, U.S. Forest Service, Washington Office." Not exactly the kind o thing you'd silkscreen on a sweatshirt.

The "new timber cops" organization represents the first substantive, properly organized, timber-theft-oriented effort the Forest Service has ever mounted. An it seems to be the first significant answer to decades of denial, neglect, and malfeasance by those few souls in the Forest Service who impeded efforts to cur timber theft.

Today it's reportedly receiving high-level support:

Jim Lyons, undersecretary of Agriculture overseeing the Forest Service, said: "Interference [of any criminal investigation] on any level will not be tolerated."

The new Forest Service chief, Jack Ward Thomas, came on refreshingly by writing in his book Environmental Leadership last year, ". . . one can also act unethically. . . by looking the other way to avoid confronting an ethical issue by remaining silent in the face of unethical activity. . . "Sounds like he was talking directly to those who would condone timber thievery.

It's on these philosophical buttresses that the timber cops are building their steam.

Timber Theft Task Force members under Hank Kashdan, feeling that new support from Washington, grabbed hold of their mission. They clarified staff role definitions, expanded investigations with new budget help, brought in temporary "detail" help for special projects, organized theft-awareness training on national forests, encouraged a "watchdog" hotline (with a toll-free number at the Office of Inspector General at USDA)--and fostered a whole new sense of purpose. The message was simple but tough: Convict timber thieves.

Today's results speak for themselves. The timber cops already have logged an all-time-high conviction rate of 90 percent of their cases--a clarion statement to those who would defraud. Columbia Scaling, Thomas Creek, Young and Morgan, Leslie William Jantzer, Campbell and Kunkel, Paul Knapp--these names and others highlight a case-results summary that shows a grand total of $3.4 million in restitutions and fines paid, and eight felony convictions, within a two-year period. (Jantzer, for example, paid a fine of $195,000 for moving a timber-sale boundary, then taking 1,067 old-growth trees on Oregon's Rogue River Forest.)

Not bad for a startup operation.

In the Sacramento "nerve center" I asked Grandalski why the success.

"Since early this year, timber-theft special agents have been linked directly t Chief Thomas in the chain of command," he explained. In a so-called "stovepipe" arrangement that bypasses district rangers and forest supervisors who sometimes interfered, the chain moves from the field to Forest Service regional office special agents, then directly to Washington, where Al Trujillo, who heads law enforcement, reports directly to Chief Jack Ward Thomas.

Sounds promising, I thought. Then I learned that the Forest Service has an average of just one special agent for each 250,000 acres of national forest, an that the western timber-theft group fields only 11 special agents on its staff of 38. (The timber cops do receive help from other special agents and from uniformed enforcement officers in the field.)

Making Cases

Lest you assume that the timber cops simply go out on the forest and "make thei cases," think again. Despite tracer paint, midnight logging, cherry picking, an other mischief, timber fraud is largely white-collar stuff that happens on pape or in computer records. Which explains why the timber-cops team also includes accountants, auditors, and computer experts in addition to foresters, timber an resource people, and others.

Auditors? In one of the Task Force's earlier landmark cases involving the Columbia River Scaling Bureau, a scaler, and two timber companies, agents reportedly scanned an unbelievable 6.6 million documents to find "the needle in the haystack" that broke the case. Fines/restitutions totaled roughly $3 millio on this case alone.

Having made their statement out of Sacramento and Portland, and having freed themselves from the harassment and intimidation they sometimes experienced, the timber cops feel a sense of relief, even hope, these days. Matter of fact, national forests to the east are now requesting their services.

Frankly, I'm concerned about their skimpy $2.6-million budget for timber theft, vs. the $1 billion worth of timber the Forest Service harvests annually. Sounds like a cheap insurance policy to protect our resources. And when you consider the huge amounts the Forest Service pays to protect trees from fire, $2.6 million for log theft is a pittance.

Meanwhile, the timber cops are quietly establishing a remarkable network of supporters and informers in and around our western national forests, while operating under their new "stovepipe" arrangement with Washington, DC. And they are showing new skill in attracting the needed support of U.S. attorneys, who often show a lot more interest in a bullet hole through someone's head than in midnight haul of inanimate logs.

"Attitudes are changing for the better," says Grandalski.

Scaling Shenanigans 

Right now the emphasis is on the scaling stations where logs are valuated for payment to the Forest Service. These may be located right at the entrance to a mill or along some highway frequented by logging traffic heading there.

For more than two decades, the Forest Service has resisted changing a system in which timber purchasers--that is, the lumber mills--pay the salaries of the sam scaling crews who valuate the logs the purchasers are buying. The system is an invitation to theft and fraud, in which the gatekeeper is also the judge.

Scaling-station shenanigans account for maybe 80 percent of the timber cops' activity, but coming up is a new "tree-measurement" timber-purchasing method by which loggers buy all the timber on a given sale, premeasured and contracted fo in advance, with no scaling necessary.

"The method is considered to be more accurate," a timber officer told me.

By early next year, most Forest Service timber in the West will be sold that way. And it looks as if a new type of scaling will soon be contracted by the Forest Service--presumably with better controls. But the jury is out on whether the new systems will actually reduce timber theft: "Timber cruisers [who will lay out tree-measurement sales] can be bought," one logger told me.

Meanwhile, as the timber cops close ranks, support within the Forest Service is growing and spirits are rising. As Grandalski told me, "If this group can continue its success, it can constitute a real deterrent to theft and fraud."

That kind of turnaround could generate new hope for an agency that is overripe for a moral retrofit.

One Small Step from Violence

Today's Forest Service timber cops, aged 28-51, usually wear civvies. They carr their choice of 45-caliber or 9-mm sidearms--for use only as a last resort. Threats, harassing phone calls, and subtler forms of intimidation remind these agents that their lives may be on the line.

Lives certainly were on the line in late 1992, when local law enforcers supported a timber-theft-related standoff in Ashland, Oregon. Dozens of local and state officers joined in a 12-hour, helicopter-supported operation begun when white separatist Maynard Charles Campbell, who had been logging illegally around his fiance's mining claim on the Klamath National Forest, wouldn't come forward to accept a no-bail warrant.

"He told us that when he did come out, he was going to come out shooting," said a deputy U.S. marshal. Fortunately, no shots were fired as the arrest was made.

The Task Force has since made its case: Campbell and an accomplice were fined $30,000, and Campbell received a two-year, five-month Sentence.

Tomorrow's Game Plan

Despite the timber cops' impressive three-year record, most special agents agre there's a lot more timber theft going on out there. If the Forest Service continues to pursue a serious cleanup effort, here are some options for beefing up the operation in the years ahead:

* Additional special agents and supporting specialists, and perhaps more offices. More convictions would result; a stronger message would be sent to timber thieves.

* More efficient ways to monitor timber sales for theft, including helicopter patrols using sophisticated GPS (global positioning system) technology. This would aid in determining quickly and precisely whether timber-sale boundaries have been altered.

* Night surveillance of suspected crime scenes, using advanced night-vision infrared imaging systems that produce convincing videotape evidence. The equipment is now available.

* Highly advanced methods of analyzing paints used to mark trees, available through the Fish and Wildlife Service's new forensics lab in Ashland, Oregon.

* Using sophisticated genetic cell samples to link stolen trees to their stumps for evidential purposes--a technology also available at the forensics lab. Today's method of physically matching log cross-sections--the stump of a tree with a suspected stolen log--is difficult and impractical.

Most special agents agree that the most vital element in controlling our runawa timber theft is the cooperation of "the people on the ground"--Forest Service, loggers, scaling bureaus, lumber mills, and members of the public who may notic timber theft taking place.

"We've all got to get involved," says Grandalski.

How You Can Help

An integral part of the timber cops' information network is a new Hotline operated by the Office of Inspector General at U.S. Department of Agriculture headquarters in Washington, DC. If you see or know about questionable or criminal timber-harvest practices, please call 800/424-9121. Be ready with as many details as you can supply.