Robert Stutman

Robert Stutman was the head of the DEA's New York office in the mid-1980s who deliberately engineered the 1986 crack media panic to force the Justice Department to take the drug seriously.¹

Creating the Crack Panic

Stutman believed the Justice Department was not taking crack seriously enough. "To speed up the process of convincing Washington, I needed to make it a national issue and quickly. I began a lobbying effort and I used the media," Stutman wrote in his 1992 memoirs. "Reporters were only too willing to cooperate, because as far as the New York media was concerned, crack was the hottest combat-reporting story to come along since the end of the Vietnam War." By the end of August 1986, Stutman noted, the "groundwork that had been carefully laid through press accounts and my own public appearances" had produced remarkable results: Newsweek was calling crack "a national scandal" and the New York papers were blaming every crime on crackheads. "Crack was a national menace," Stutman wryly observed.¹

In June 1986, DEA intelligence under Stutman revealed that "what looked like independent street corner pushers were actually the bottom rung of carefully managed organizations." Stutman called it "a revelation" in his memoirs. The discovery paralleled what the LASD Major Violators squad in Los Angeles was simultaneously uncovering through the Torres brothers.¹