In The Name of the Law

Herbert Giglotto, 29, and his wife Evelyn, 28, had gone to bed early. Suddenly the sounds of splintering wood and shouting men jolted them awake. Giglotto jumped up and headed in the direction of the noise. At the top of the stairs, he recalls now, he saw "four or five long-haired men with guns" rushing toward him. "I looked at my wife and said 'My God, we're dead. The hippies have come to kill us.' "

But the shabbily dressed invaders were not the young rock freaks who had recently occupied the house next door on Arrowhead Drive in Collinsville, Ill., a blue-collar suburb of St. Louis. Rather, they were agents of the federal Office for Drug Abuse Law Enforcement (DALE), backed up by perhaps a dozen policemen. As the Giglottos tell it, the raiders two weeks ago ransacked the house and loosed a fusillade of obscenities that they threatened to follow with bullets. They forced the couple to lie on the bed face down and handcuffed them. The leader of the group held a cocked revolver to Giglotto's head while the others rummaged through dresser drawers and closets.

"My wife was crying and begging them not to kill me," says Giglotto, a boilermaker who worked on construction projects until he left his job after the raid. The man with the pistol repeatedly asked him, "Where's it at?" and rattled off a series of names that Giglotto did not recognize. Then someone ran up and said, "Hey, we made a mistake!" As quickly as they had entered, the agents prepared to leave. When Giglotto asked for an explanation, one of them replied: "Shut your mouth, boy."

Without a warrant, without identifying themselves in any comprehensible way, the agents had terrorized the Giglottos for half an hour. A unique blunder by overzealous investigators trying to crack a narcotics ring? Hardly. A little later the same night in Collinsville, a service station operator, Donald Askew, 40, and his family were about to sit down for a late dinner when their dog began barking frantically. Askew's wife Virginia, 39, was the first to see the man standing outside the open living-room window. "I looked," says Askew, "and the man looked just like my boy, long hair and all. Except he was carrying a short rifle."

Then the scene that had taken place at the Giglottos' home was re-enacted, though less violently. Still, the agents broke through a side door that had been nailed shut. Mrs. Askew fainted. After a search and interrogation, the lawmen again realized that they had made "a mistake." Askew asked them to wait for the police, but the leader retorted, "We can't. We got four other places to go tonight." They left with no further explanations.

Mental Ward. The St. Louis area has been the scene of considerable illicit drug traffic, and DALE agents based there have made some valid arrests. Still, as one federal law-enforcement official acknowledged, "this isn't the first time" that agents in the vicinity had staged lawless raids. Nor has St. Louis been the only site of such excesses. On Jan. 9 in Winthrop, Mass., DALE agents went along on a morning foray led by state and local police that also turned out to be a terrifying case of mistaken identity.

Amidst a chorus of protest over the raids, a federal grand jury has been convened to investigate DALE'S tactics. The agency was set up by President Nixon in January 1972 to work with the local authorities in combatting the narcotics trade. It has done effective work in some areas. It has some 300 agents, many of them recruited from the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs and accustomed to undercover work.

The criticism had repercussions at the top of the agency. From Washington, Myles J. Ambrose, Assistant Attorney General in charge of DALE, suspended four of the agents involved and promised a thorough inquiry. "It would have been reprehensible conduct," he said, "even if [the victims] had been defendants. People who use their badge to violate other people's constitutional rights are worse than criminals."

The Askews and the Giglottos want more consolation than that; they are bringing suit against the Federal Government. Evelyn Giglotto says that she can no longer sleep in the bedroom where she thought her husband was going to be murdered. Virginia Askew, according to her husband, has a history of "psychological problems." She has been in a local hospital's mental ward since the raid took place.

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