Private Investigators Ponder Fugitive's Ability to Elude Capture

November 24

Private investigators torn on fugitive James Cameron's ability to elude capture

Convicted child pornography owner could prove a tough capture because of his knowledge of criminal law, but freedom on the lam is a difficult gambit, investigators say

By Michael Shepherdmshepherd@mainetoday.com
Staff Writer

You just found out you're headed back to prison, so you cut off your monitoring bracelet and have some time before a federal probation officer will knock down your door.

James Cameron

click image to enlarge

U.S. Marshal Service investigators search the residence of Barbara Cameron, the ex-wife of fugitive James Cameron, in Hallowell on Nov. 20. Authorities continue to hunt for Cameron, Maine’s former top drug prosecutor, who cut off his electronic monitoring bracelet and fled after learning his appeal of child pornography convictions had failed earlier this month.

Staff file photo by Andy Molloy

Additional Photos Below

Related headlines

• Prosecutors considered Cameron a flight risk before indictment
• James Cameron escape timeline

Select images available for purchase in the
Maine Today Photo Store

Where do you flee? How do you stay gone? And where do federal investigators begin looking for you?
Three private investigators, two of them former high-ranking state-level law enforcement officials, say fugitive James Cameron likely has more knowledge than an average escapee.
Two of the private investigators agreed that Cameron's knowledge of the legal system makes him an especially formidable fugitive and he likely didn't flee without a well-thought-out plan.
"I would assume that he is one of the cagiest, most learned fugitives they're going to be dealing with in current times," said Thomas Santaguida, a former chief of the Maine Warden Service who now runs a Brunswick-based private investigating firm. "He knows what to do to get around everything, and most people who flee do not know that."
The private investigators were asked this week to assess the potential story behind the hunt for Cameron, a former top state drug prosecutor who was convicted in 2011 of possessing child pornography.
The U.S. Marshals Service said Cameron, 50, fled his Rome house last week after finding out that appeals of some of his convictions had failed and he would return to prison. Cameron had been out on bail since August 2011 waiting for the appeals to be heard.
On the afternoon of Nov. 14, after a federal appeals court upheld seven of his 13 convictions, he visited his ex-wife's home on Greenville Street in Hallowell and told his son he was going back to prison. Cameron appeared to be "not doing well," his wife told law enforcement officials. That meeting and what Cameron did in the hours before he fled were recounted in a document filed in U.S. District Court in Bangor by a federal probation official.
Just after 8 p.m. that night, Cameron arrived at his house in Echo Valley Estates on Watson Pond in Rome. About a half-hour later, he checked the Internet for the last time that night.
By 12:46 a.m. the electronic monitoring bracelet he was required to wear as a bail condition showed he'd left the home without authorization.
At 1:47 a.m., a federal probation officer tried to call Cameron's home phone and cellphone, but didn't get an answer.
The officer tried to call again between 7 and 8 a.m. Again he got no answer.
Around 10:30 a.m., probation officials and state police went to the house in Rome. His cellphone was still there, but Cameron, his laptop and his tan Audi were gone.
On Monday, marshals publicly announced they were hunting for Cameron.
Dean Knightly, a deputy U.S. marshal for Maine and spokesman for the service, wouldn't whether he thought Cameron's escape was planned or spontaneous. He said Friday there were no developments in the search for Cameron.
Elaborate plan or desperate act?
The private investigators are divided in their opinions of Cameron's escape plan.
To Joseph Thornton, a private eye in southern Maine since the 1970s, it looked rushed.
"It sounds like an act of a desperate man," Thornton said. "I don't think he's been planning this since August 2011."
But Santaguida and Stephen Pickering, a retired Maine State Police homicide detective who's now a private eye in Blue Hill, both doubt Cameron's exit was spur-of-the-moment.
"Lawyers tend to be pretty logical people both personally and professionally," Santaguida said. "I think he's made an elaborate plan with a lot of knowledge and a lot of planning time."
Pickering said the timing of Cameron's escape -- made hours after learning the appeals failed and during the wee hours of the morning -- makes this plan look like a planned last-resort decision.
"I think in his mind, right when he got out on bail, he probably had some kind of plan if things didn't go well," Pickering said. "Any intelligent person, whether it's a lawyer or not, is going to have some kind of idea."
Staying off the grid
Cameron's gone. To stay gone, he needs to not just run, but disappear.
"He knows that once a threshold of time has been met, people are going to be looking for him, so his disappearance needs to be quick after that," Santaguida said. "He now has to stay off the grid."
That means he needs to use cash to pay for what he needs on the road.
He shouldn't go where he's expected to go, like his brother's home outside Detroit, Mich., where he stayed before his 2009 indictment.
He can't contact those close to him, either.
"As a fugitive, you need to separate yourself completely and finally from any and all contact with your former life," Thornton said.
The private investigators said money is a big factor for a fugitive at this point. It's not known what resources Cameron has. Knightly, the marshal, wouldn't discuss that, or whether bank accounts have been frozen or other steps have been taken to limit Cameron's assets.
When his divorce from Barbara Cameron was finalized in 2010, he claimed an annual income of $25,000.
He had earned more than $100,000 as an assistant attorney general, a job he held for 18 years until 2008, almost a year before he was indicted on the child porn charges.
"It takes a lot of money to be sophisticated enough to plan to elude authorities for any length of time," Thornton said. "He's not going to have $850,000 in cash in the wall when they find him."
If Cameron is fleeing, he needs a place to flee to.
Santaguida said if he were in Cameron's shoes, he'd have an ambitious plan that included leaving the country.
Cameron shouldn't have a passport. Pretrial bail conditions forced him to surrender it and not seek another, the Kennebec Journal has reported. If he had one and tried to use it, he'd likely be nabbed.
"I would leave the United States and go to a country that didn't extradite any crimes," Santaguida said. "I'd make arrangements to get a (private) flight out of the country (and) get transported to a place where I know I could get a fake passport and re-establish myself with a new identity in a country that is not extradition-friendly with the United States."
But Thornton doesn't think Cameron has the resources -- or criminal know-how -- to stay gone.
"It takes a certain level of cunning and sophistication and street smarts," Thornton said. "Guys who sit behind a desk in Augusta for 20 years don't pick that up."
'An intelligent criminal'?
Cameron's knowledge of the legal system could be a complicating factor in the marshals' hunt for him, the investigators said.
"I think Mr. Cameron is unique in his position as far as being, for lack of a better word, an intelligent criminal," Pickering said. He added that Cameron is "somebody that can think a few places ahead on the chessboard better than the average criminal."
Santaguida said Cameron had plenty of time to plan an escape and had a wealth of experience watching "the best practices on how to do it."
"Generally there's a layer of ignorance that causes the person to get caught," he said. "I just don't see him making a blunder that causes him to be apprehended quickly."
Marshals have downplayed that issue since they announced Cameron had fled.
Last week, Maine U.S. Marshal Noel March said, "I don't know if he's smarter than the average bear. We're pretty good at this."
March is right. The marshals' website says in fiscal year 2011 the service caught more than 36,000 federal fugitives -- averaging almost 100 per day. Santaguida called them the best in the world at fugitive hunting.
"This is what they're trained for, to find people who don't want to be found," Pickering said.
Behind the hunt
Pickering didn't want to talk much about police tactics he might use to find Cameron because he didn't want to scotch potential pieces of the marshals' investigation. But he and Thornton agreed to make some general points.
"The only way to do it is start going backwards," Santaguida said.
He said he'd find any person Cameron has had notable associations with and grill them in interviews, looking for any dropped hint about what he'd do on the run, however benign the detail.
Thornton said because Cameron's location was monitored since his release from prison, marshals can figure out patterns of where he goes and how he moves. If Cameron's smart, he'll stay off his previous tracks.
Thornton also said there may be electronic or paper trails that could tip Cameron's hand. Although his Internet activity was monitored as part of his bail conditions, his laptop disappeared when he did.
Marshals haven't dropped many clues about what they're looking at, but last week they searched his ex-wife's Hallowell home. March said the search ruled out the possibility that Cameron was hiding there.
Barbara Cameron has said she doesn't know where her husband is, according to Knightly.
'No Whitey Bulger'
Veteran private eye Thornton expects Cameron to be a relatively quick capture for marshals.
"He's no Whitey Bulger," Thornton said, referring to the infamous Boston gangster who evaded capture for 16 years before his 2011 arrest. "This guy will be caught eventually and it will probably be sooner rather than later."
Retired detective Pickering doesn't totally disagree. He thinks Cameron may be a tougher get, but the marshals are well-equipped.
"I have no doubt that they have the resources to find him," Pickering said. "What he got caught doing, he was acting on an impulse he can't control or decided not to.
"He has some flaws," he added.
But former warden service head Santaguida said Cameron appears to have the knowledge and likely the drive to elude authorities.
All three private eyes said that as a middle-aged former prosecutor convicted of a crime that involves child victimization, Cameron would be petrified to go back to prison.
That motivation could make a difference.
Santaguida said, "My personal opinion on this, and I could be completely wrong, is he's going to be a difficult person to find."
Michael Shepherd -- 621-5632
mshepherd@mainetoday.com

Online Privacy Issue Is Also in Play in Petraeus Scandal

By SCOTT SHANE

New York Times

The F.B.I. investigation that toppled the director of the C.I.A. and has now entangled the top American commander in Afghanistan underscores a danger that civil libertarians have long warned about: that in policing the Web for crime, espionage and sabotage, government investigators will unavoidably invade the private lives of Americans.

On the Internet, and especially in e-mails, text messages, social network postings and online photos, the work lives and personal lives of Americans are inextricably mixed. Private, personal messages are stored for years on computer servers, available to be discovered by investigators who may be looking into completely unrelated matters.

In the current F.B.I. case, a Tampa, Fla., woman, Jill Kelley, a friend both of David H. Petraeus, the former C.I.A. director, and Gen. John R. Allen, the top NATO commander in Afghanistan, was disturbed by a half-dozen anonymous e-mails she had received in June. She took them to an F.B.I. agent whose acquaintance with Ms. Kelley (he had sent her shirtless photos of himself — electronically, of course) eventually prompted his bosses to order him to stay away from the investigation.

But a squad of investigators at the bureau’s Tampa office, in consultation with prosecutors, opened a cyberstalking inquiry. Although that investigation is still open, law enforcement officials have said that criminal charges appear unlikely.

In the meantime, however, there has been a cascade of unintended consequences. What began as a private, and far from momentous, conflict between two women, Ms. Kelley and Paula Broadwell, Mr. Petraeus’s biographer and the reported author of the harassing e-mails, has had incalculable public costs.

The C.I.A. is suddenly without a permanent director at a time of urgent intelligence challenges in Syria, Iran, Libya and beyond. The leader of the American-led effort to prevent a Taliban takeover in Afghanistan is distracted, at the least, by an inquiry into his e-mail exchanges with Ms. Kelley by the Defense Department’s inspector general.

For privacy advocates, the case sets off alarms.

“There should be an investigation not of the personal behavior of General Petraeus and General Allen, but of what surveillance powers the F.B.I. used to look into their private lives,” Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said in an interview. “This is a textbook example of the blurring of lines between the private and the public.”

Law enforcement officials have said they used only ordinary methods in the case, which might have included grand jury subpoenas and search warrants. As the complainant, Ms. Kelley presumably granted F.B.I. specialists access to her computer, which they would have needed in their hunt for clues to the identity of the sender of the anonymous e-mails. While they were looking, they discovered General Allen’s e-mails, which F.B.I. superiors found “potentially inappropriate” and decided should be shared with the Defense Department.

In a parallel process, the investigators gained access, probably using a search warrant, to Ms. Broadwell’s Gmail account. There they found messages that turned out to be from Mr. Petraeus.

Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, said the chain of unexpected disclosures was not unusual in computer-centric cases.

“It’s a particular problem with cyberinvestigations — they rapidly become open-ended because there’s such a huge quantity of information available and it’s so easily searchable,” he said, adding, “If the C.I.A. director can get caught, it’s pretty much open season on everyone else.”

For years now, as national security officials and experts have warned of a Pearl Harbor cyberattack that could fray the electrical grid or collapse stock markets, policy makers have jostled over which agencies should be assigned the delicate task of monitoring the Internet for dangerous intrusions.

Advocates of civil liberties have been especially wary of the National Security Agency, whose expertise is unrivaled but whose immense surveillance capabilities they see as frightening. They have successfully urged that the Department of Homeland Security take the leading role in cybersecurity.

That is in part because the D.H.S., if far from entirely open to public scrutiny, is much less secretive than the N.S.A., the eavesdropping and code-breaking agency. To this day, N.S.A. officials have revealed almost nothing about the warrantless wiretapping it conducted inside the United States in the hunt for terrorists in the years after 2001, even after the secret program was disclosed by The New York Times in 2005 and set off a political firestorm.

The hazards of the Web as record keeper, of course, are a familiar topic. New college graduates find that their Facebook postings give would-be employers pause. Husbands discover wives’ infidelity by spotting incriminating e-mails on a shared computer. Teachers lose their jobs over impulsive Twitter comments.

But the events of the last few days have shown how law enforcement investigators who plunge into the private territories of cyberspace looking for one thing can find something else altogether, with astonishingly destructive results.

Some people may applaud those results, at least in part. By having a secret extramarital affair, for instance, Mr. Petraeus was arguably making himself vulnerable to blackmail, which would be a serious concern for a top intelligence officer. What if Russian or Chinese intelligence, rather than the F.B.I., had discovered the e-mails between the C.I.A. director and Ms. Broadwell?

Likewise, military law prohibits adultery — which General Allen’s associates say he denies committing — and some kinds of relationships. So should an officer’s privacy really be total?

But some commentators have renewed an argument that a puritanical American culture overreacts to sexual transgressions that have little relevance to job performance. “Most Americans were dismayed that General Petraeus resigned,” said Mr. Romero of the A.C.L.U.

That old debate now takes place in a new age of electronic information. The public shaming that labeled the adulterer in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Scarlet Letter” might now be accomplished by an F.B.I. search warrant or an N.S.A. satellite dish.

Private Investigators are the Experts in Your Case

Why Private Investigators should run their own investigations

While a good PI will always listen to their client and make sure they address all their concerns, it is important that we run our own investigation and only give updates as deemed relevant. Domestic cases can be very challenging to conduct as there are usually children involved and also property, assets and money. These things tend to make the spouse very much on edge causing them to ask the subject far too many questions hoping to glean some useful info for the investigator. This can turn on you! Most of the time, it does more harm than good to the case. It’s best in the beginning to fill out the appropriate paperwork giving the investigator the requested information to have in your file. No one has ESP and can know what the subject is planning to do before they do it. It doesn’t matter how the spouse answers your questions, subjects DO NOT tell the truth! One thing to always remember is this simple fact, if you could trust him or her, you wouldn’t have hired a PI. Best advice to take is, hire a good state licensed PI, turn them loose and give them time to do their job. There are right and wrong ways to conduct a case. However, one thing is for certain, each case is different and the investigator can tell pretty quickly if the subject has been tipped off by someone. Keep in mind it is very important you tell no one but your attorney that you have hired a PI. Bottom line, trust no one while your case is active.

Characteristics of most stalkers

Cyber Stalking is one of the most horrific crimes one person can promote against another. Stalkers are self-centered persons consumed with having power and control over others, and the firm belief they are a legend and entitled to any and all persons or things their depraved heart desires. These are dangerous individuals and do not stop on their own. Unfortunately, it seems that stalkers can often find loop holes in the law they use to their advantage.

One woman called me a few weeks ago regarding a situation she had been having for over two years. Her former husband was angry with her for divorcing him and made it his life’s mission to make her miserable. He set out to accomplish this by inadvertly sending email threats against her and her family, compromising her job security, putting numerous and outrageous lies on paper via US postal service, sending hundreds of emails and texts filled with very heinous accusations of her character, and even writing a self-published book. Yes, that’s right. Unless you have ever been stalked, you cannot possibly understand how this activity can uproot your life, filling you with utter hopelessness and despair. You try to do the right thing by talking with what you believe to be the appropriate authorities and are shot down by every department you turn to for one bureaucratic reason or another. 

Bottom line is Do Not Give Up! Start from the top of the system and work your way down if you have to. No one should have to live in total fear of a mean, deranged, self-tormented person. There is help out there- you have to be diligent. Stand up for yourself, believe in yourself, and challenge the legal system. Carry a tape recorder with you. Carry a video camera or use a cell phone video / camera if you have one. Most of all – DOCUMENT dates, times, actions, etc on a consistent and diligent basis. You have done nothing wrong to cause this person’s action. The stalker is the one breaking the law and the system should take this serious and do what we elected them to do for each citizen. Good luck and May God bless you and your efforts. I care.

The Legal Gray Area of Private Investigators Using GPS To Track Cheating Spouses

 The Legal Gray Area of Private Investigators Using GPS To Track Cheating Spouses
By Ryan Gallagher | Posted Friday, Nov. 9, 2012, at 8:33 AM ET

The Spy Who GPS-Tagged Me
Private investigators who use GPS trackers to monitor suspected cheating spouses are in a legal gray area.
The tools once reserved for intelligence operatives have become increasingly cheap and available in recent years,and perhaps no one has benefited from this more than private investigators who make their money by monitoring suspected cheaters. No longer do they have to sit outside a seedy motel for hours, trying to take pictures of a philandering husband and his mistress entering a room together. They need only attach a GPS device to the suspected adulterer’s car, and the client’s suspicions can be confirmed. In a landmark ruling in January, the Supreme Court held that law enforcement use of GPS trackers to monitor movements constitutes a “search.” That means the technology falls under the Fourth Amendment’s protections
against unreasonable searches and seizures, making it difficult for police to put a tracker on a car without first
obtaining a warrant. But for private individuals, laws around the use of GPS trackers remain patchy, differing state to state.
Take California, Texas, Virginia, and Minnesota. These states allow private individuals to use tracking devices where the owner of a vehicle consents to it being monitored. Where there is no consent, it is considered a misdemeanor that can result in a fine and a jail sentence of six to 12 months. If a vehicle is jointly owned—say, by a husband and wife—and one owner wants to secretly track the other, it’s a murky area that’s as ethically dubious as it is legally contentious. However, that isn’t stopping private investigators—some of whom appear willing to track any vehicle regardless of its ownership. In a bid to find out whether private eyes are adhering to the law, earlier this month I decided to dabble in a bit of
undercover investigating of my own. Posing as a suspicious wife and using a fake email address, I wrote to a number of PIs in the states with the strictest laws on the use of GPS surveillance trackers. Those I randomly selected were all advertising a GPS service openly on their websites, and I emailed to request a quote for how much it would cost to “GPS monitor movements of my husband's car” over a two-week period.
Of the 20 investigators I contacted, 16 replied, and only one declined to offer me some sort of GPS tracking citing legal concerns. The majority of the PIs said they would do it on the condition that my name was on the title of the car, with some offering to provide a DVD of its movements and others offering “real-time” surveillance of the vehicle for me to watch live via cellphone or computer. Two separate investigators in California I approached expressed no immediate concern for the state’s GPS tracking law, which unequivocally outlaws tracking a car without the consent of its owner. Still using the fake name and
email address, I asked whether the investigators would be willing and able to monitor more than one vehicle at a time. “There is another person who I believe is involved with my husband and it would be useful for me to check her car's movements at the same time as my husband's,” I wrote. The response from Irvine, Calif.-based Hudson Investigations was a straight yes. “I could do it for $1200 including install and removal,” company boss Rick Hudson, a former Orange County police officer, told me. I received a similarly affirmative answer from Western Investigations, a firm headquartered near San Diego that claims on its
website to be one of the most experienced PI agencies in California. “You are looking at a total of $1,800 for 2 vehicles for 2 weeks of the tracking,” Western Investigations’ general manager wrote. “We will give you access to monitor it yourself during the entire course of the investigation. And if you would like a location history report at the conclusion of the investigation, we can do so as well.” When I subsequently contacted Western Investigations under my real name about this story, I asked whether it was aware the service I requested is classified as a misdemeanor under California’s penal code. “If I gave you the wrong impression then I was mistaken,” the GM wrote back in an email, insisting that the company would not install a
tracking device without the consent of the registered owner. Western Investigations’ owner Patrick Schneemann then told me in a separate message, “I can assure you that our company policy is that we do not use GPS in our investigations unless we have consent from the owner of the vehicle.”
Rick Hudson at Hudson Investigations said he was sure he had mentioned the legal constraints in his emails (he didn’t) and said that he wouldn’t put a tracker on any vehicle without signing a GPS agreement with the customer that says that they have the authorization. Hudson added that he gets “so many calls regarding these tracking units that it's crazy.” Other PI companies were reluctant to directly help me track the vehicles but instead offered to sell or rent me GPS tracking equipment. This would mean any unlawful use of the tracker would be on my shoulders and not those of a PI. In one instance, even after I informed Texas-based LP Dynamics that I was looking to track two vehicles, one of which had no ownership connection to me, I was offered "2 passive GPS units" for $125 each. A company representative emailed: "Just place on a vehicle, remove when you want and download to your computer to see where they have been." When I later contacted the company for this story, CEO Michael Morrison emailed that "we are a licensed private investigation corporation and not an attorney." Morrison rightly stated that LP Dynamics follows Texas law "to the letter" because the penal code covers only the installation of tracking systems but not the sale of the devices. This could be considered something of a legal loophole. The solitary exception was California-based Orange Investigations, run by former military policeman Ryan Garrahy. Of the 16 that responded to me, Garrahy was the only PI to completely stonewall my request. Orange Investigations
has previously provided GPS tracking for its clients, but Garrahy said he has stopped doing so “at this particular time” because of concerns about a possible rise in civil suits linked to the Supreme Court decision in January.
*****
Overall, the impression I got was that it was not difficult to find companies willing to help me track any vehicle, which could potentially result in a misdemeanor being committed. Even the investigators who were more cautious,telling me that they would only track a vehicle I had an “ownership interest” in, were on shaky ground. Though a case in Minnesota last year ruled that it was acceptable to use a GPS tracker on your spouse if you co-own the car,there is far from a legal consensus on the matter in other states.
Austin, Texas-based criminal lawyer Ian Inglis told me he thought that the Texas statute on tracking wasn’t
constructed with joint ownership in mind. “Even if there’s no criminal liability, there could be some civil liability, and it might look bad in a divorce, too,” Inglis said. “Whether it’s your husband or wife, it’s a bad idea to track anybody’s car without their permission.”
In California, similarly, it’s a gray area. Hanni Fakhoury, staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said he wasn’t aware of any statutory California law that addressed the joint ownership question. Fakhoury referred to Georgia v. Randolph, a Supreme Court case where it was ruled that there needed to be joint agreement for the lawful search of a jointly owned property. According to Fakhoury, the joint consent deemed necessary in Randolph is consistent with other California law and so could feasibly apply to the use of trackers on a jointly owned vehicle. (Californian wiretap law, for instance, requires both parties to a conversation to consent to having the conversation recorded—unlike federal wiretap law, which only requires one party to consent.) Contentious legal issues aside, what’s clear is that the use of GPS tracking devices is very far from being under control. While law enforcement agencies are now bound to consider the trackers as covered by the Fourth Amendment, in the private domain there’s a lack of clarity when it comes to the regulation. Where there are laws, in some cases they are being ignored, and where there is any ambiguity, it is being exploited—often by individuals who stand to make a profit. As is frequently the case in the realm of surveillance, the technology is out of step with the law. High-tech tracking tools that would a decade ago have rarely been used outside police and military circles are available today to anyone
with a credit card and access to the Internet. The technology is continuing to advance and is simultaneously

becoming cheaper. And that’s not going to change any time soon. SpyBase, a surveillance gadgets retailer based out of Torrance, Calif., has seen in recent years a rapid increase in sales of GPS trackers, a trend that’s continuing. The store’s owner, who didn’t want to be named, told me GPS trackers were his “best-sellers,” and that a sophisticated $299 real-time tracker called the PTX 5 was his customers’ favorite.
“PIs, police, private citizens,” he said. “It’s a very big market.”

Former Yard chief John Yates 'knew News of the World hired second private eye'

http://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/former-yard-chief-john-yates-knew-news-of-the-world-hired-second-private-eye-8300264.html

Synthetic Drugs Uncovered

"Synthetics Uncovered - Part 2" - Investigation Of Synthetic Drugs In The Permian Basin 11/1/12

Felicia Bolton

Fbolton@cbs7.com

CBS 7 News Reporter

November 1, 2012

Ector County, TX - It happens every day; smoke shops and adult book stores selling synthetic drugs in Ector County. Now it’s getting in the hands of minors.

After talking with a 13-year-old boy who says he purchases synthetic marijuana at local stores, we hired a private investigative team that went undercover. 

Within minutes they purchase synthetic marijuana. It's labeled "not for human consumption" and marketed by businesses as incense and potpourri. Stores signs say 18 and older allowed, but they never asked the young investigator for her I.D. 

The Drug Enforcement Agency says keeping businesses in line and cracking down on the sell of these synthetic drugs is a challenge..

"They [these businesses] are walking a fine line between what's legal and what's illegal. But again if they are selling an illegal product and they are not marketing for that…you and I, as common sense citizens can come to that conclusion. But you also have to show criminal intent in what the individual is doing,” said Midland DEA agent Dante Sorianello.

Although federal law has banned many ingredients in synthetic drugs, chemists continue to change the chemical compounds. This switch is making the drug legal. 

It's a barrier that local law enforcement has to deal with on a daily basis. 

"We have to try to figure out how to battle it as far as the different chemical compounds that they change all the time, which is a major problem with it. You know you can test it, one deal will pass. You test a different one they come up with the next time they make a batch and it won’t pass," said Ector County Sheriff Mark Donaldson.

Local law enforcement say Ector County is a distribution pipeline for drugs and these synthetics are a growing trend, putting more stress on officers. 

"Synthetic narcotics are illegal period. No one can purchase those legally. They can’t be purchased. They can’t be sold. They can’t be possessed, legally," said Lt.. Mike Gerke with the Odessa Police department.

In our investigation, we caught a clerk at a local convenience store selling “Kush”. The marketed the drug as potpourri, but it’s used as synthetic marijuana. So we went into store and asked the manager why they are allowing this to be sold. 

“The stuff we sale is legal. Whatever we’re selling is according to state law. It’s legal,” said the manger at “One Stop” convenience store. 

While we were in the store, we saw synthetic drugs behind the counter. They even sold it in front of our face.

According to the American Association of Poison Control Center, the chemicals in synthetic marijuana are 3-to-5-times more potent that real marijuana. That can be especially detrimental to a young person, causing long-term damage to the brain.

It’s a problem founder of New Day Counseling Anna Scroggins sees every day.

"It’s leaving them with no conscious. They are making these decisions with no hesitation and no fear of the consequences, regard for the law or compassion for their family. So it’s leaving them with what we would call cognitive impairment," said Anna Scroggins, founder of New Day Counseling Founder.

Scroggins believes there is an answer to the loop hole in the law, she’s pushing for an Odessa city ordinance banning the sell of all substances that imitate an illegal drug.

"They had a business before these synthetic cannabinoids came out, they don't need this… they are killing our youth. They are killing our future," said Scroggins.

During our investigation, the private investigator went into 8 different adult bookstores, convenience stores and smoke shops. Four of which sold synthetic drugs, marketed as incenses. 

Anna Scroggins with New Day Counseling has started a petition asking for signatures to get the ordinance in place. For information on that, contact her at 432-332-5645 orclick here.