Lawn, John

John Lawn (1935-) served as administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) from July 1985, when he was appointed by President Ronald Reagan following the retirement of Francis Mullen, to March 1990. After his retirement from the DEA, he served as vice president and chief of operations of the New York Yankees until 1994.

[Page 463]Lawn had served as deputy administrator since 1982. Before the DEA, Lawn was a long-time FBI agent, serving as a special agent for 15 years. Some of his assignments included the supervision of FBI civil rights cases, background investigations for White House-related matters (such as the nomination of U.S. attorneys, federal judges, and White House officials), and a stint in the Bureau's Criminal Division, where he supervised Congress's review of the facts in the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Lawn's tenure at the DEA came just as the crack epidemic was hitting its stride. The Medellín and Cali cocaine cartels wielded tremendous power in Colombia, and conflicts among cartels in Miami had led to open gunfire on city streets. From 1985 to 1989, cocaine-related emergency room admissions increased by 2,800 percent—some of which can be ascribed to the popularity of cocaine among urban professionals and children of privilege, but the bulk of which came from crack, which was cheaper, purer, and highly addictive. Len Bias, widely considered the most talented basketball player never to play at the professional level, died of a cocaine overdose two days after his draft pick in 1986, bringing a large amount of attention to the problem of cocaine.

Prior to Lawn's time with the DEA, crack had been considered primarily a regional problem, popular mainly in Miami, where dealers working with a glut of Bahamian cocaine converted it to crack for a primarily middle-class clientele. It took crack a few years to spread and find new customers, who could afford its much cheaper price point, but in 1985 four crack labs were seized in New York State, four more in California, two in Virginia, and two more in Arizona and North Carolina—demonstrating how far crack had spread from a regional niche product. The number of self-confessed daily cocaine users increased to 5.8 million from 1984's 4.2 million, according to the Department of Health and Human Service's surveys. By 1986 crack was available in every region of the nation from a wide array of suppliers.

The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 allocated $8 million for domestic cocaine enforcement, some of which went to new DEA crack teams, each of which included two DEA special agents who liaised with local and state law enforcement as crack labs and interstate trafficking networks spread. These teams were especially useful for deploying to areas that had little experience dealing with drug crime, like western Arizona, where crack was being trafficked by Los Angeles gangs, or Louisiana, where Haitian dealers had started selling crack to rural laborers. When more money was allocated, Lawn established five crack task forces to share information on interstate traffickers, based in Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Detroit, Denver, and Houston.

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