Threats Batter Mother Who Joined Drug War

Wendy Stanek stiffened instantly.

She had been slouched on the witness stand, acting more like a defiant teen-ager than the undercover drug informer that she is. Then the lawyer asked about threats.

“Threats? Yeah, someone has been calling me lately,” said Stanek, a mother of seven. “I’m thinking of moving the kids, yes.”

Pivoting in her chair, she glared at half a dozen defendants accused of dealing drugs, each of whom she had helped put in the Iron County courtroom that day. “Whoever’s calling me, I hope you’re enjoying it,” she said to them.

Stanek expected threats when she contacted the police last summer and volunteered to become an informer in Crystal Falls, a remote timbering town of 1,965 people near the Wisconsin border in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.

Now a caller is promising to do perverted, criminal things to her children.

Yes, it’s bad, the 35-year-old unemployed, twice-divorced barmaid said late one night last month, drinking beers and smoking cigarettes at a downtown tavern. A friend was watching the kids at her home.

The bar owner ordered a beer and sat down beside Stanek. “I give her a lot of credit,” he said, raising his glass in salute.

The police are doing what they can about the threats, trying to identify the caller and increasing patrols past her two-story house in the middle of town, but they say they have no way to totally protect Stanek from retribution.

Officers warned Stanek it might be like this. “All it takes is one idiot. All it takes is one flake,” said Lt. Bill Johnson, the Michigan State Police detective who heads UPSET, the Upper Peninsula Substance Enforcement Team, a federally funded drug task force.

“Wendy is one who just wouldn’t listen,” Johnson said. “She was motivated very strongly because of the death of her son.”

Stanek’s life turned on its edge in June, 1987, when her eldest child, 15-year-old Ryan, died in a car crash after hitching a ride home with friends who had been at a party.

His ashes are in a marble box in a glass cabinet in the corner of the dining room. Ryan’s soiled baseball cap sits on top of the box, next to Stanek’s many citations and a photograph of a Crystal Falls girl who killed herself, one of three local teen suicides last year--a reminder to Stanek of the perils faced by the town’s children, and her own.

Stanek describes the cabinet as “my little tomb.”

After an emergency-room nurse mistakenly gave Stanek the clothes of another boy hurt in the accident, and she found a hash pipe tucked in one of the shoes, Stanek took her rage and grief to Johnson and UPSET. She penetrated the drug world in Crystal Falls and surrounding small towns, buying more cocaine and marijuana than the task force could pay for.

She said she simply picked up the phone and called almost 50 people and asked if they would sell her marijuana or cocaine. All but one said yes.

Stanek said it was amazingly easy. It gave her a giddy sense of justice. “Anybody could do it. You could do it,” she told a reporter.

She broke her cover and quit her bar job last Christmas when UPSET went public with 23 arrests in Crystal Falls, Iron River and neighboring towns.

The threats started immediately.

“Those people are scums anyway,” Stanek told a reporter after the first calls. “They said they would hire a hit man from Chicago. Big deal.”

Until a Feb. 14 message, the threats were aimed only at Stanek. But on Valentine’s Day, she received an envelope with a magazine clipping of a mother caressing a naked baby. There was also a handwritten note.

“Less than 15 minutes after this picture was taken, the woman was stripped completely nude and both she, and the child, were thrown into a large vat of boiling water! Bye Bye Wendy!”

The calls threatening to harm Stanek’s children, always by the same male voice, were coming at the rate of one a day until recently, when they tapered off. But Stanek is still considering moving her family out of Michigan.

Stanek’s son, Jamey, 15, wants to stay in Crystal Falls.

“I don’t want to move,” he said, wearing a plaid hunting shirt and fidgeting at the kitchen table, eager to go snowmobiling.

“I won’t go,” Jamey said.

“He’ll go,” said Stanek, who went on welfare after quitting her job and who spends most of her days in court testifying against the men and women she says sold her drugs.

Around their disagreement, chaos momentarily held forth. Thirteen-year-old Rikki, her blond hair moussed in the latest fashion, had just baked a cake but was insisting that her mother frost it. Two-year-old Lacy, wearing nothing but one of her brothers’ T-shirts, was racing bare-bottomed across the linoleum behind a hyperactive terrier mutt named Pee Wee.

After spending an eight-hour day at the courthouse, Stanek stood in the kitchen, juggling the demands of supper--a skillet of ground beef and Hamburger Helper--along with the cake, the dog, her kids, a reporter and a photographer and telephone calls from a news producer for a television network.

This is normal, said Scott Thrasher, Stanek’s boyfriend, as he watched from a perch at the kitchen table.

The threats have not changed Stanek’s life, said Thrasher, who owns a gas station in nearby Sagola.

“Most of it has been good,” Thrasher said. “When we go out to dinner, somebody stops by to congratulate Wendy.”

But the threats against her children have the otherwise unshakable Stanek worried. She turned from the stove, gripping the skillet of hamburger in one hand and the spatula in the other.

“If they touch my kids, I’ll kill them.”