Gang squad Detective Luis Ortiz fiddled with his radio one recent Tuesday afternoon, fighting for a clear signal. The surveillance microphone broadcasting from inside a house had a limited range.</p><p>The basement walls of a home less than a mile from Northeast High School muffled the signal, so Ortiz lurched his sedan around the block, hoping the air would clear.</p><p>Over static, he made out conversation as the "money guy" counted $14,000 for the "dope guy," a man called Primo who was peddling 30 pounds of Mexican marijuana. Ortiz had been tracking Primo for weeks.</p><p>A confidential informant, a drug trade middleman who connected buyers with sellers, spoke up occasionally to lubricate the deal and keep things moving.</p><p>Ortiz smiled. He liked what he was hearing. Still, he could go either way on this informant, whom he had recruited only the previous night.</p><p>"This guy is pretty good," Ortiz said brightly, but then reconsidered. "He’s pretty spooked."</p><p>An hour or so later, the drug traffickers emerged from the house and drove away, unmolested by a half-dozen undercover surveillance officers and seven tactical team members lurking nearby.</p><p>Ortiz punched numbers into his cell phone, trying to raise the informant and learn when the next, and presumably bigger deal, would go down. That was the deal he wanted to bust.</p><p>"Man, I hate to let dope walk away," he said.</p><p>Thirty pounds of any illegal drug probably would be worth pulling out of a house in midtown or the East Side, but the stakes are higher in the Northeast area, where Hispanic gangs predominate.</p><p>The difference in the gang scene there became clear recently as two Kansas City Star reporters and a photographer spent three weeks following members of the Kansas City Police Department’s gang squad. Overworked and undermanned, the eight-member unit is charged with tracking the city’s more than 3,300 documented gang members and draining their economic lifeblood, the narcotics trade.</p><p>Nowhere are the squad’s frustrations more exasperating and victories more substantial than the Northeast. Exasperating because detectives regularly watch large quantities of dope change hands without making arrests in order to work their way up the drug chain. Substantial because when the detectives finally seize larger drug quantities, the defendants usually face harsher penalties in court. And with harsher penalties, defendants are more likely to cooperate and give up their sources.</p><p>Only a tiny fraction of Hispanic youth are involved in gang-related drug trafficking, Northeast area leaders say. But they are devastating some neighborhoods.</p><p>Mexican drug trafficking organizations and the Latino street gangs that work with them use the Northeast as a major distribution point for cocaine and other drugs, according to a May report on Kansas City’s narcotics market by the National Drug Intelligence Center.</p><p>Think of it in economic terms.</p><p>The Hispanic gangs have access to international connections and transportation systems that bring in wholesale quantities of methamphetamine, marijuana and cocaine.</p><p>Those drugs are resold, often to African-American gang members for retail distribution to users.</p><p>So while East Side gang members deal in ounces and grams, Northeast gang members move pounds and kilograms.</p><p>To get inside those deals, Ortiz and his partner, Eric Benson, depend on confidential informants, or CIs, like the middleman helping them on the 30-pound marijuana deal.</p><p>They had confronted this CI the previous evening, after they recovered $1,100 hidden under his car’s dashboard during a traffic stop. Benson had asked him the three standard questions used to encourage drug traffickers to cooperate.