'It was good work': Ex-leaders mark 10 years since Johnstown's National Drug Intelligence Center closed

Jun. 15—JOHNSTOWN, Pa. — For two decades, the Johnstown-based National Drug Intelligence Center was a key part of the nation's effort to address drug issues.

At the same time, it faced the near-constant possibility of being defunded and abolished by federal politicians.

The organization ultimately came to an end 10 years ago.

What remains is a message at the U.S. Department of Justice's archives website — "On June 15, 2012, the National Drug Intelligence Center (NDIC) closed" — with a dead link to what is supposed to be a collection of historical materials.

NDIC, formerly located in the Penn Traffic Building on Washington Street in downtown Johnstown, was established in 1993 with the support of U.S. Rep. John Murtha, a Democrat.

It conducted strategic intelligence analysis and Document and Media Exploitation, better known as DOMEX, with the mission of providing law enforcement departments and policymakers with domestic drug intelligence.

Steve Frank, an NDIC chief of staff, said the work done by the agency was "unparalleled."

"You cannot put into words the gratification we had from the work that we produced," Frank said. "We know it was good work. We know it was effective."

Murtha, the longest-serving congressman in Pennsylvania history, annually fought to secure funding for the program that many Republicans decried as a pork-barrel project that served no clear purpose. He died in February 2010.

Former U.S. Rep. Mark Critz, a Democrat from Johnstown, succeeded his mentor in office.

"From a personal standpoint, the Republicans went after NDIC every year, and Mr. Murtha had to defend it every single year," Critz said. "He had to put it in the budget, defend it and get it through, and he did it just by his sheer will and by the allies and friends he had made in Congress, in both the House (of Representatives) and the Senate.

"When I went to Congress, I wanted to be Jack Murtha. For all intents and purposes, I was going to do my best to be Jack Murtha, and if there was one thing that the Republicans were able to do to just show that I wasn't Jack Murtha, it was shut NDIC down. So when they took control in 2011, they went after it full-force. It was just something that I couldn't stop."

Critz called the closing of NDIC "one of the toughest blows I've ever had in my life to lose that."

Michael Walther, the center's last director, felt the closure was "really sort of a vindictive measure by anti-Murtha people."

'We built something'

NDIC coordinated with numerous agencies, including the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; the Federal Bureau of Investigation; the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration; and the U.S. Marshals Service, along with state and local law enforcement.

The group's analysis was designed to help slow the trafficking of narcotics.

"NDIC often had predicted what drugs would become more prominent in advance to give federal agencies an opportunity to gear up and prepare," Frank said.

DOMEX teams sifted through assets, financial transactions, phone numbers, associates' lives and other records to come up with reports about suspects. The objective was "to make sense of everything that (law enforcement) seized," said Steve Gironda, who was a DOMEX national program manager.

Gironda added: "We built something that no one else was doing."

NDIC's budget for salaries and benefits in its last fiscal year was $25.8 million.

When announcing his retirement shortly before the closing, Walther told The Tribune-Democrat that "for the last 20 or 30 years, our government has been all about 'performance measures,' " adding that NDIC became a target for government cuts because its impact could not be strictly measured monetarily.

"The leadership of the Department of Justice has not appreciated the value of statistical intelligence," Walther continued.

He said there was an "unhealthy interagency rivalry" happening.

Looking back, during an interview last week, Walther said: "I always thought that our most important function and the thing that people disliked us for is the fact that we continued to remind people about the lack of progress that we were making against drugs. It made us unpopular within, I think, government circles and law enforcement circles because we were sort of a regular reminder that their policies were failing.

"I'd like to think that if we were still around, we would still be serving that function and maybe — maybe, just maybe — the policy would change in response to our strategic findings."

Critz added: "They shut it down, and, lo and behold, as the years tick by, the heroin, opioid epidemic blows up in our face, and you start to look at that and say, 'Well, wait a minute here. A lot of these things existed prior to NDIC shutting down. Why wasn't it an issue beforehand?' "

About 300 employees and contractors worked for NDIC during its peak.

Annual salaries averaged $89,000 in 2011. No employer of similar size, offering jobs at that level of pay, has filled the void in downtown ever since.

The people who worked there supported businesses, lived in local neighborhoods and socialized together away from the office.

"It was the best work environment that anyone could ever ask for," Frank said. "It was a family. One of the things we touted when we were trying to recruit talent to NDIC was the local environment. It was very supportive of family life and offered great work-life balance, and ... we also made tremendous contributions to the country from our small operation."

Gironda said he had a "great experience" working with "top-notch people."

At the time of NDIC's closing, Gironda wrote an op-ed in The Tribune-Democrat in which he stated: "I had a great run at the National Drug Intelligence Center. I worked in and traveled to places I never would have gone, met people I never would have known, and shared experiences with friends and co-workers that made the past 17 years extremely fulfilling.

"I consider myself very lucky."

Walther called his time as director the "most fulfilling job that I ever had."

When NDIC was shuttered, approximately three dozen employees took jobs offered with the Drug Enforcement Agency in Washington, D.C.

"Obviously, I have lots of regrets about the center closing," Walther said. "The fact is, over the last 10 years, DEA has tried to reconstruct the capabilities, at least in some measure, of NDIC internally. And if you see some of the recent reports that DEA puts out — strategic intelligence reports — they look almost identical to the style and the technique used by NDIC for a couple of decades. That's primarily because DEA was able to hire a number of our best people when NDIC shut down."