By Rick Pfeiffer Niagara Gazette The Niagara Gazette Fri Oct 28, 2011, 11:46 PM EDT
NIAGARA FALLS — Falls Police Narcotics Division detectives say they have taken another pair of drug dealers out of the city’s South End.
Investigators hit homes on 17th and 19th streets in raids just over an hour apart early Friday morning. Members of the police Emergency Response Team came through the door of 451 17th St. just after midnight, looking for Joseph “Joe Black” Currie.
Investigators said they found Currie, 32, inside the home along with his girlfriend, father and a child.
“We’d been looking at (Currie) for about two months and we made several (drug) buys at that location,” said Narcotics Detective Jay Reynolds, who led the investigation with his partner Detective Joseph Giaquinto.
Reynolds said as ERT officers made their entry into the home, they encountered a pit bull who was “protecting (Currie’s) business.”
The dog was controlled and given to representatives from the Niagara County SPCA.
Inside the home, investigators seized two grams of crack cocaine, half a pound of pot and $1,100. Currie was charged with fifth-degree criminal possession of a controlled substance and fifth-degree criminal possession of marijuana.
Ninety minutes later, ERT officers went to the troubled 19th Street corridor and hit an apartment there. Their target, Bonito “Segal” Medina, was no stranger to Falls narcotics detectives.
“Bonito Medina has been selling (drugs) in the (Falls) for years,” Reynolds said. “But he just bounced from one location to the next so fast that every time we got information on him, he’d move before we could do something on him.”
Reynolds and Giaquinto said this time, they were able to monitor Medina’s drug dealing and make “numerous” undercover buys from an apartment he was using in the 500 block of 19th Street.
During the raid of the lower apartment at 533 19th St., investigators recovered 23 grams of crack cocaine, a digital scale and $2,100.
“He always lists a Buffalo address, so we think he may have been bringing the dope from Buffalo and selling it here,” Reynolds said.
Medina, 28, 70 Comstock Ave., was charged with two counts of third-degree criminal possession of a controlled substance.
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