Box of Dreams

How a too-good-to-be-true tool fooled drug warriors.

Brian Doherty from the November 1996 issue

(Page 2 of 3)

"We were all sitting in the school board auditorium," Halbig remembers. He had invited Quattlebaum and the former police chief of Harleyville down to demonstrate the tracker after an enticing phone call from a Florida Quadro distributor, who also happened to be the mayor of the small Florida town of Lake Helen in Volusia County.

"They walk in with it in hand. You see the antenna swing. It points to a sign. You move the sign, there's a bullet. They had a gunpowder chip in there. We were finding bullets, we were finding marijuana. I saw the big picture: A device that could serve as a deterrent! Just let kids know we have a tool that can find those substances." Halbig trails off wistfully. A dream too fine to come true. But Halbig got a hint of how it might have worked.

While using a Quadro on loan before purchase, he wandered around middle school hallways and parking lots, letting the antenna swing where it would. It reacted to a car driving into the school parking lot. Halbig is sensible about the subject--now, at least.

"I used to be a customs inspector. We tried to be rational. We knew the profile. Why would Quadro react to one bunch of kids and not to another? You see a car drive in with a bunch of kids. Windows closed. They're bouncing their heads. Next thing you know, you get them to admit, 'Hey, I was smoking marijuana this morning.'"

The demonstration, and even some experience, made Halbig a believer. It took a magician to convince him that the Quadro Tracker's magic was just an illusion. "Just as I was ready to make a commitment to buy one, I got a call from this fellow named James Randi. He told me, 'Before you buy it, can I come up and show you a test?' I checked the guy out on the Internet." Thus Halbig learned about James "the Amazing" Randi, professional magician and debunker extraordinaire. Through the generosity of some of his supporters, Randi has a standing offer to pay $624,000 to anyone who can conclusively demonstrate to his satisfaction any method or device that works by supernatural or extraphysical means. As a professional fakir, Randi is not easily fooled by others. Despite the plethora of the supposedly mystical in the world, no one has yet won Randi's booty.

Halbig let Randi supervise a double-blind test of the tracker. It didn't work. Later, Halbig began to wonder: Did the magician fool him? He tested it again, doing his own single-blind test in which he placed a bag of pot on a desk, and then put in different frequency chips without himself knowing what chip he was using. The Tracker failed. He similarly tested a colleague who had gone through extensive personal training in Harleyville with Quattlebaum. He failed too. The Quadro Tracker had lost a customer--a $49,000 customer, since Halbig had planned to buy one for every school in his district.

Soon, Quadro was losing more than that. In addition to the problems in Beaumont, the attorney general of Iowa obtained a court order enjoining both the national Quadro Corp. and its Iowa distributor from trying to sell the device. After the FBI sent notices in January to every law enforcement division in the country declaring the device a fraud, sales slackened. Post-injunction, of course, sales have stopped entirely. Quadro's employees are out of work. And now there's the grand jury indictment.

If there's a lesson to be learned from this, it goes beyond the old standard that people can be really dumb. From talking to Quadro believers, you can sense the sheer desperation of the fight against drugs and guns in the schools and in public that drives a man who might not be a total nincompoop to want to believe. Randi was on a crusade to convince Quadro buyers to renounce the device, but he didn't always succeed.

"Most of them get very angry at the suggestion they were fooled, and they probably never will change their mind," he says. "People have such faith in their own perception--they think what they see and hear necessarily represents the real world, but it's a very filtered view. That's why magicians are so successful. The spectator chooses to believe they are seeing what they think they are seeing."

Randi may be understanding, but the FBI's Kelly is positively peeved at people's stupidity about the Tracker--especially in schools: "School districts using them to search lockers--that's just outrageous. All they had to do was talk to their physics teacher, and hopefully the teacher would tell them it's a bogus find. If not, get a new teacher."

Kelly had to deal with many perplexed law officers after the FBI spread word the device was a no-go. "People who have been conned have a hard time coming to grips with it," he says. "Police officers are supposed to be skeptical. That wand will wobble whichever way--gravity, wind, the way you move your hand, will all move it."

Any successes attributed to the device--and plenty of buyers insist the device did find things-- Randi can explain: "They know where it is, so they incline it that way." That knowledge need not be exact--the intuitive cop's or guardian's suspicions can be enough.

Beyond the madnesses that a war on drugs can lead to, the sordid saga raises questions of proper government reaction to this sort of fraud--which in most cases is self-fraud. That a lone judge can ban a device nationally on his own say-so might seem alarming. After all, where was the harm? One potential problem was the use of Quadro evidence as probable cause for a search, which alarmed everyone from the U.S. attorneys on the case to the American Civil Liberties Union. But at the Quadro trial, the government produced no evidence the device had ever been used that way.

Kulp, the Quadro lawyer, thinks the government overreacted. In fact, he thinks they had no business getting involved at all.

"Where's the beef? If it's not inherently dangerous, and if purchasers believe it works and it comes with a money-back guarantee, what's the fraud? The rate of dissatisfied customers was 0.6 percent. But the FBI comes in with search warrants and seizes records anyway," says Kulp. "One of the things the government didn't try to prove was that anyone was duped. We had satisfied customers ranging from narcotics agents in New York to sheriff's deputies in Lubbock, Texas.