William Graziano, MJ'80

By Karen Feldscher

Maybe you saw it on a CSI: Miami episode televised in March. Crime-lab director Horatio Caine, played by David Caruso, held a test tube filled with a clear liquid up to the light, dropped in some white powder, and watched as the liquid changed color. “That’s cocaine,” he pronounced, with evident satisfaction.

Forensic chemist William Graziano does that test a lot. It’s simple: Add cocaine to a reagent called cobalt thiocyanate, and the mixture turns blue right away.

At New York’s Westchester County Department of Laboratories and Research, where he’s worked for twenty-two years, Graziano spends about 90 percent of his time testing for cocaine. He has so much volume to deal with, he uses a glass dish with twelve wells so he can test up to a dozen samples at a time.

“It’s cocaine, cocaine, cocaine,” Graziano says. “There are seven of us in here, in close quarters.” Thankfully, he says, “we all get along pretty well. We make jokes to get us through the tedious jobs.”

Sometimes other drugs come under the lab’s scrutiny. One of Graziano’s big cases involved 3,000 decks—small glassine envelopes—of heroin. To prove all of it was heroin, he had to analyze a whopping 800 decks. (Heroin’s color test: Place the drug in a reagent of formaldehyde and sulfuric acid; the mixture turns purple.)

Even though a positive color test was good enough for Horatio Caine—he immediately went back into the field to question the guy who’d had the coke—in reality, Graziano says, more tests are required to confirm a drug’s presence.

After a cocaine color test, for example, he looks at the powder under a microscope and adds acetic acid, then gold chloride. If it’s cocaine, the resulting crystals will look like television antennas.

Then, to determine what the cocaine is cut with, Graziano uses an instrument called a gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer, which separates out the different substances in the sample and gives the chemical structure of each.

“The color test is preliminary,” says Graziano. “The microscopic test confirms it, and the mass spectrometer is the final confirmation.”

The lab work takes some time. Television “makes it sound like the case can be solved in a hour, but sometimes it takes six weeks for results to come in,” says Graziano. “I know they have to make it dramatic, though. It wouldn’t be exciting to watch a chemist wait six weeks for results.”

Graziano enjoys the details he hears about how drugs come in off the streets, one story in particular. “There was a cop sitting on Route 80 [in New Jersey] going in the New York direction,” he says. “Two guys came up to him and said, ‘Which way is New York?’ There’s nothing wrong with that. But the sign right next to them said, ‘This way to New York.’

“The cop found that odd,” Graziano continues, “and the guys were acting suspicious. So the cop said he wanted to look in their trunk, and the guys, trying to act nonchalant, said, ‘Go ahead.’ And there were drugs in there.

“You just can’t believe how stupid people are.”


See other profiles:

Liz Ziolkowski, MJ'87
Irene Wong, BHS'01
Robin Smith, MJ'84
Paul Zambella, MJ'81