“But both Massie and Nicholson had to tell all.”

“But both Massie and Nicholson had to tell all.”

And because drug conspiracies aren’t carried out on the street corner in daylight with the dealers wearing neon signs, “there is no other way to find out what goes on . . . People have got to cooperate with the police, otherwise you just don’t find it out.”

In their deliberations on the conspiracy charge, which carries a sentence of five to 40 years and a fine of up to $100,000, Alderman called on the jurors to be “the conscience of the community” by deciding “what message ought to go out to people like George Massie, Ronnie Nicholson and Denis Peper. . . the dopers, the people who mess with dope.”

‘Where’s the beef?’

Morchower focused his closing argument on the credibility of the prosecution’s star witnesses. Convicted felons Nicholson and Massie “had a chance to dovetail their testimony” in discussions together and with the prosecuting attorney, the defense counsel said. And their testimony is the entire basis for the case against Dr. Peper, he maintained.

“People, when they get arrested, make things up to help themselves in bargaining with the police . . . The police, with all their resources, haven’t added a thing,” he said, questioning why law enforcement officials didn’t immediately go to Peper’s house and office instead of waiting until August and why no one had bothered to check the phone number of the “call Massie” memo recovered from Dr. Peper’s office.

The dentist is not on trial for using cocaine, Morchower emphasized. “He’s a product of his generation, folks. A lot of us missed that... So he who casts stones should reflect.”

Borrowing a line from Wendy’s hamburger commercials, Morchower demanded: “Where’s the beef in this case? There’s a lot of cocaine here, but where’s the beef?”

“Where’s the beef? That’s where the beef is!” said Alderman, pointing to the two bags of cocaine sitting on the rail in front of the jury box, his voice rising for the first time in the two-day trial. “Conspiracy exists in the mind. It happens at night. It happens behind closed doors. It happens by scheme ... It took climbing the ladder to get to the top, to that man, Denis Peper,” the prosecutor concluded.

But apparently Massie and Nicholson didn’t serve up enough “beef’ to convince the jurors; they deliberated only three hours before returning a verdict of not guilty on both charges.