Police found the two 16-year-olds who are already charged at one of their family's backyards in an upscale neighborhood west of Market Street, weighing and bagging more than 35 grams of cocaine while the unsuspecting mother was inside the house.

Both boys pleaded not guilty.

Police also have recommended charges to the prosecutor for three other teens for their part in depositing stolen checks into ATMs and withdrawing cash to bankroll the drug activity.

Police detective Phil Goguen said the teens are part of a larger group of kids who sometimes hang out at the Kirkland Teen Union Building, some of whom deal drugs at the transit center in downtown Kirkland. The teens don't all go to the same schools and some don't live in Kirkland at all.

What they all have in common is an affinity for gangsta rap and drug culture, and the comments shared on each others' MySpace accounts refer almost exclusively to drug and alcohol use, scoring drugs and hooking up downtown.

According to police, one of the teens, who has been charged, and another 16-year-old, who has been arrested, masterminded the plan to steal checks from mailboxes. They'd cross out the names on the payee lines of the checks and write in the names of their friends.

They then had the teens, some as young as 14, deposit the fraudulent checks into their or their parents' accounts using ATMs, which registered the deposits immediately and allowed them to withdraw the money from the accounts right away.

Police haven't recovered all the money yet, Goguen said, but he estimated the kids ran up more than $1,000 in fraudulent deposits and withdrawals.

Goguen said police became aware of the illegal activity after someone reported stolen mail and the mother of one of the teens noticed weird activity on her bank account, talked to her son about it, and then turned him in.

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