Crack

Here they were in the night, dressed like they were Lord Mayors, gold chains as thick as forearms hanging around their necks, sitting in a white Excalibur that was stuck among all the limousines, Jaguars and Rolls-Royce convertibles in the circular driveway in front of the hotel.

The doorman walked down the line of cars to the Excalibur and pointed to an empty alley on his right. "You're not picking up anybody; you can go out that way."

The guy driving the Excalibur pointed to the crowd in front of the hotel. This was Atlantic City, just after the heavyweight-championship fight. "If I do that, how they goin' notice me?"

It took them an hour to creep into the lights in front of the hotel. The two got out and stood in the driveway with their heads high, arrogant high, my man, and they smoothed their pants, and three blacks in a Rolls convertible waved and they nodded regally and now four young black men, their fingers heavy with gold, stood in front of the hotel and hailed the Excalibur.

"Fine-looking ride you got," one of them said.

The driver tipped his head. He got back into the Excalibur and sat with his hand on the side of the car, and the lights hit the line of diamonds on his fingers and the diamonds blazed; and I saw that all over the driveway, lounging in these Jaguars and Rolls-Royces with their license plates from Dade County and Broward County, in Florida, from Illinois and Pennsylvania and New Jersey and New York, were people who knew one another by sight; blacks who had spent $1500 to sit at ringside or were such high rollers that the hotel had bought tickets for them. There were virtually no blacks in any of the cheaper seats. As they greeted one another, it became a ceremony. The guy driving the Excalibur moved his hand just slightly, and the light caught his diamonds from all angles and his hand was one bright blink, and now I realized that I wasn't at a heavyweight-championship fight but at the coronation of a new class of American mobster.

Of course, they were drug dealers. For as the Excalibur moved slowly, it rolled over something--a piece of glass, a shell from the beach, a gambling chip--and there was a cracking sound: the bones of people in the housing projects being crushed again by mobsters, this time by their own.

In memory, in my time, in my business, there was Anthony "Tony Pro" Provenzano, lounging in the Federal courtroom in Newark on the day he was to be sentenced for being a gangster, his arm draped on the back of a bench, and the light coming through the high windows causing his diamond pinkie ring to blaze. That was 25 years ago, and Tony Pro was the beacon for crime in this country. He was Mafia, Teamsters.

And now, all these years later, Tony Pro has been in and out of jail a few times, but his form of gangster endures: In Atlantic City, the light blazing on the fingers of the guy in the Excalibur told you that we have our first black wise guys.

It should have been a sign of health. Every immigrant race started in this country by controlling its own crime, except the blacks. While blacks played numbers, they could only work as runners in the numbers rackets for Italian mobsters. While blacks used drugs and peddled them on the streets, they had to buy their supply from both Jews and the Mafia.

Major criminals were white; long-term prisoners were black.

And now, suddenly, on this night in Atlantic City, blacks sat in diamonds in their $100,000 cars and announced that, finally, they controlled their own crime. What they have found to control is the dirt from the bottom of a grave.

They run a drug called crack, which is cocaine smoked in a glass pipe and which goes to the head immediately. There have been three great movements of our time that have occurred without the politicians' and the reporters' realizing they were happening until they were over: The first was the civil rights movement, the second was the women's movement, the third is crack.

•

One of the first things I remember about crack is that it arrived with swarms of bees. You usually think of bees as something from the country, on shrubs in the sun in the summer, but this was on a city street called Pitkin Avenue, a place of low buildings, many of them burned out, all of them seeming to snarl at you--get away, get out of here!--in an East New York neighborhood.

A couple of hours before, a cop named Venable was riding in a police van when he saw a man waving frantically. He was at the curb when the scarred green door to the empty building opened and somebody fired an automatic weapon and he went down at the curb. Dead at 35. Now, a couple of hours later, I walked toward the spot where he was killed and the bees were everywhere and I had to wave my arms as I walked and here at the curb was a pool of Officer Venable's blood and the swarms of bees raided the surface.

"They fight you for that. The blood is sweet for them," a woman called from across the street in front of the bodega.

"Who did the shooting?" I asked her.

"Crack drug. You can't go near them. They're just like the bees over there with the blood."

Crack is so addictive that nearly all whites--even the gas-station and tattoo-parlor ruffians--have passed on it. A few whites once liked to pretend they were black and tried heroin, which is a Mounds bar compared with crack. This time, some whites rode in over the bridge or on the freeway to the bad black neighborhoods and took it back to Teaneck, New Jersey, and Fullerton, California, and at first use got the life scared out of them. They backed away and left it all for the blacks.

I keep in my house a letter from Bill O'Dwyer, who once was the mayor of New York, and who wrote to me, "There is no power on earth to match the power of the poor, who, just by sitting in their hopelessness, can bring the rest of us down." It always sounded right, but I never saw it happen until crack came along.

And with it, there are no more rules in American crime. The implied agreements on which we were raised are gone. You now shoot women and children. A news reporter is safe only as long as he is not here. A cop in his uniform means nothing.

•

Kennedy Airport is the lighthouse of crack. Even if cocaine is brought up from Miami in rental cars and by 14-year-old boys sitting on buses and wearing bulletproof vests and carrying guns and kilos of coke, Kennedy, and the neighborhoods around it--such as Far Rockaway, Queens--is the home of crack. From Kennedy, it goes everywhere.

One fall, on 31st Street in Far Rockaway, somebody set fire to the boardwalk and a section of it dropped into the sand. By summer, what was left standing was charred and rippled. A beach in the summer is supposed to be a place for summer dreams, but on this day, it was deserted. Two lifeguards sat on a platform with a kid who ate cookies.

A woman named Ruth was supposed to take her little girl, Ebony, onto the beach, but she was pregnant with another child and she knew there was nothing left of the beach, so she talked the girl into an afternoon nap in the four-story yellow rooming house nearby.

A couple of blocks away, a reputed crack-peddler man named Robert Roulston had a fight with his girlfriend in her house, and he had been smoking a lot of crack, which makes people want to wave guns around. He fired a gun and left. The girlfriend's brother ran out to the street and waved Officer Scott Gaddell over. He saw Roulston running and chased him and caught up with him in the broken glass of the alley alongside the rooming house where Ruth and little Ebony were taking their afternoon nap.

Gadell had six shots in his .38 revolver. Roulston had a nine-millimeter semi-automatic pistol, which carries as many as 14 rounds. Gadell and Roulston were no more than seven feet apart as they faced each other. Between them was a cement staircase leading to a cellar. Above their heads were the windows of the rooming house. And somewhere, only a block or so away, were more police.

Never in modern times have I heard of such a thing, a face-off with a cop in the sun. It happens only on some television show.

But now there is crack, and Gadell knew there were no more rules, so he flopped behind the cement staircase and Roulston fired. Gadell fired back. The shots shattered the window where Ruth and Ebony slept and the mother and daughter rolled onto the floor, screaming. Outside, Roulston fired again. Gadell, wearing a bulletproof vest, looked up from behind the cement staircase to get a better shot and Roulston fired a bullet through his neck. Gadell's blood spilled over the vest and he was dead--at 22.

A piece of grammar school art paper was next to him. In crayon were three red roses growing out of a clump of grass. The name printed across the bottom was Kawon. It was still there an hour after they had taken Gadell's body away. I saw it as I walked around the rooming house. I put it into my pocket; death and hope beside each other on the same (continued on page 210) Crack (continued from page 110) patch of ground, and I wondered how fast the hope in a little girl would dissolve in the life she had to live.

•

A chunk of crack, smoked in a glass pipe, lasts only ten minutes and needs to be relighted constantly, which prompts people to walk around with big butane lighters. But inhaling purified crack gets it into the blood stream in under ten seconds, and the first rush is an earthquake.

Most street people say that crack began directly after Richard Pryor set himself afire while free-basing cocaine. Then somebody--probably on the West Coast--found a way to take the fire out of free-basing and developed crack.

The name comes from the crackling sound that occurs when it is being made or from its resemblance to the plaster cracks in the walls of the broken and hopeless neighborhoods of the country.

In places of no hope, people act hopelessly. "Why do you take crack?" I asked my good friend Precious one day.

"Why not?" she said.

She was on Pacific Street, taking the "'ho' stroll," as she calls it. She was going to sell herself to as many men as she could. She has four children, and the last time she delivered, she left the baby with a girlfriend and went out on the street and was arrested for prostitution. It is all on paper: date of birth, of arrest, criminal-court-case number. It is the North American record for sex, postbirth. Winner is Precious from Brooklyn, age 24. Official time: eight days from delivery room to getting into cars on Flatbush Avenue, Brooklyn.

At first, Government agencies were saying that because there are no needles involved in crack, it attracts heroin users, and that cuts down on the spread of AIDS. In real life, there are so many out selling bodies for crack, from the age of 12 and up, that AIDS must increase.

There was a man on Inwood Street in South Jamaica, a section of old frame houses, who complained that kids were selling crack on the street in front of his house. The man's name was Arjune and he became a grand-jury witness, and the crack dealer he complained about, a veteran named Mutstafa, who was all of 26, ordered men to throw fire bombs at his house. Police assigned a car to stay in front of the house. For the 12-P.M.-to-eight-A.M. shift one Friday morning, they assigned Officer Edward Byrne, age 22, son of a retired police lieutenant, a handsome young Irish kid who had grown up in the suburbs and returned to the job of his family, to the tradition of the police department of the city of New York.

But life had changed. He was in South Jamaica in the age of crack. And on this cold night, he sat in the car alone, with the windows rolled up and the heater on; he sat bored and read the newspaper. And at 3:30 A.M., a car pulled up on the dark street behind the patrol car and two young guys got out. One was Todd Scott, 19, and the other was Scott Cobb, 24. Police charges say that Cobb made a noise on the passenger's side and Byrne looked over. Todd Scott stepped up to the driver's window and blew Byrne's head off.

It snowed the next day, and I stood with a woman and her son, who was about 25, next to a two-story frame house at the corner and looked at the crowd of police--holding carbines and shotguns--that was down the block at the murder scene. The woman shook her head. "I was asleep. I sure heard nothing."

She and her son walked around the corner to the front of the house. I stayed on the side and looked up. Two young kids in white T-shirts appeared at the windows. I motioned to them. One of them pushed the window up.

"Did you see anything last night?"

The one kid said, "I'm only nine."

The second said, "I be 12. I saw. I goin' to the bathroom when there was bullet shots."

"How many people did you see?"

"Four. Two in the street and two in the car."

"What color car?"

"Rusty."

Suddenly, the woman came around from the front of the house and screamed, "Get back!" The kids disappeared. "What did they tell you?" she demanded.

"That they saw four guys."

She closed her eyes. "Now I'm goin' have to move."

"You can shut me up easy," I said. "But then you'll have detectives around here and they'll probably hear the same thing."

"I'm moving today," the woman said. "These people kill my kids."

"Now, wait. For sure, the police will get the ones who did it."

She shook her head. "Don't matter. The others kill my kids."

Her kid sure had seen the thing. There were four involved in the assassination of a cop, and they drove a rust-colored car. After the shooting, with proper imagination, like that of a bear that doesn't know what it wants to do from one moment to the next, they drove back to the housing project where they lived, only ten blocks away, and there, the next morning, sold crack out of the doorways as usual.

Later that day, the four heard that somebody had given the police their names, and they went on the run, all the way out to 209th Street, nearly two miles away. They took girls with them for a crack party. Six days later, they were grabbed by police, and that very day, new young faces were out selling crack on the same streets.

When I went back to the two-story house on the corner, a man told me that the woman with the kids had moved away.

"She didn't leave an address with me," he said.

•

I was in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, when they brought the aircraft carrier John E. Kennedy in from the high seas, the suspicion here is, to scare the local drug dealers. People stood on the pier and looked up at the ten-story-high gray vessel. Jutting out from the flight deck were the aircraft that carry nuclear weapons many hundreds of miles.

Only one person on the pier knew enough to look down. His name was Reed and he had just driven me down from Lauderhill, which is where a lot of drug peddlers live.

Reed pointed to a canal that was filled with small boats. "All we be needin' is an oar."

He began to snicker at the aircraft carrier and his snicker became a laugh and the laugh covered all of it--this huge, mad nation with a skinny woman with her large-looking head smiling on television, saying, "Just say no," and the blacks smoking crack and waving at her on TV; this nation that tries to blame all drugs on a general in Panama, when you can look at the sea and the sky and the dusty land along the border in the South and know that the drugs come from everywhere and cannot be stopped, because the people in the cities want them.

The first word in any economics textbook is consumer, and all of his demands are always supplied. By Bolivia, where skinny men called cepas, after the leaf-cutting ants, are in an endless file, carrying 100 pounds of coca-shrub leaves on their backs up and down mountains to a town where the leaves are turned into coca paste. Botanists find towns in the Amazon valley, towns hundreds of miles apart, where a low-altitude coca shrub we have never heard of grows. Forget the Andes; watch the valleys this year.

To stop cocaine, you might start by eliminating one of the continents of the world.

On the weekend after watching the drug dealers in their cars in Atlantic City, I sat over coffee in Washington, D.C., and read in the paper that the police in East Palo Alto, California, were stunned by the first killing of a cop in the town's history. A crack dealer did it. In Washington, a man who owned four astonishing cars and his 19-year-old girlfriend were executed in an apartment. The police said that the deaths might have been drug-related, which is like saying that a death at Gettysburg might have been battle-related.

Of course, crack can be stopped by the words that make everybody so unhappy: day care, education and jobs with hope. But good, thoughtful white people wonder if it is worth fighting any more. As long as it is all black, then legalize it. But even the smallest fire department knows that if you let a building--even the most despised, ramshackle building--on a crowded street burn away, so many flames will be sent into the sky that something may start skipping through the air and ignite everything it touches.

•

Each day, for so many young blacks, the choice is a job at McDonald's, at minimum wage and with no chance of ever getting higher, or a job in the crack trade that gives you new clothes and maybe a Jaguar.

"I got the perfect job. Me and my girl are workin' together," a guy named Curtis was saying one day.

"What at?" I asked him.

"Love factory," he said. "We make the love drug. Crack. The more you take it, the more you want it."

He made a fist and shoved it between the waistband of his jeans and his flat stomach.

"Got my waist down to 26 inches. I used to have a 32-inch waist. Half my clothes I can't wear."

"What kind of a diet?" I asked him.

"Smokin'. You don't have to ask anybody to know. You just have to look at the jaws."

He rubbed his jaw, which had skin stretched over it. "Losin' weight is the only thing I ever heard of happenin' to you from crack. You walk down the streets, they say to you, 'Oh, you're going to Jack LaLanne's.' Losin' weight, that's all that happens."

"What about this guy Lenny Bias, dropped dead of it?"

"He must of got some bad crack, that's all. We make good crack in my factory. My ride is going to be a BMW."

Now, I know that Curtis finished three years of Hillcrest High School and might have taken a science course. But I also know that his girlfriend, Iris, turns the faucet the wrong way. Their crack factory consisted of a room in the Lincoln Motor Inn, a converted girdle plant that is now a welfare hotel on Van Wyck Expressway, a couple of miles short of Kennedy airport. In the room, Curtis and Iris sat with a blowtorch, glass bottles and water. When one of the bosses appeared with a bag of cocaine, Curtis and his girlfriend dropped the cocaine and baking soda into the water, then hit the bottle with the blowtorch. The cocaine powder boiled down to its oily base. The baking soda soaked up the impurities in the cocaine. When cold water was added to the bottle, the cocaine base hardened into white balls. Curtis and Iris spooned them out, placed them on a table covered with paper and began to measure the hard white cocaine with sleepy eyes--they worked round the clock and smoked crack to keep their energy high--and chipped it into chunks about as big as a thumbnail, which were put into small glass vials, of the sort in which sequins are stored, and rubber caps were stuffed into them. Every now and then, one of the bosses pounded on the door and Curtis handed him the vials. Each time, before the guy left, Curtis asked him, "When I be gettin' the chance to get out and make some money sellin'?"

A crack-factory worker was paid $600 a week and Curtis heard he could make himself almost $1000 out peddling. For months, each time he asked, the boss only grunted and left to distribute the vials to street peddlers, who, at the time, sold them for ten dollars each. Then, one day, the cops made a couple of quick arrests out on the streets, for the trade was too brazen even for them, and the boss appeared at the motel door with two geniuses from a gas station.

"Show them what you do and then get down to the street in a hurry," the boss said.

Some hours later, Curtis and Iris were out selling. They wore space helmets with walkie-talkie wires attached--"NASA sets." Curtis stood inside an old garage with 40 crack vials and Iris stayed outside on the street, hustling customers and telling Curtis over the headset when a guy was going in. They started early in the morning--crack is the first before-noon drug besides alcohol--and by midafter-noon, the boss would come pulling up in his car and hurriedly grab all the money they had. He had to get over to Brooklyn and buy some more kilos of cocaine from one of the Jamaican West Indians who had driven it up from Miami.

"How about my pay?" Curtis said one afternoon when the boss grabbed the receipts.

"You got to stay out there until you make enough for yourself," the boss said.

Curtis and Iris began putting in 16- and 17-hour days selling on the street, with the last four hours for themselves. They made $1200 the first week and more in the weeks after that, making as much as $1700. Once, Curtis and Iris simply stayed out for the entire 24 hours, with freezing snow water on the sidewalks, and made $1000 each. Which is wealth that cannot be comprehended by someone young in a black neighborhood of this country.

Then, one day, Curtis was standing in the cold garage and over his NASA set came Iris' code from outside, "Raise it up," which meant that the police were there. Curtis was still dropping his crack vials into a hole in the floor when the door came busting open. As he was being driven off in the patrol car, he looked out the window and saw two new sellers appear on the corner and the first customers approach.

While Curtis was in prison, the use of crack increased so rapidly that for the first time in memory, saloon business was hurt, as people gave up even beer to smoke crack. Crack sellers became younger; kids from 15 to 22 stood around in Reebok sneakers and gold chains making astronomical amounts--as much as $400 a week--selling the drug and ready to kill over territory: the parking lot of a fried-chicken stand, the side of a corner grocery store, the toilet of a gas station.

The price of a vial dropped to five dollars, then, at times, to three dollars. Crack was cheaper than a movie, cheaper than a hamburger and Coke at McDonald's. School children could afford it. There appeared a nine-year-old crack user in East Harlem; then a 14-year-old, Angela Rodriguez, became news in New York when she was killed after buying crack. It turned out that she had been using it and selling her body for it since the age of 12; and in her neighborhood, the story was hardly unusual. For crack was genocide.

One night, after Curtis had done his time, he went to see a girl in the St. Albans neighborhood. At 10:30, he walked her to Montauk Triangle, where there's a monument to the 19 young men from the neighborhood who went into World War Two. On one side of the triangle is a two-story building with a crowded video-game parlor on the ground floor. Michael Lilly, 17, sat outside on a beach chair, with a pocketful of quarters, making change for anybody who needed it for the video games. On the other side of the triangle, there is a wall of a supermarket, and a lot of people were sitting on chairs along it, smoking crack.

As Curtis walked his new girlfriend to the supermarket wall, two cars turned the corner and moved slowly onto the street--two old cars, which should have made everybody nervous; all crack business is done out of old cars or rental cars. The personal cars are for glory.

The cars rolled down one side of the triangle, turned slowly at the base and started up the other side.

Someone in the cars got nervous and aimed a gun across the triangle and shot out the window. It blew Michael Lilly out of the beach chair. Dead at 17. Then the others in the cars opened up with semi-automatics. Somebody was dead, six or seven were shot, everybody else was flattened on the pavement, hollering. Curtis was looking at Samia Tripp, 20, who stood in front of the supermarket with her two fingers pinned together from a bullet that had gone into her house during the night a couple of weeks before. She started running to Curtis and she just made it as the bullets chipped the sidewalk in front of the supermarket.

"What were they firing?" somebody asked Tripp.

"Real bullets."

That was the night that Curtis decided that a career in crack was too dangerous.

•

Lady Boncile had some money; everybody knew that. She had it with her on the second floor over the liquor store on Sutphin Boulevard in South Jamaica, and she wanted a lot more, because she wanted to get herself a car.

"My ride is a Jaguar," Boncile said.

Once, at the end of the Seventies, she had been out with her man, C.J., and they got a ride in somebody's Jaguar, the kind with the big old back, a Bentley-styled Jaguar, and Boncile smelled the leather and looked at the wood, real wood, and that was all she wanted, a Jaguar XJ6.

"I want my Jaguar XJ6 to be green," she said.

C.J. winced. At that time, he was running a numbers operation out of a store on 116th Avenue and Sutphin Boulevard, and while numbers was good, he never saw money like that. And still, here was Boncile, who wanted the Jaguar XJ6.

"How did he get his?" she said, pointing to the Jaguar owner.

"Some new drug he be sellin'," C.J. said.

"Then you sell it, too."

"He don't give it out."

Boncile said that was nonsense, because the drug was crack. "Just because a man is a big drug dealer, that don't make him smart," she said, analyzing the sales of the new drug. "They be dumb. Look at how people sell tooth paste. You know the man come to the store in a van and see how much tooth paste you got gone, and then he replace it with all the tooth paste you need for yourself. If they think of doin' this crack like that, put it right out there for the customer, then they be havin' crack in every livin' room. Supposed to be that good."

Her man, C.J., shrugged. He looked around until he got his hands on some crack and then found out how to make it himself. The money piled up and Boncile had stacks of it, one of which they used to buy cocaine, the other of which was saved for her Jaguar.

Then, one day, C.J. was busted and, because he had a bad record, they put him in for $50,000 bail. He called out in court to one of his men who was sitting in the spectators' seats, "Get Boncile to give you the money for my bail."

The runner went to Boncile's apartment. When he rang the bell, he heard the window upstairs over the liquor store open. He looked up.

"What do you want?" Boncile said.

"I need $50,000 for C.J.'s bail."

"Ain't no $50,000 here," she said.

"Where is it?"

"I don' know. Never been no $50,000 around here. That man must be dreamin'."

That night, when nobody showed with his money, C.J. was carted out of the courthouse detention pen and shipped in a bus to Rikers Island. Late the next day, he got Boncile on the phone.

"I couldn't stop them," she said.

"Stop what?"

"All the runners from takin' all your money. They tell me if I don' give it to them, they shoot me."

On Rikers Island, C.J. went berserk and had to be tossed into a quiet room. On Sutphin Boulevard, Boncile walked out of the apartment over the liquor store and, both hands clutching a new large purse, walked off into the night and the beginning of a new career as a Jaguar driver.

Weeks later, when C.J. finally went back to his old grocery store on 116th Avenue and Sutphin Boulevard, he found that it was boarded up and that two 19-year-olds were on the corner, selling this new drug crack. They didn't even know who C.J. was, except that he was old, way up in his 30s, and that he was from the dim past, as long as six months ago.

"This was my spot," C.J. said.

"You old," a kid said.

The kid wore a red Troop suit and underneath it was a black Uzi, which impressed C.J. so much that he walked off and left the whole place and moved to Virginia. He spends his life in bitterness, because he missed out on the start of a major new trend, the invention of the computer in the underworld, untold money, the chance to be on the ground floor of crack.

I saw the Lady Boncile one day a year later. In a green Jaguar, waiting at a traffic light on Sutphin Boulevard. Then I heard that she was using as much as an ounce of crack a day and didn't know where she was, and then I heard that one day, like Lenny Bias, she dropped dead.