The Drug Wars: Voices From the Street

painful testimony from the cops, coke whores, judges and junkies who fight and die on america's urban battlefields

We think of the drug wars as battles fought among clearly defined antagonists--good versus bad, well-heeled versus impoverished, us versus them. But the conflict is more complicated, more personal, than that. The central figures of this grinding, inconclusive struggle are dealers, addicts, cops, children, parents, doctors and nurses. All are individuals, all have stories to tell, and all become casualties, whether or not they survive the conflict.

Tim Wells and William Triplett, journalists who work the drug cross fire, became frustrated with the media's narrow coverage of the problem. "We watched the so-called experts on 'Nightline,'" remembers Wells, "and we realized that the most significant people in the drug wars were on the front lines. They were also the most silent."

Wells and Triplett traveled the streets of America's inner cities listening to those previously silent voices. This is what they heard.

The Doctors

"We got a call over the radio informing us that there had been a shooting. We went racing out there with the siren blaring. When we arrived at the scene, the victim was still in his car. He was a teenage kid and he was in the front seat sitting behind the steering wheel. He had been shot right between the eyes at point-blank range.

"This was an obvious drug assassination. This kid had been driving a brand-new sports car and he was wearing all kinds of gold. He had a beeper on his belt, and when the ambulance technicians lifted him, a wad of about three thousand dollars in cash fell from his coat pocket. One look at that bullet hole and I knew he wasn't going to make it. But he was still alive and he could still talk.

"After we got him into the ambulance, I leaned real close to him and said, 'This is (continued on page 118)Drug Wars(continued from page 96) serious. You've been shot and I don't think you're going to survive. Do you understand what I'm telling you?' He nodded yes.

"'Before you die,' I said, 'do you want to tell me who shot you?'

"He looked me square in the face and, in a voice husky with blood, he said, 'No.'"

•

"The weekends are unbelievable. The hospital's hallways are always packed with patients. It starts on Friday and doesn't let up until Monday. It's not uncommon to have three, four or five gunshot victims come in within a span of an hour or two. Then, on top of that, the police are bringing in overdose cases and people who've gone psychotic from using PCP.

"The police are all part of the mix. They'll be in the halls trying to restrain patients, and plain-clothes detectives will be asking questions. Some guy might be lying there dying and the police will want to know who shot him. It's an incredibly chaotic environment in which to try to practice medicine."

•

"You do recognize your handiwork on some of the repeaters. We had one kid come in, a major trauma case, and I opened his chest--but there was no hope. He had taken a bullet right through the heart and it was virtually blown apart. He died, but I thought I recognized him. We undressed him and I saw a fresh scar on his left thigh. He was a kid I'd treated only a few weeks earlier. After we'd patched him up, the drug counselors had worked with him, but then he went right back to selling."

•

"The ones that come in talking are sad because they're in agony and they have that feeling of impending doom. They're pleading with you, and sometimes they'll grab you by the wrist and hold on with this death grip. That's a hard thing to deal with. It's like the movies, when you see a hand come out of the grave and grab somebody. It's a lot easier when they come in comatose or unconscious."

In the Combat Zone

"This violence wave is butchering the hustling process. It don't make no sense. When I first started dealing heroin back in 1978, it wasn't like that. There wasn't so much unnecessary violence. But these days the young kids out hustling don't understand that. They don't understand the importance of fear. The only things they care about are gold chains and fancy cars. If some dude smokes up some dealer's money, the dealer don't go back with a baseball bat and put fear in the dude. He thinks he's got to save face, so he goes back with his gun and kills the dude straight off the top."

•

"The first time I had to shoot a dude, it was a traumatic experience for me. This guy was a hustler out selling hand to hand. I put a gun on him and said, 'Don't move, man! Just keep real still! Do not move!' But the dude bucked and reached for his vest pocket. I thought, Holy shit! This guy has a weapon! So I shot him. When I fired, it was like the whole world was moving in slow motion. I could see the bullet go into his chest, and the force of the blast lifted the dude off his feet and knocked him to the ground.

"I saw the dude lying on the sidewalk and I ran like hell. It was broad daylight and I was shooting this guy on the street. That scared me. I thought maybe some of his buddies was gonna come after me. When I finally stopped running, my knees were knocking and my hands were shaking. It was very emotional 'cause I'd never had to shoot nobody before. I thought that maybe the dude was dead--that maybe I had killed him.

"The next morning, I read the newspaper real close, looking to see if there was anything in there about a murder. I figure the dude must've lived because I never saw nothin' in the paper about no murder."

•

"Nobody wants to get involved in a drug-murder case. Witnesses are extremely reluctant. They're afraid. They think that if they testify, they're going to get killed. Which is true a lot of times. Witnesses get threatened. They get hurt. They get killed.

"Last night, I went over to where a guy had been shot in the chest. The victim was a drug dealer and he was still conscious when we arrived on the scene. One of our detectives interviewed him, and he told the detective, 'Fuck you. I ain't telling you shit. I'll take care of it myself.'

"Half an hour later, that guy died. So we had a homicide on our hands. We tried to interview his friends and relatives, but they all told us the same thing: 'Fuck you. We'll take care of it ourselves.'

"That's the sort of thing a homicide detective deals with constantly. It never ends. I've had family members who are witnesses to the murder of their uncle or their son, and they won't tell me anything except to tell me to go fuck off.

"You can't help but get disgusted at people. When you're involved in situations where it's dealers shooting dealers, and none of the witnesses will talk, you feel like taking the case and putting it on the shelf and saying, 'To hell with it. Let 'em kill one another.'

"And if you want to know the truth, more and more cases are being handled that way."

The Cops

"In dope cases, you have to do whatever's necessary to make the case, and that usually means using an informant. Oklahoma has a lot of lakes, resort-type areas, that are well known for gambling and drug activity. I got a girl out of the Alabama penitentiary to be my snitch because I needed someone who wouldn't be known in these areas. I brought her in, got her a false driver's license and sent her up there. She learned that one of the mayors in one of these small resort towns was into buying and distributing dope. She and I sat down and worked out a plan to try to make a case on him.

"She was a cute thing, and she bleached her pubic hair blonde and shaved it into a nice heart shape. On Monday morning, the mayor was in a meeting, so I put her in his office. When he came back, she was there waiting for him. She had on a short skirt, no underpants. He was a middle-aged man, and when she opened her legs, there wasn't a thing he could do. For Christ's sake, he'd been waiting for something like this to walk up to him for forty-five years. She took him right there in the office.

"After he got what he wanted, she told him she wanted some dope, which he was more than happy to supply. She was wired and I was sitting in my car listening to every word. She made the buy from him and that's how we got him. He took one look at that heart and couldn't say no."

•

"Down in Miami, I was sitting with a smuggler in Coconut Grove. He told me, 'One night after we'd gotten several loads in, we brought in all these duffel bags full of money. We started dumping them on the floor, and pretty soon the entire floor in the living (continued on page 158)Drug Wars(continued from page 118) room--wall to wall--was covered with money. We were standing knee-deep in twenty-dollar bills.'

"That's why there's so much corruption among law-enforcement people involved in the drug war. Cops will bust a place and one of them will find thousands of dollars stashed away in a back room. He'll grab a handful and stuff it into his pocket. He knows that what he grabs in that handful will be more than his salary for the entire month. He also knows that nobody will be doing any counting until he turns the money in."

•

"There are plenty of abandoned buildings in New York. The drug dealers come in, take over a few apartments and force the good people out. It isn't safe for them to walk in the front door, so they move. After a while, the landlord even stops collecting rent. He leaves a situation like that alone. The place becomes a crack house or a shooting gallery, and it's these buildings where we do most of our work.

"The dealers know we'll be coming after them sooner or later, so they set booby traps for us. They'll kick big holes in the upper floors and cover them with linoleum so that we fall through. Sometimes they'll drive nails into the banisters up a dark flight of stairs. Or they'll weaken the stairs so they collapse when we're about halfway up, and they'll drive a nail into the banister right where you're most likely to grab when you fall.

"The dealers have started using pit bulls for protection. They'll remove the dogs' vocal cords and train them to go for the groin. You'll go into one of these dark buildings where you can't see a thing, and three or four dogs will come at you. They can't growl, so there's no warning. They just come leaping at your groin.

"I used to be an animal lover, but not anymore. I shoot those dogs without hesitation. This year alone, we've shot hundreds of dogs."

•

"As a cop, you hear about rip-offs all the time. And it's not just stick-up boys knocking off street sellers. There are big-money rip-offs, too.

"My favorite one took place about a year ago. Through an informant, we learned that a transaction was going to take place at a motel, and we had the room wired. On the day of the transaction, a SWAT team was ready to storm the motel.

"When you have an operation like this set up, you never know if it's really going to take place. A lot of informants aren't reliable. They'll feed you all kinds of bullshit and you'll end up spending six hours staking out an empty hole. But on this particular day, the relevant parties showed up right on time. The only thing was, the seller didn't bring any cocaine--he just brought guns because he was planning on ripping off the buyer. But the buyer didn't bring any money because he was going to rip off the seller.

"I was at the command post listening on the wire, laughing my ass off. All I could hear was these two dudes in the motel room shouting at each other, 'You lying motherfucker!'"

Criminal Justice

"Going from the streets to prison is moving from one drug-infested place to another drug-infested place. When a dope fiend wants his dope, he'll take whatever measures are necessary to get it. You'd be amazed at how easy it is to smuggle drugs into this penitentiary. I've been locked up for nine years and I've never had any trouble in getting drugs.

"Probably the most common way is to have a guest bring it in. If you've got a baby, your woman can hide the drugs in the baby's diaper, and when you're holding your little baby, you know where to look. In this prison, we're allowed to have contact visits, so another way is to have your girlfriend stick some drugs up her pussy. When the two of you are alone on the bed, all you got to do is reach between her legs and pull the drugs out. To get past the shakedown when your visit is over, you pack the drugs into a balloon and swallow it or stick it up your anus. It's as easy as that."

•

"There was this one guard here that I used to talk to all the time. I thought he was the squarest dude in the world. Then one day about a month ago, I opened the newspaper and I see this dude's picture. He'd been busted for running a cocaine ring in the prison. Him and another guard would come in with cocaine strapped all up and down their legs. Now, I was talking with this guy for a year, and like I said, I thought he was the squarest guy around. I thought I knew everything that was going on, but I come to find out he was the man. I couldn't believe it. I knew that guards were dropping off packages and stuff, but I never would have suspected this guy. He was a sergeant and he was up for promotion. He was going to be a lieutenant. But like everybody else, he got caught up chasing the money."

•

"For every person who goes to jail, eight to ten people pass through the court system. As a judge, I'm permitted an average of four and a half minutes per case. Given these circumstances, we're only able to negotiate pleas. We don't even wield the threat of trying these people. The plea bargain has replaced the indictment in our system. The word on the street is: It doesn't matter what you've done or what you've been arrested for, the courts won't be able to prosecute you.

"The fact that our resources are stretched beyond our ability to cope is evident just by walking through the building. We're using basements for courtrooms. The building's pipes and plumbing are exposed overhead, and every time a toilet flushes in the building, they have to stop the trial because you can't hear over the rushing water. In other basements, the jurors have to wear overcoats because there isn't any heat. There are pretrial examinations being conducted in hallways, and attorney conferences are taking place at Burger King and McDonald's."

•

"On the day that he becomes a policeman, every cop thinks he's going to change the world. He's going to be the cop that puts all the bad guys in jail and makes the streets safe. He's thinking the world is going to be a better place because he has a badge and a gun.

"But pretty soon you find out that's not the case. You learn that the system isn't set up to keep people in jail. A lot of the bad guys you arrest, who really do belong in prison, end up copping pleas and don't do any serious time. No matter how many arrests you make, there are still thousands of dealers standing on street corners selling drugs. The murders and robberies and O.D.s keep on coming. The city is like a giant cesspool, and no matter how hard you work, you can't clean it up. The judicial system stinks and that hardens your attitude, makes you a little cynical.

"Pretty soon, you slow down. You don't try so hard. After you've been shot at once or twice, you shy away from potentially dangerous situations. Instead of telling yourself, 'I'm the cop who's going to make the world a better place,' you ask yourself, 'What the fuck am I risking my life for?'"

The Dealers

"I first started selling drugs when I was thirteen. By the time I was fifteen, I was doing ten thousand dollars' worth of business every day selling cocaine, heroin, bam and dust. Out of the ten thousand, my take would be twenty-five hundred. That is a lot of money for a little teenage boy to be bringing in every day.

"I rented my own two-bedroom apartment that I used to deal drugs out of and I bought a brand-new Lincoln Town Car. I wasn't old enough to have a driver's license, so my mother cosigned for the car. There I was, driving this big fancy car and buying things that my mother had never been able to buy for me.

"I wasn't a drug user. I was just a dealer, which gave me power over the users. I'd prey on drug users the same way a lion preys on other animals in the jungle. I was strong and they were weak. I never had to do violent things because I could get a drug user to do them for me. It's a mind-boggling thing for a teenage kid to have that power.

"The thing that makes it seem right is, I'd always go home and give money to my mother. She was working, but she wasn't making a whole lot of money. She couldn't afford to buy food and clothes for my brothers and sisters. Life for her was a struggle. A lot of times you'll hear these young kids dealing drugs say, 'Man, my mother needs help.' And that's the truth. To me, that made what I was doing acceptable. My family never had nothing and I was taking care of them. Nobody could say that what I was doing was wrong."

•

"I've only had two real jobs in my entire life. The first was mopping floors and cleaning toilets at the airport, and the second was shining shoes in the men's room at the airport. Do you know what it's like to be working in the shit-house all day, man? People in there be groanin' and fartin'. Some of 'em stink so bad you can smell it coming through the door. It's degrading, man. Degrading.

"After a while, I quit going to work. Why should I be standing in the shit-house when I can make ten times more on the street? Working don't make no sense, man. I ain't got no education. Never even passed the fifth grade. I can't get no good job.

"When I'm on the street, ain't nobody asking how much schoolin' I got. And there ain't nobody telling me to put on clean clothes. All they doing is givin' me rock, sayin', 'Sell 'em, man, sell 'em.'"

•

"I was seven months' pregnant when I was arrested. The cop who arrested me kept asking, 'What are you doing selling crack when you're carrying a baby? What do you think that baby is going to be like?'

"I told him I didn't do drugs. I don't smoke crack. I just sell it. Hell, I don't even smoke marijuana. Just cigarettes, that's all. But the policeman kept being mean about the baby. He kept saying, 'What's that baby going to be like?' Tellin' me that I wasn't cut out to be a mother.

"Hell, you can't hurt a baby by selling drugs. The baby don't know. It ain't even been born yet."

•

"It ain't hard to spot police. Any educated person like me can do it. Like just a few minutes ago, I saw a guy in a black shirt coming down the street, and it was obvious that the guy was a police officer. He was clean and he had all those big muscles.

"Wanna know how to make a bust? OK, this is how. The police can't be sending in all these big, healthy-looking guys all the time. They got to send in a guy that looks like he's addicted. You got to see it in his eyes. They got to send in a guy who looks like he wants the pipe so bad he'll get down on his knees and suck some dick to get it. If you're a cop and you just want to make a little ten-dollar buy, come in dirty with some stink on you. That's how to make a bust."

•

"The jump-out squad has arrested me three times for selling crack, and that's the worst feeling in the world, man. After sellin' to an undercover, the jump-out squad swarms right down on you. They put you in handcuffs, knee you in the back, rub your nose in the dirt and leave you lying on the ground. The neighbors all gather round and stand there looking down at you. It makes you feel real stupid. You're thinking, Damn, how could I let this happen?"

•

"A lotta crackheads will tell. They don't want to sit in jail 'cause the only thing they're thinking of is getting more 'caine. So they tell.

"The worst ones are the women. These female crackheads, man, after they flip and start working for the police, they'll have sex with you. They'll screw you real good and be finding out information at the same time. A lot of dudes get busted like that. They'll trust the woman 'cause she's givin' him a piece of pussy. The dude'll think she's all right, but she'll be looking around, seeing where he's hiding all his coke and listening to everything about how his operation runs. Then, as soon as she gets her panties back on, she'll run and tell the police.

"A woman like that gets off two ways, man. She gets a good fuck and she don't have to do no time."

•

"When you're dealing rock, you get a lot of women, man. If I'm on the street and I see a woman that I might want to be with, I find out if she likes rock. If she does, I give her a proposition. I tell her, 'Hey, baby, you give me some head and I'll give you this here rock.' And they do it, man. Really beautiful women, all races, they'll give you head for a little tiny rock.

"A lot of hustlers like to go to bed with crack whores. Not me. I'd never put my penis in their vaginas because I'm thinking 'bout AIDS. A woman pipehead will spread her legs for anybody to get some cocaine.

"Fortunately, I've got a good wife at home. I know there's gonna be times when she wants to make love. That's something I gotta do and I don't want to be bringing no diseases home to my wife. So I don't go down on no crack whores. I only let 'em give me head."

The Addicts

"I was selling boat [PCP] when crack cocaine first came out, and right away, everybody started putting their money behind crack. So I switched over and was selling crack. I seen how crazy people was acting. I seen dudes getting shot and beat over the head for smoking up product. I seen how women would sell their bodies just to get a little hit. I been in houses where there'd be a little three-, four-month-old baby crying upstairs while the mother was next door selling her body. I'd look in the icebox and there was no food in there. The only thing I'd see in the icebox was some baking soda and some water. I said to myself, 'That ain't right. The baby ain't got no food. No matter what happens, I'll never let myself get this desperate.'

"Then one day my old lady took her mother to the grocery store in my car. While they were gone, I cooked up a rock and said, 'I'm only gonna do it this one time. I'm gonna see what all the fuss is about. And after that--no more.' I cooked up a fifty, put the rock in the pipe, lit it and took a long, deep hit. I held the smoke in my lungs for thirty seconds.

"I felt so free. The feeling was indescribable. I was standing there in front of the window, saying, 'Lord have mercy! This son of a bitch ain't to be fucked with!'

"That first hit there, that was my downfall. Crack is the worst addiction there is. It's worse than heroin and it's worse than PCP. The craving is so powerful that it makes you lose all your morals and principles. It robs you of your dignity.

"I've seen grown men and grown women sitting down crying, saying, 'I've got to stop living like this. I've got to stop hittin' the pipe. I've got to get some help.'

"But five minutes later, when somebody is knocking on the door with a rock, all the cryin' and shit is history, man. All they thinkin' about is gettin' a hit on the pipe."

•

"I remember one time I got jumped for messin' up this dude's money. I was working the street, doing hand to hand, and this dude I was working for come around and gave me some coke. He said, 'Look, man, I'll be back in two hours. If you don't have my money, I'll blow your motherfuckin' brains out.' He was giving me a second chance.

"But as soon as the dude walked away, I run off again. See, when you messin' with crack, you do crazy things.

"I run off to this girl's house. My intention was to screw this girl, 'cause I knew she like to smoke. So me and her started in on these rocks. After we started smoking, I lost interest in sex. I was thinking, You can keep your drawers on, bitch. We'll just smoke. A lotta girls will do that. If you come to trick, they'll try to get you to smoke first because they know you'll just want to keep smoking. You should always make 'em trick first. But that's not what I done this time.

"Me and this girl smoked up all the dude's product. We just smoked and smoked and smoked till it was gone. I didn't have no money to give the dude, so I was ducking and hiding, trying to avoid him. But they found me going into a crack house. Eight dudes run up from behind and jumped me on the street.

"All the people in the neighborhood were looking out of their windows, watching to see what was happening. The dudes carried me back in the alley, and I thought they were gonna kill me because that's what the dude told me he was gonna do. But they just gave me a beating, man. I was lying there on the ground all bloody, and the whole time they was whipping me I was thinking, I wish they'd stop. I wish they'd let me go so I can get a hit of cocaine, man. I need a hit.

"And that's exactly what I did. When they finally stopped, I went upstairs to the crack house. People in there took pity on me. This dude said, 'Man, we seen what happened to you.' And he gave me a rock. Another dude gave me some heroin. I wasn't sitting in there two minutes before I had a hypodermic in my arm and the crack pipe in my hand."

•

"After four or five months of heavy crack use, I didn't even look like a human being. I lost a lot of weight and my eyes looked all bloodshot and wired out. I looked like a person off the streets. My boyfriend let me have all the crack I wanted, but he wasn't nice to me anymore. Him and his friends would beat me and rape me. At parties they'd get real rough and throw me around the room. They'd tear off my clothes and screw me, with a bunch of people in the room. I was sixteen years old, getting raped by these men who were thirty and thirty-five years old. But I didn't try to leave. I lived in that environment--let them beat me and rape me--because I wanted crack. Physically, I was still alive, but emotionally, I'd committed suicide."

•

"The first time I walked into a shooting gallery, I couldn't believe my eyes. The gallery was located on the ground floor of a four-story apartment project in a notorious drug area. The entire project was filthy--bare concrete floors with broken glass and needles lying in the halls and stairwells. I'm talking about grinding urban poverty of a sort I didn't know existed in the United States until I saw it with my own eyes.

"In the living room of this gallery, three junkies are sitting on a beat-up old sofa and it's obvious they've just finished shooting up. Their eyes are wide and glassy and they're nodding from the high--you know, junkie heaven. I'm standing there trying to talk to one of them when this little three-year-old boy runs up from behind me and starts pulling on my hip pockets, saying, 'Don't touch the needles! Don't touch the needles!' Then he points to all the discarded needles lying on the floor.

"That damn near broke my heart. Instead of learning his A B Cs, the first thing this kid's mother taught him was not to play with the needles because they'd give him AIDS. I'm ashamed to say, the thing I remember most vividly is the way I recoiled from that little boy. Normally, when you see a child in distress, your instinct is to touch him, and I didn't want him touching me. He had open sores on his chest, mossy teeth and horrible B.O. He'd probably never taken a bath in his life.

"A cop saw me with the kid, and when we got back to the car, the first thing he did was give me a Handi Wipe so I could clean myself off."

"'He was a middle-aged man, and when she opened her legs, there wasn't a thing he could do.'"