Casualty In The War On Drugs

That Night after work, they stopped at the Wakamba Cocktail Lounge near Times Square, a working-class side pocket of a joint in the city's glittering wardrobe. No velvet ropes or sneering doormen here: Entry is by buzzer. At a glance, the bartender knew Patrick Dorismond and Kevin Kaiser were OK, recognizing them and a few other guys from their job. It was late in the evening of March 15, 2000.

The men worked for the 34th Street Partnership, a semiprivate group that provides neighborhood businesses with services the government is too tired or too distracted to provide. One such amenity was a private security force of uniformed men resembling police officers, including Kaiser and Dorismond. They passed their days sorting wheat from chaff, directing tourists to Macy's in Herald Square or Pennsylvania Station, or rousting derelicts, dope hustlers and other unsightly nuisances from the crowded streets.

At home in Flatbush, Dorismond had two kids and a girlfriend. He had grown up in Brooklyn, the son of Haitian immigrants. At the Wakamba, Dorismond and Kaiser stayed for two beers, long enough for Wednesday night to roll into Thursday morning. By 12:30 A.M., they could not face a long, late-night subway ride back out to their homes in Brooklyn.

"Let's get a cab," Dorismond said. Outside the Wakamba, they stopped at the corner of 37th Street and Eighth Avenue, watching for a taxi. Dorismond dialed a number on his cell phone.

"Yo, yo," a voice called from some shadow. "Yo, homey. Got some weed?"

Dorismond turned. The shadow drifted into shape, a street punk, exactly the sort he spent his days running off.

"Get the fuck out of here, man," Dorismond said.

"I just want some weed," the punk whined.

"I don't got none. Don't ask for none. Leave."

Kaiser had turned, noticing that Dorismond was annoyed and that the dirt-bag was not alone. A few other shapes lurked nearby.

By now, the punk was making animal noises, snorting like a bull or something, trying to turn Dorismond's anger into a joke. Kaiser locked his eyes on the man and put a hand on Dorismond's shoulder to move him. Dorismond was pissed.

"Chill. Let it be," Kaiser suggested.

The punk barked. Another man stepped from the shadows. "Take your dog around the corner," Dorismond said.

"What are you going to do, rob me?" asked the punk.

Bizarre as the question seemed, Dorismond and Kaiser did not have long to think about it. The other shadows suddenly took on the forms of street skells, swarming around them. Kaiser yelled, "Get the gun."

At that instant, yet another firefight in the war on drugs--the American war that never ends--erupted around them on that street corner.

A black SUV pulled up to the curb, and men in police windbreakers piled out, hollering at them to get on the fucking ground, to put their hands on the wall. Dorismond and one of the shadows shouted and swung at each other, until the fracas finally found its punctuation mark: a single, ringing gun blast.

Dorismond was falling. Kaiser found himself shoved onto the sidewalk, face down, handcuffs snapped across his wrists.

"Cuff that shot motherfucker, too," ordered one of the officers.

"No, no, that's my friend. Those other guys were bothering us for weed," Kaiser tried to explain.

He was told to shut up. He turned his head. Near him on the sidewalk, Dorismond was trying to roll over. His face an inch above the filthy sidewalk, Dorismond gasped. Blood streamed from his mouth. Kaiser shuddered, then screamed Dorismond's name. "Say another word, I'll put your face on the ground," said a cop.

"It's those other guys, trying to buy weed," Kaiser whispered helplessly. But the cops were going through Dorismond's pockets, speaking urgent cop talk into radios.

His friend had fallen into a terrible stillness. Dorismond, with a bullet through the chest, was moving fast beyond help. Kaiser was searched, loaded into a police car and carried to a precinct station. For the next 12 hours, he answered questions from detectives, trying to rebuild the moment. Much of the time, he was cuffed to a chair. Early on, Kaiser asked about Dorismond, and though the detectives were vague about his condition, they told him that he had been shot by a police officer.

"What about the guys trying to buy the weed?" Kaiser asked. "Did you arrest them?"

Kaiser just didn't get it, so the detective finally laid it out. The guys trying to buy the weed, they weren't bad guys. They were police officers, too. That strange question--What are you going to do, rob me?--was actually a code for help sent over a radio transmitter to a backup team. Hearing it, the other undercovers rushed in. In the struggle with Dorismond, one of these cops (continued on page 175) War On Drugs(continued from page 80) fired the shot. It was midmorning before the detectives told Kevin Kaiser that his friend Patrick Dorismond was now on a gurney at the city morgue. He was 26 years old.

Today, in the war on drugs, a man ended up dying in the gutter, bleeding to death from a bullet fired by the good guys. Rarely had the malignant stupidity of the antidrug campaign stood in such stark relief. Dorismond's death was a mistake, but it was also an inevitable expression of official national policy.

•

In the fall of 1968, a presidential candidate appeared at Disneyland, determinedly climbing out of the early and shallow political grave into which his career had been thrown. If he were elected president, Richard M. Nixon promised America would face down a new enemy. For months, he had crossed the country, nimbly defining law and order as the central issue for a nation heaving with antiwar demonstrations, race riots and cultural entropy. Speaking at a Republican rally near Disney's Matterhorn ride in September 1968, Nixon sharpened his focus.

"As I look over the problems in this country, I see one that stands out particularly," he said. "The problem of narcotics--the modern curse of the youth, just like the plagues and epidemics of former years. And they are decimating a generation of Americans." No longer would the federal government play a near-invisible role against narcotics trafficking. Nixon campaigned on a plan to end one war, in Vietnam, and the declaration of another--a siege not against a state or people, but on an eclectic list of substances called drugs.

Long after Richard Nixon rose, then fell, and finally passed on, the war against drugs continues. The torch has passed from Republican to Democrat and back, and no party or politician has been outfervored in fighting drugs. Just in the past 10 years, the federal government has spent $150 billion fighting drugs. The federal antidrug budget this year is $17.8 billion, which is more than 220 times greater than Nixon's 1969 budget of $81 million. Compare that with the $22.2 billion spent per year by the Departments of State, Interior and Commerce combined.

Thousands of tons of illicit drugs have been seized at borders, ports and warehouses, from secret compartments in trucks, from hollowed-out holy statues and from the toilets used by human drug mules detained at airports until they pass the cocaine-packed condoms they swallow. Thousands of people have died on the streets of American cities, in Colombia and in Mexico. By uncounted thousands, law-abiding African Americans and Latinos have been ordered by troopers onto the shoulders of interstate highways, their cars searched, their very races transformed into probable cause for suspicion. Since 1980, the total number of people in prisons on drug offenses has risen from 50,000 to 400,000, most of them confined at an annual cost, per capita, that would pay for tuition, room and board at a private college.

A milestone in the war on drugs occurred in 1986 when key members of the House of Representatives, then controlled by the Democrats, saw a chance to take the sting out of Republican charges that Democrats were soft on criminals. The plan was to institute mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses, a notion that surfaced immediately after the death by cocaine overdose of University of Maryland basketball star Len Bias--in plenty of time for the November midterm elections. The idea was that anyone possessing five grams of crack cocaine would serve five years in prison, with no possibility of parole. Other drugs carried similar mandatory sentences. Normally, such a drastic revision to the federal code, with powerful implications for the entire justice system, would not be undertaken without a detailed consideration of the impact. For this one, though, no hearings were called. The Bureau of Prisons was not consulted. No judges were invited to share their thoughts. Speaker of the House Thomas "Tip" O'Neill, whose Boston constituents were shocked by the death of Bias (who had been drafted by the Celtics), helped the legislation sail through Congress. A new economy was created in the federal courts. The mandatory minimums can be waived only when the Justice Department certifies that one criminal offers incriminating information on another. Incredibly, the sentencing formulas of the supposedly tough legislation permit the convicts to snitch down the criminal food chain, so that drug dealers can cut time off their bits by, say, giving up girlfriends who may have done little more than answer phones and cook dinner.

As Eric Sterling, former counsel to the House Judiciary Committee, documented for a PBS Frontline episode, the doorman in a crack house is now legally responsible for every flake of cocaine in the house or handled by the people who run the house. The new legislation led to an explosion in the number of federal drug offenders in prison, which increased by 300 percent in six years. Only 11 percent of the federal drug-trafficking defendants are classified as major traffickers, and more than half are low-level offenders.

Snitch culture shaped U.S. foreign policy on Manuel Noriega, the hoodlum Panamanian dictator. By occasionally dishing up the shipments or names of cocaine smugglers who used Panama as a transshipment point, Noriega earned a batch of hero-grams from U.S. drug enforcement authorities. The feds were happy for the collars; Noriega was content to have the yanquis weed his garden of cohorts or rivals who displeased him. Oliver North provided another coating of Teflon when Noriega promised North help with the contras.

Inevitably, a narcoindustrial complex has risen behind the colossal government expenditures. The Coast Guard deploys high-speed patrol boats, Customs flies early-warning surveillance planes, the DEA uses radar-equipped balloons to watch the Mexican border and local police get grants for narcotics enforcement operations. All these funds stitch the nets that haul in some real drug dealers--and the Patrick Dorismonds of the world.

Earlier this year, President Clinton announced he was sending $1.6 billion in military aid to fight drugs in the jungles of Columbia. The Colombian government will receive 60 new helicopters and enough money to fund two battalions. The aid will help the Colombian government attack just about any opponent or challenger to its authority--and, possibly, pinch off the traffic until it relocates once more.

"As in Vietnam, the policy is designed to fail," says Sylvester Salcedo, a retired naval lieutenant commander who worked for three years in the mid-Nineties as an intelligence officer on a joint drug task force. "All we're doing is making body counts, although instead of bodies, we're counting seizures--tons of cocaine, kilos of heroin." After learning of the new bolus of money being hurled at Colombia, Salcedo composed a letter of protest to President Clinton and returned the Navy and Marine Corps Achievement Medal he received last year for his work on the task force.

No one involved denies that the seizure scorecard is the body count of the drug war. And no one argues that seizures crimp the supply of drugs on the streets.

Today, after three decades of blood and money, neither supply nor demand has flagged. Cheap, potent cocaine, heroin and marijuana remain abundant.

"It would be hard to think of an area of U.S. social policy that has failed more completely than the war on drugs," writes Michael Massing, author of The Fix, an insightful book critical of the drug war.

The futility of the drug war does not make drug abuse any less regrettable. For the poor and working poor, the fallout from addiction runs to child abuse, disintegrating families, inability to hold jobs, and crimes large and small. Of the nation's estimated 4 million hard-core drug users, only about half have access to treatment. While the rich go to Betty Ford, the poor go to jail--particularly African Americans. Though most drug offenders are white, black men are sent to state prisons at 13 times the rate of white men.

In the early days of the drug war, criminalization was seen as a dead-end street. After Richard Nixon was elected in 1968, his domestic policy advisors approached America's drug use primarily as a public-health issue, not a law-enforcement program. A Nixon aide, Egil "Bud" Krogh, designed a model program for the District of Columbia based on drug treatment and addiction alternatives. Only half of Nixon's federal drug budget was spent on law enforcement; the remainder went to treatment. By the late Eighties, when drugs replaced communism as the most reliable enemy in U.S. domestic political debates, the Reagan and Bush administrations repudiated treatment as a policy initiative, and about 80 percent of the money was spent on enforcement. Today, treatment still isn't a priority. Two out of every three dollars are spent on enforcement.

•

In October 1998, 30 years after Nixon declared the drug war, another Republican politician on the rise flew to North Carolina to make a speech, exasperated by what he saw as a lack of effort by government.

"We get to a drug-free America," Rudolph Giuliani said, "by arresting the people who are selling drugs, putting them in jail for a very, very long time, and recognizing the fact that people who sell those dangerous drugs are very much like murderers because they take people's lives from them."

People simply were not trying hard enough, argued Giuliani. A complicated figure, clownishly belligerent at times, brilliant at others, Giuliani, along with former Senator Alfonse D'Amato, once made a spectacular public relations foray into the Washington Heights section of Manhattan at the height of the crack era, both dressed in their versions of street duds. Giuliani campaigned for mayor in 1993 as a man who would crush New York's drug problem with intensive policing--and also by providing treatment facilities. He kept virtually none of his treatment promises.

By January 2000, Giuliani was being celebrated around the world for the rebirth of New York. He was a candidate in one of the most heavily watched Senate campaigns in modern history: Rudy the crime buster versus Hillary Rodham Clinton, first lady. But he had a problem. After seven years of decline, the murder rate in New York had crept up in 1999 and was starting to jump again in 2000. In mid-January, Mayor Giuliani and his police commissioner effectively declared a public safety emergency, quietly authorizing virtually unlimited overtime for the police department. Its mission: Attack drug dealing, anywhere, any time. The mayor was certain that earlier drug crackdowns--not demographic or other social changes--had led to the drop in crime. And he would do it again, harder.

The new program was called Operation Condor, and it sent a flood of street wretches sloshing down the chutes of precinct houses, holding cells and criminal courts. "In order to continue working the overtime, you are expected to produce," says Tom Scotto, president of the Detectives' Endowment Association.

The unofficial quota, say the under-covers, was five collars per tour for each team. No one sweated about the quality of the arrests. A man selling tamales on the street was busted for not having a permit. Another was grabbed for spitting on the sidewalk. Nearly 80 percent of all the Condor cases were misdemeanors or low-level violations. "We are spending all our time locking up three guys for smoking a joint, and there are no large-scale investigations going on," says one undercover sergeant in the narcotics division. All Patrick Dorismond had to do that fateful evening was surrender a joint, if he had had one, and he would have had a night in jail instead of the morgue.

With crime already low in New York City, the use of undercover officers to arrest people for minor infractions seemed to be a dangerous tactic. "If this is the safest large city in America, where are they finding all these people to arrest?" asked Bill Bratton, the former police commissioner who was given credit for driving down the city's crime rate. "In the early Nineties, making arrests was like fishing in a stocked pond. Eventually, you started to have fewer fish. Instead of reducing the number of people fishing in the pond, they actually increased them. So they're reeling out smaller and smaller fish."

Two months into Operation Condor, Police Commissioner Howard Safir declared it a success. The city's murder rate, however, was still climbing. A member of the city council stated that the name Operation Condor was also the name used for a death squad in Latin America.

"In case you didn't know, a condor is a bird," Safir replied.

Actually, Condor stood for Citywide Organized Narcotics Drug Operational Response. "They should call it Operation Band-Aid," remarked the narcotics sergeant.

In the two months since Operation Condor started, police had averaged 350 arrests per day. On the night of Dorismond's death, a Condor team had arrested eight men near the Port Authority Bus Terminal on 42nd Street. With the police van nearly full, the team was just about ready to bring in the night's haul to central booking.

Patrick Dorismond just wanted to catch a taxi. But the drug warriors refused to listen to him. They wanted to make some overtime. The mayor, who got them the overtime money, wanted better crime statistics--and to win another election. And Dorismond ended up dead.

Within hours of Dorismond's death, the mayor and the police commissioner unsealed Dorismond's 13-year-old juvenile court record. "I would not want a picture presented of an altar boy, when, in fact, maybe it isn't an altar boy," said the mayor. It turned out Dorismond had been an altar boy--and that he and Giuliani had both been students at Bishop Loughlin High School. Nevertheless, the mayor hurled abuse at the dead Dorismond and at people who did not have respect for the dangerous jobs performed by police officers--for flailing at everyone, it seemed, except himself. Even the police officer who shot Dorismond sent regrets and condolences to the victim's mother.

In May, sick with prostate cancer, his poll numbers collapsing after the Dorismond killing, his marriage dissolving, Giuliani pulled out of the Senate race against Hillary Clinton.

One might have thought that the Dorismond shooting would have occasioned soul-searching about the tactics of Operation Condor. But just 11 days after Dorismond died, a team of Condor cops was in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, on the prowl for drug offenders. In pursuit of a suspect, cops in an unmarked van swerved into a tree outside a crowded schoolyard, and some of the students thought the noise of the collision was a gunshot. Then the kids, hundreds of them, had more to worry about. The suspect ran through the schoolyard and, eyewitnesses reported, as many as five undercover cops, at least one with a visible drawn gun, followed. One child got cut on the leg and another had an asthma attack in the panic that engulfed the playground. The police got their man, a 19-year-old who, they said, had sold some dope to another young man not far from the school. It was another point tallied on the drug war's endless scoreboard.

"The whole purpose of an action like that," Mayor Giuliani explained, "is to remove drug dealers from the areas around schoolyards and playgrounds because of the great damage that drug dealers do, and the police want to do that without creating disruptions, problems or difficulty for children."

Mission unaccomplished.

All Patrick Dorismond had to do was surrender a joint, and he would have had a night in jail, not the morgue.