Where The War Is Being Lost

If America’s struggle against drugs is indeed a war, then the nation’s inner cities are the trenches. Ghettos have always been the main marketplace for narcotics, but never before has the drug trade been so pervasive or its repercussions so brutal. The primary reason is crack, the cheap and highly powerful cocaine derivative. The booming crack business has led to unprecedented violence by dealers fighting for their share of the market. Widespread addiction to the drug has helped further shred what was left of the tattered social fabric of the ghetto. The mean streets of the inner city form the bloody battlegrounds where the war on drugs is being lost. Last week correspondents visited the front lines in three major U.S. cities: Detroit, Miami and Washington.

DETROIT. Amid the hobos and evicted tenants at the Coalition for Temporary Shelter facility on Detroit’s crumbling East Side, there is a new type of homeless: families and individuals who have fled their neighborhoods because of the crack epidemic.

Harvey Turner, 29, Denise Arrington, 30, and their two children, ages four and two, have come to the shelter seeking refuge from their Philadelphia Street home. With the violence among drug dealers and the frequent police raids on local crack houses, explains Arrington, “we didn’t feel safe.” During a recent late-night shootout, she says, “one of the bullets ricocheted and came through the bedroom window.” According to Kevin Hailey, an autoworker who moved into the C.O.T.S. shelter last week, crack is an omnipresent fact of life in Detroit. “Drugs have taken over,” says Hailey. “It has ruined the schools. You’ve got teachers doing it now. Every place is a dope exchange.”

Wayne County Prosecutor John O’Hair estimates that 70% of all local crimes are drug related. Much of the havoc is crack fueled. “With heroin addicts, there wasn’t this propensity for violent crimes,” says Commander Warren Harris of the Detroit police. “Crack is a pick-me-up, a big rush. So there is a tendency to become more active, more aggressive and more violent.”

Perhaps the ugliest aspect of the Detroit drug scene is the involvement of children. Since courts are generally lenient on young offenders and the juvenile detention facilities are overcrowded, adolescents are ideal runners and street dealers. The number of juveniles arrested in Wayne County jumped from 341 in 1986 to 674 in 1987. “They are easily recruited,” says Inspector Rudolfo Thomas, who points out that a youth can make up to $2,000 a day dealing. “There’s no way to build any kind of drug-education program that can stop that.”

“You walk into a classroom, and you see kids in fur coats and $100 gym shoes,” says Wayne County Sheriff Robert Ficano. “They’re trying to tell their peer groups that they’ve succeeded.” In some cases, ghetto parents do not discourage young dealers. “They just look the other way,” says Juvenile Division Probate Judge Y. Gladys Barsamian. “Some of the kids say they do it because they are the breadwinners in the family.”

Mayor Coleman Young announced last November that the city would step up its fight against drug dealers. “We’re going to hit them and hit them hard,” Young declared. He beefed up narcotics squads and ordered police to shut down at least a dozen crack houses a day. Police began soliciting tips from citizens on a “dope hotline.” In December and January, Detroit cops increased warrants and arrests on drug charges by 375% over the same period a year earlier. Last week a grand jury returned indictments against 22 people allegedly involved in the Chambers brothers’ drug ring, an organization that at its peak, prosecutors claim, had sold up to $3 million worth of crack a day.

Police are not the only ones striking against the dealers. Last month two overzealous Northeast residents were charged with arson after burning down a crack house in their area. Both men confessed, saying that several neighbors had chipped in to buy the gasoline used to start the blaze.

Mayor Young recognizes the daunting odds against his crusade. “We have more than tripled the number of people arrested,” he said last week, “but prison space hasn’t tripled. We are putting an additional burden on an already overcrowded system.” Young also blames the Federal Government for failing to stanch the flow of cocaine into the U.S: “We’re fighting an impossible fight if our city and other cities continue to be inundated by this drug.”

MIAMI. They call themselves the Shower Posse because they are known for unleashing torrents of machine-gun fire in the course of business. The Miami- based Shower gang is the largest of some 30 so-called posses across the U.S. that have been set up by illegal Jamaican aliens. With branches in New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Kansas City, Dallas, Washington and other large cities, the Jamaican network has come to dominate the U.S. crack trade in the past two years. Sporting such fanciful nicknames as “Tivoli Gardens,” “Bushmouth” and “Superstar,” the posses currently have more than 3,000 members and are growing fast.

Even by gangland standards, the Jamaican dealers are uncommonly vicious. Since the late ’70s, the Jamaicans have been implicated in as many as 800 murders nationwide; an estimated 150 of those killings occurred in Miami alone. “If a target happens to be in a group of four or five others,” says Bruce Snyder of the local office of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, “too bad for the four or five others.”

In a 1985 north Miami shootout, posse gunmen killed a six-year-old boy on the doorstep of an ice-cream parlor. At Fort Lauderdale’s Firemen’s Benevolent Hall, Jamaican gang members killed one person and wounded several others when they emptied their machine guns during a reggae dance. Since witnesses are often too terrified of retaliation to testify against the gangsters, suspected posse assassins usually escape conviction.

The Jamaicans have found a niche, along with the Colombians and Cubans, in Miami’s drug trade. Unlike the South American gangsters who sell narcotics wholesale, the Jamaicans are primarily street dealers and crack-house operators. Their enterprise has proved outrageously lucrative: posses will process a $6,000 kilo of cocaine into crack and sell it for $120,000.

When the posses are in need of fresh recruits, trusted “lieutenants” are sometimes dispatched back to Jamaica’s shantytowns. There the gangsters flaunt fancy cars and flash wads of cash to entice impoverished youths. In recent months Jamaican police have noticed an exodus of young men from east Kingston neighborhoods. It doesn’t take a sleuth to deduce their ultimate destination.

WASHINGTON. After Vivienne McPherson’s common-law husband was murdered in a shootout with rival drug dealers, she decided to take over his business. For four months she dealt crack out of her apartment at 2840 Robinson Place, in the rough southeast district. Then, in the words of a vice cop, she “messed up the money.” A local Jamaican posse made her pay for the transgression. It was bad enough that McPherson, nine months pregnant, had been pumped with eight bullets while her neighbors watched, says a federal agent. But what really sickened the lawman is that “three of the slugs had gone right through the baby.”

McPherson’s grisly execution last summer is part of a trend that has shocked the nation’s capital. In the past two years, narcotics dealers, led by the Jamaicans, have begun to realize Washington’s potential as a drug bazaar. Dealers from New York City and Miami have invaded the D.C. area, discovering a voracious demand for their supply. “An ounce of coke goes for $800 to $900 in New York,” says John Bartlett, a vice detective in Prince Georges County, Md. “In D.C., it goes for $1,400 to $1,800.”

The influx of drug dealers has led to an astonishing surge in drug-related violence. In 1985, 17% of Washington’s 148 homicides were connected to narcotics. In 1986 the figure climbed to 33% of 197 murders. Last year’s tally: 57% of 228 killings. Police estimate that in the first two months of 1988, 67% of the city’s 54 homicides have been due to the local drug wars.

The new breed of D.C. drug dealer does not always kill his enemies. Consider the case of Patrick Monfiston, 20, who last Christmas Eve was found “badly burned” in a motel room in the northeast sector. “They put him in a bathtub and turned on scalding water,” says an agent at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. “As his skin was peeling off, they took turns urinating on him.”

Last week the ATF redeployed 33 agents to work with D.C., Maryland and Virginia narcotics squads and U.S. Park Police officers in a regional antidrug task force. Late Thursday night, Thomas Moyer, a plainclothes sergeant with the Park Police, was cruising down Washington’s Champlain Street. He pointed out two Jamaican men in hooded sweatshirts, standing guard outside a decrepit apartment building. “They’re protecting everything that’s going on inside,” says Moyer. “You see the same thing every day. A car pulls up and two guys get out. One’s got a pound of cocaine in a plastic bag. And the other one has an Uzi under his coat.”

Moyer decides to check on an apartment on Robinson Place, a hideout that has been a fruitful source of confiscated drugs and weapons in the past. Just down the street is the yard where McPherson was gunned down. Moyer enters apartment 402 with his 9-mm handgun drawn. Tonight the unit is deserted. The rear window is still shattered; dealers had thrown drugs and guns through it as police banged down the door in a December raid. In that bust, cops found 184 quarter-pound bags of marijuana, five rifles and sawed-off shotguns and a healthy supply of ammunition. Moyer enters a rear bedroom and shines his flashlight into a dingy closet. On the closet wall, targets have been scrawled with a red ballpoint pen. The area around the bull’s-eye is pockmarked from gunfire. Says Moyer matter-of-factly: “Looks like they’ve been practicing.”