CRACK'S LEGACY: A SPECIAL REPORT

        A Drug Ran Its Course, Then Hid
        With Its Users
 
 

        By TIMOTHY EGAN

            On a day when Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani went to
            Brooklyn to tout the renewal of the Bushwick
        neighborhood, once considered one of the most
        notorious drug bazaars in the country, Pipo Rios
        opened a 40-ounce malt liquor and contemplated his
        business not far from where the Mayor spoke.

        Rios used to sell crack in the neighborhood, but
        street-level drug dealers are hard-pressed to make a
        living these days, he said.

        So now he deals in Tommy Hilfiger knockoffs. "I can
        make more money selling these," he said, pointing to a
        stack of the jackets inside his cramped kitchen,
        "especially on Friday nights."

        Rios, 36, said he no longer used crack, either. But it
        was not the many times he was arrested, nor the year he
        spent in prison, that changed his attitude. He simply
        grew tired of the drug, he said. Still, the plum-colored
        marks on his arms are the trademark of another drug
        that he does use -- heroin. That, plus tobacco and
        alcohol.

        "I've got to quit these cigarettes," he said, shaking his
        head in a cloud of smoke.

        It is unlikely that Rios will ever get invited to City
        Hall. But the change in his life is the story of the
        decline of crack in New York -- done in by age,
        boredom and new opportunities.

        Today, in communities that used to have more open-air
        crack markets than grocery stores, where children grew
        up dodging crack vials and gunfire, the change from a
        decade ago is startling. On the surface, crack has all but
        disappeared from much of New York, taking with it the
        ragged and violent vignettes that were a routine part of
        street life.

        For example, a little triangle of land near Bushwick,
        where crack dealers used to stage midnight fights with
        their pit bulls, is now a community garden. It was a
        great year for tomatoes.

        Over the last 10 years, the New York police made
        nearly 900,000 drug arrests -- more than any other city
        in the world. Almost a third were for using and selling
        crack.

        But a broader look at the arc of the crack years suggests
        that it was not the incarceration of a generation, or the
        sixfold increase in the number of police officers
        assigned to narcotics, that turned the tide in New York,
        which the police called the crack capital of the world.

        Nearly every major American city plagued by the drug
        has matched New York's rise and decline in crack use,
        regardless of how law enforcement responded.
        Drug-use surveys, arrest statistics and the personal
        narratives of scores of users, dealers and street-level
        narcotics officers point to the same pattern: The crack
        epidemic behaved much like a fever. It came on strong,
        appearing to rise without hesitation, and then broke,
        just as the most dire warnings were being sounded.

        In New York, the use of crack stopped growing as its
        addicts became known as the biggest losers on the
        street. At the same time, the violent drug markets settled
        down, as dealers and users fell into retail routines.
        Perhaps most telling, there was a generational
        revulsion against the drug.

        "If you were raised in a house where somebody was a
        crack addict, you wanted to get as far away from that
        drug as you could," said Selena Jones, a Harlem
        resident whose mother was a chronic crack user.
        "People look down on them so much that even
        crackheads don't want to be crackheads anymore."

        The police consider the transformation of parts of
        Harlem, Washington Heights and Brooklyn something
        of a miracle, emblematic of New York's determination
        to beat back the drug tide that many people thought
        would overwhelm it.

        "I'm not ready to say we won," Police Commissioner
        Howard Safir said recently. "But we're no longer the
        crack capital of the world." He attributed the change to
        a policy of zero tolerance for anyone using or selling
        drugs in the open.

        "You can spray them once, but they come back," Safir
        said, comparing drug dealers to cockroaches. "You
        have to keep going after them. We had to take this city
        back block by block."

        In Washington, however, the drug arrest rates actually
        declined in some of the peak crack years -- and the city
        still recorded a steeper drop than New York in the
        percentage of its young residents using cocaine from
        1990 to the present.

        "This happened over a period of time when Washington
        had fewer officers on the street, the police made fewer
        arrests for drugs, and the mayor himself was indicted
        for smoking crack," said Bruce Johnson, a New York
        social scientist who has conducted extensive surveys of
        crack use across the country for the National Institute
        for Justice.

        "Something clearly happened to change the attitude
        among youths," Johnson said. "They deserve a lot of the
        credit."

        The drug that was held up as the scourge of New York
        is still around, of course, and so are its consequences --
        broken families, battle-scarred neighborhoods, crimes
        both petty and large. The cheap, smokable form of
        cocaine gives its users a quick high and often leaves
        them wanting more. But a clear trend has developed
        that few public officials predicted: Crack has become a
        drug used primarily by older people.

        Embraced by one generation, crack was spurned by the
        next. The level of crack use has remained steady for
        more than a decade.

        According to an annual survey of drug use among
        people who are arrested, 35.7 percent of all males over
        36 years old who were arrested in New York last year
        had used crack recently, but barely 4 percent of those
        15 to 20 years old had used it.

        National surveys of the general population show the
        same falling off in crack use among the young. And
        among all age and race groups, the most startling
        decline has been among young blacks, the very
        stereotype of the urban drug user.

        A new drug cycle, this time following new ways to
        ingest familiar drugs like alcohol, marijuana and even
        heroin, which is cheaper and more plentiful than ever,
        has taken hold. Among many young people in New
        York, the rage is a "40 and a blunt" -- a 40-ounce bottle
        of malt liquor and a hollowed-out cigar packed with
        marijuana.

        "You don't find much crack use among the young," said
        Jean L. Scott, who has worked with drug abusers for 30
        years at Phoenix House in New York, the nation's
        leading treatment center. "These people saw a whole
        generation go bad on crack. They stick with their 40
        and a blunt."

        Crack, she said, the drug that so scared America that it
        prompted major changes in the judicial system, in
        prisons and in police tactics, is barely spoken of among
        the young in New York -- except with disdain.

        The Change: Ripple Effect of Aging Users

        A tentative peace has come to many of the old haunts of
        crack. Scouring the New York neighborhoods that once
        had up to 12,000 open-air drug markets finds only a
        spectral presence of the great drug epidemic. The
        streets are no longer congested with armed boys selling
        cheap highs by the fistful.

        A walk down Knickerbocker Avenue in Bushwick,
        where three generations of gangsters from Sicily,
        Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic flourished
        over three different drug cycles, is a tour through the
        changed cityscape.

        In the block where crack dealers shot Maria Hernandez
        to death in her apartment 10 years ago for trying to
        unify the neighborhood against them, three new
        businesses have come to life. In the park where gunfire
        could be heard nearly every night, the loudest sound at
        dusk comes from two boys arguing over who is
        baseball's best power hitter, Sammy Sosa or Manny
        Ramirez.

        "They're still here, these crack dealers," said Carlos
        Hernandez, Maria's widower. "But you can't find them
        unless you know where to look."

        A few blocks away, on Wilson Avenue, a handful of
        gaunt-faced older men follow a furtive routine to buy
        $3 vials of crack from an established dealer not far
        from the police precinct house. Once, dealers sold
        crack from the sidewalks. Now they must be summoned
        by beeper and code and are wary of selling to
        strangers.

        "They no longer own the street," Hernandez said.

        The police used to call a stretch of Knickerbocker
        Avenue the Well -- an endless fount of drugs and
        violence, sometimes with 25 crack dealers to a block
        and three killings a week.

        "This place has changed dramatically," said Stanley
        Bauman, 41, a lifelong resident of Bushwick.

        For years, he sat on a street corner with a dog named
        Wacko and sold crack to hundreds of customers.

        "Did it right out in broad daylight," Bauman said. "All
        the cops knew me. And I knew most of them." He was
        arrested many times, he said, and did a stint in prison.

        When asked what happened to his regular customers, he
        said: "Some of them died. Some of them went to jail.
        The others are still using crack, but they're getting old."

        The aging of the habitual crack user has had a ripple
        effect on all the negative social indicators connected to
        drug abuse.

        At the height of the crack years, foster care agencies
        were swamped with children left in squalor by parents
        who pursued the crack high; last year the number of
        children brought into the New York foster care system
        fell to fewer than 40,000, down from nearly 50,000 a
        decade ago, and child welfare officials attribute the
        drop in large part to the decline in crack use by women.

        Ten years ago, many experts feared that crack would be
        passed on from mothers to children. But the children
        did not follow the pattern.

        "I remember being 10 years old, and having to take
        control of my own life," said Ms. Jones, 25, the Harlem
        resident. "We were eating cornmeal pancakes without
        syrup for dinner -- crack vials all over the floor. I was
        like, 'Hello! Don't you know you have a daughter?' "

        Ms. Jones lives near Jackie Robinson Park. Crowded
        with crack users 10 years ago, it now looks like any
        other slice of green in New York on a warm day --
        mothers pushing strollers, children playing, clusters of
        people swapping stories.

        Violent crime in New York hit a 30-year low last year,
        a drop that Giuliani says is largely attributable to the
        city's record number of arrests of drug users and
        dealers.

        "One of the main reasons crime is down so
        dramatically in New York is that we no longer let the
        drug dealers control the city," Giuliani said.

        But nationwide, the murder rate also reached the lowest
        level since 1969, according to the F.B.I., even in cities
        where drug arrests fell or remained the same.

        A recent study by the Centers for Disease Control and
        Prevention in Atlanta cited diminished warfare
        between gangs that deal in crack as a major reason for
        the sharp drop in violent crime nationwide. The crack
        marketplace had become organized.

        In Bushwick, the police cordoned off the Well in the
        early 90's and special teams of officers made thousands
        of arrests. So many people were sent to jail that Rikers
        Island became known as a Bushwick block party, said
        Dr. Rick Curtis, a cultural anthropologist at John Jay
        College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan, who has
        interviewed more than a thousand crack users and
        dealers in Brooklyn over the last decade.

        "Even the drug dealers were happy to see a certain
        level of sanity return," Dr. Curtis said. "The question
        is, would this have happened anyway? Drug markets
        were in contraction well before the stepped-up police
        action."

        Arrest statistics show that crack use among the young
        started to decline nearly 10 years ago, in the
        administration of Mayor David N. Dinkins. In
        Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Washington and other cities
        where the drug took hold about the same time as in
        New York, in the mid-80's, crack fell out of favor at the
        same time.

        "You used to see crowds of people waiting to buy their
        crack kept in line by some jerk with a baseball bat,"
        said Robert Baumert, a retired deputy chief who was in
        charge of narcotics enforcement in north Brooklyn at
        the peak of the crack years. "They were not afraid of
        the police."

        Longtime crack users agree with the police on at least
        that point: They did not fear the law. But the large
        police actions, the sweeps that had names like
        Operation Striker, did not ultimately deter use, they say.
        In a 1997 survey that asked crack users why they had
        given up the drug, only 5 percent cited arrests or jail.
        Nearly 19 percent said they "grew tired of the drug
        life."

        "I don't think anything the police did changed my
        behavior," said Thomas Covington, who was arrested
        31 times, mostly for crack possession, and served two
        prison terms before voluntarily entering drug treatment.
        "Sometimes it was a little more challenging to buy. But
        once that compulsion is there, it doesn't matter what the
        penalty or the threat is."

        Covington is a big, sharp-witted Brooklyn native who
        has used crack on and off for 15 years. He made it
        through the explosive violence that came with crack's
        introduction. He was homeless, and sick, and twice felt
        the steel tip of a handgun pressed to his temple by
        hot-tempered dealers.

        He dodged the police offensives of three mayors.

        But starting in the early 90's, Covington said, he noticed
        a shift in the attitudes of young drug dealers. "They
        didn't use crack," he said. "And they didn't respect
        people who did. To me, being a 34- or 35-year-old
        guy, standing on line and handing my money to a
        15-year-old, that was humiliating."

        The Bad Times: Getting Better Amid Despair

        At the lowest point of New York's long night of despair
        over crack, the city was nearly broken by the drug. Or
        so it appeared.

        During one rush hour 10 years ago, 149 subway trains
        came to a sudden halt, held up by an electrical short. It
        was one of the more unusual casualties of crack, transit
        officials later concluded. Pawn shops paid $1 a pound
        for copper, and drug users found that few things brought
        in money like the two-inch-thick copper wires that help
        guide subways around New York.

        "We used to rip the cable out and then burn off the
        insulation," Covington said. It was just this sort of
        scavaging, transit officials said, that led to the subway
        short.

        In the crack years, the city had an aura of menace. In
        1989 a police officer, Edward Byrne, was killed while
        guarding the home of a witness in a drug case in
        Queens. In 1990, a record 2,262 people were slain, and
        the police linked two-thirds of the deaths to the drug
        trade.

        Other drug addicts were afraid of the hard-core crack
        users. Doris Randolph, a former drug user in Harlem
        who now helps young people stay off drugs, said, "The
        people who used heroin, we'd be sitting there in the
        shooting galleries, nodding, talking politics, talking
        about music, the paper under our arms, and then all of
        sudden these twitchy crackheads showed up, and they
        looked dangerous."

        But as early as 1989, four years after crack's
        appearance, at a time when New York looked to be at
        its lowest ebb, the fever had broken and the epidemic
        was beginning its slow decline. It continued to fall
        before and after the major police crackdowns, until it
        hit a plateau in the mid-90's where it has been ever
        since.

        Mandatory prison terms and hundreds of thousands of
        arrests "appeared to have no major deterrent effect,"
        according to a study of crack's decline by the National
        Institute of Justice.

        Dr. Lynn Zimmer, a professor of sociology at Queens
        College, who studied the effects of police sweeps on
        drug use in New York in the late 80's, said: "Crack
        would never be as popular as it was made out to be,
        and people who really understood drug cycles
        predicted that. There is a natural cycle to these kinds of
        drug trends. Crack followed that."

        Growing up with a crack-addicted mother, Ms. Jones
        said, she could tell the drug would never be popular
        with the children her age. "You'd see things that were
        just crazy," she said. "My mother used to like going to
        jail. She'd get her rest there. She said all her friends
        were there."

        The Campaign: Driving Dealers Underground

        A stroll down West 139th Street in Manhattan, in the
        heart of a square mile that the New York police once
        called the cocaine capital of the world, found
        71-year-old Casimiro Lopez relaxing on the stoop at
        dusk.

        "I'm telling you: the drugs never finish," said Lopez,
        who has lived here for 31 years. "But it's much better
        now, because you don't see them anymore."

        Much of West 139th Street was taken over by the New
        York police in the mid-90's in what the officers call a
        model-block campaign to reclaim neighborhoods from
        drug dealers. They put barricades at both ends of the
        street and stopped people who could not prove that they
        lived in the neighborhood. From 139th north, through
        Washington Heights, the police carried on similar
        campaigns: taking over entire blocks, arresting people
        for minor offenses, then hanging N.Y.P.D. banners,
        planting a row of trees and moving on. Signs posted on
        the outside of apartment buildings read: "No Hanging
        Out. No Eating. No Pets. No Loud Radio."

        Many residents welcome the police attention. Others
        compare it with martial law.

        "The idea is to blanket the city and give drug dealers no
        place to hide," Giuliani said in explaining the city's
        policy. "It's working."

        But scores of interviews in these hard-hit
        neighborhoods found many people who felt that the
        change had been largely cosmetic.

        "I compare it to Niagara Falls," said Jordi
        Reyes-Montblanc, director of the West Side Heights
        Citizen League. "You take 10 buckets out one year, 100
        buckets out the next. That's a 500 percent improvement,
        but the falls are still in place."

        Drug dealers are indeed hard to find on West 139th
        Street. But a few blocks further north, men in their late
        30's and early 40's make deals in the shadows around
        Our Lady of Lourdes Roman Catholic Church and the
        two-story, wood-frame house built in 1802 by
        Alexander Hamilton, a framer of the Constitution.

        "What the police did was move the drug traffic north,"
        said the Rev. Thomas Fenlon, pastor of Our Lady of
        Lourdes, a church with bars over the stained-glass
        windows. "Now, instead of being on 139th Street, they
        are in front of the church and school."

        But over all, he said, there are fewer dealers, and his
        comments were echoed throughout old crack alleys.
        Crack users told of going inside to buy, using beepers
        and code, and pretty much going on as usual within a
        block or two of the street where the N.Y.P.D. banners
        flew.

        "Everything went underground," said Rolando Lopez,
        an antique furniture restorer from Brooklyn who has
        had a crack habit for much of the 90's, but has never
        been arrested. "It became more of a thrill. You'd walk
        by the cops, carrying the crack vial in your mouth."

        Covington in Brooklyn also changed his buying routine,
        but not his habits. "Instead of buying in the street, we
        started buying from some of the bodegas," he said.
        "You'd go in and order a hero sandwich in the back,
        and they'd put the crack in a bag with some chips."

        The police say they have tried to do something
        considerably more difficult than showing an iron fist 24
        hours a day.

        "We're not just coming in and locking up dealers like an
        invading army," said Capt. Garry F. McCarthy, who
        until recently was in charge of the 33d Precinct, which
        includes most of Washington Heights. "We're coming in
        and trying to create a livable community."

        But others says more credit should be given to the
        people of the neighborhoods. No matter how many trees
        they plant, banners they fly or arrests they make, the
        police cannot create a livable community, they say. It
        takes human resiliency.

        The Rebirth: Neighborhoods Heal Themselves

        It has been a prosperous decade.

        Disney and the Gap are now coming to Harlem.
        Bushwick and Washington Heights are alive with new
        bodegas, farmicias, fruit markets, discount clothing
        stores, chains like McDonald's and Rite Aid.

        Bauman, the former crack dealer in Bushwick, now
        works on construction crews, putting up plasterboard.
        "I got all the work I can use," he said. One of his fellow
        dealers has become a security guard. Another is a
        school bus driver, said Dr.

        Curtis, the anthropologist.

        In Bushwick, Dr. Curtis concluded, the neighborhood
        healed itself. Many people had expected the arrests to
        continue without end, until Bushwick was a place
        nearly devoid of young men. But social pressure and
        neighborhood initiatives brought a change.

        "Rather than fulfilling the prophecy of becoming
        addicted and remorseless superpredators," Dr. Curtis
        wrote in his study, the young men of Bushwick "opted
        for the relative safety of family, home, church and other
        sheltering institutions, which persevered during the
        most difficult years."

        Hernandez of Bushwick gives the police plenty of
        credit for the change in his neighborhood. But he says it
        was more than arrests that made crack's imprint
        diminish in his small piece of New York. The crack
        epidemic looked like it would never end only to those
        who could not see to the other side, he said.

        "The community came together, and it created a
        snowball effect," said Hernandez, walking down
        Knickerbocker Avenue in bright sunshine. "The
        churches, the merchants, the parents -- we showed
        young people there was something to live for here in
        Bushwick."

        His family is the best proof of his point. Hernandez's
        eldest daughter, Evelis, having completed college, has
        decided to return to Bushwick. She will soon be
        teaching school in the neighborhood where her mother
        was shot to death.

        "Why should we ever leave?" Hernandez said.