Problem in 46 States : Crack: It’s Not Just a ‘City Drug’

For two days this winter, gunfire echoed through the snow-covered streets here as rival gangs fought for control of a neighborhood’s drug traffic. Young men raced along sidewalks firing sawed-off shotguns and pistols at one another, and four were wounded before the battles ebbed.

The December spasm of shootings in this usually placid region provides a startling example of the nationwide violence spawned by the rapid spreading of crack, a potent and profitable cocaine derivative, into middle-sized cities, smaller towns and even rural areas of America.

“If you’d mentioned this a year ago,” said Sgt. Harry Baltzer, head of the city police’s narcotics division, “people would have laughed at you. They’d say, ‘Hey, this isn’t Detroit or New York, this is Minneapolis.’ . . . but now, they’re terrified.”

Problem in 46 States

The sense of terror is shared in a growing number of neighborhoods, according to Times interviews across the country and a new report of the federal Drug Enforcement Administration that documents the spread of crack to 46 states in the past three years.

“These are good people in these neighborhoods, and they’re at their wits’ end,” said Lamar Sims, chief deputy district attorney in Denver. “They want (crack) out of their neighborhoods.”

“It’s a war zone out there,” said Houston police narcotics agent Kevin Johnson as he discussed drug-related shoot-outs and murders in the Texas city.

In describing how crack--and the violence usually accompanying it--has spread since 1985 to all but four of the most sparsely populated states, the DEA report used phrases such as “dramatic increase . . . serious problem . . . literally exploded . . . escalating to alarming levels.”

No Longer Small-Time

Once a cottage industry, crack now is distributed throughout the nation through sophisticated networks organized by “splinter groups” from two Los Angeles street gangs as well as groups of Jamaicans, Haitians and Dominicans, the agency said in the report, made available to The Times after it was given to selected police chiefs at a Justice Department meeting.

In California, the 22-page document said, “crack is a problem of epidemic proportions in Los Angeles, Riverside, Santa Barbara. . . . Some areas of San Francisco report up to 25 street dealers at a single corner, while Sacramento reports an enormous increase in the number of crack houses.”

Crack is “inexpensive, highly addictive, physically and emotionally destructive. . . . Never before has any form of cocaine been available at such low cost and high potency,” the report said. Only Alaska, Wyoming, Montana and South Dakota, it said, have so far escaped problems with the drug.

Crack is smokable slivers or crystals processed from powdered cocaine hydrochloride through use of baking soda or ammonia. The effect of smoking it is said by experts to be far more intense than that of snorting cocaine.

While the common one-gram package of powdered cocaine sells for $100 and is 55% pure, the DEA said that a dose of crack weighing one-tenth of a gram sells for between $5 and $25 and often is 90% pure.

Although crack is “primarily an inner-city drug problem at the present time,” the agency said, it has become available in much smaller cities and towns--Peoria, Ill.; Martinsburg, W. Va.; Salisbury, Md., and Pascagoula, Miss.

The DEA said that recent seizures of the drug indicate that crack has reached rural areas of California and nine other states--Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana, Florida, Alabama, North Carolina, Delaware, Maryland and New York.

Rapid March of Drug

“This rapid appearance of the drug in rural areas highlights the easy marketability and speed with which it is capable of spreading through society,” it said.

According to the DEA, crack first showed up in the United States in 1981 in Los Angeles, San Diego and Houston, three cities where it was commonly called “rock.”

It “was considered a localized phenomenon until late 1985, when crack became a serious problem in New York City,” the report said. “Crack cocaine literally exploded on the drug scene during 1986 and was reported available in 28 states and the District of Columbia.” In late 1987, when the DEA conducted a new survey of its field offices and local police departments, it found that the number of states had jumped to 46.

Many smaller metropolitan areas were stunned by the rapid advance of the drug, said Patrick Murphy, director of the police policy board at the U.S. Conference of Mayors who, in a 42-year law enforcement career, has been a police chief in four cities.

When crack was first detected in a few large cities several years ago, Murphy said in an interview, many officials in other cities said: “ ‘Well, that’s New York, or well, that’s L. A. We’ll never have it in our city.’ They were shocked when it hit them so fast.”

Worst Violence Ever

Most disturbing, Murphy said, is that “crack is bringing a level of violence we never saw with heroin or cocaine or marijuana.”

Crack is so potent and addictive that it breeds “violent desperation” among users, who commit robberies and other crimes to finance their drug purchases, he said. And bloody battles over turf, such as the one between drug dealers in Minneapolis in mid-December are becoming more common.

Last month in Washington, D.C., two women linked to drug trafficking were slain in what police described as executions witnessed by four small children. A week earlier at a busy intersection in the capital, four men with automatic weapons gunned down a drug competitor as he sat in his car at a red light.

The escalation in drug-related homicides is charted by police statistics in the District of Columbia, where police have attributed four of every six murders this year to drugs, up from one of six as recently as 1985.

Similarly, in New York, police said that 39% of last year’s murders were drug-related, compared with 20% to 25% in the early 1980s. Arson also apparently figures in the New York crack trade. Forty people were left homeless on March 23 as the result of a fire in a seven-story apartment building in Harlem that had been described as a “crack den.” A day earlier, two people were killed and five injured in a similar incident in the Bronx.

Police Are Targets

Besides killing one another and sometimes slaying innocent bystanders--as in the case of a 60-year-old woman killed by a stray bullet in a shoot-out between crack gangs in Atlanta last September--dealers increasingly have cast aside one of the unwritten rules of the street, an informal code followed by even the Mafia: never deliberately kill a cop.

One recent example was the assassination of a rookie New York City policeman, Edward Byrne, as he sat in a police car guarding the home of a Queens resident who had complained about drug dealing in the neighborhood.

Crack dealers “don’t follow the same rules, and that’s a worry,” said Murphy of the Conference of Mayors. “They kill at will, and there seem no limits left.”

It is a trend to which Sgt. Ken Williams of the Birmingham, Ala., narcotics division can personally attest. He recently came within inches of becoming a victim of the crack industry’s penchant for violence.

“We were raiding a crack house and I was banging on the door when shots were fired from inside,” Williams said in an interview. “One bullet missed my head by only six inches.”

Shot at Twice in Month

He said it was the second time in a month that Birmingham officers had come under fire in crack raids. “I’ve been in this business here for 10 years and in those 10 years we had been shot at maybe twice, until this last month--we’ve been shot at twice in the last month,” Williams added.

“They’ve all got guns,” he said. “That seems to be the common denominator of these crack houses.”

Williams’ colleagues in Birmingham’s homicide division keep a bullet-riddled metal chair in their office as a grim reminder.

A crack dealer was sitting in that chair when another man--an “enforcer” brought down from Detroit--murdered him with a burst from a military-style automatic rifle. The Detroit man was sentenced to life imprisonment and, after his trial, “we got the chair out of the evidence locker to keep here as a reminder of their firepower,” said Sgt. Butch Quinn.

Williams, Quinn and other law enforcement officers across the country have detected a quantum leap in the arsenals of drug dealers. They have seized Israeli-made machine guns, known as Uzis, American-made submachine guns known as Mac-10s, a variety of sawed-off shotguns and, Williams said, “every kind of handgun you can imagine.”

Arsenal in a Bus

Earlier this month, when New York police searched a bus that had just arrived from Atlanta, they found powerful weapons they said were headed for crack dealers in Queens and Brooklyn: a Chinese-made assault rifle, two hand grenades, 14 semiautomatic guns, a batch of 32-round ammunition clips and a Colt .45 with a laser scope.

In Atlanta, narcotics squad Lt. John Woodward talked of the Uzis, Mac-10s and Florida-made 9-millimeter machine pistols carried by drug dealers there. “Most of them are semiautomatic, but that’s still more than we’ve got,” Woodward said. “If we don’t catch them by surprise, we don’t have enough firepower. If we ever get in a fire fight . . . .”

“It’s scary out there,” said Mike Schoebn, Minneapolis police gang crime specialist. “We’re now up against people who live solely by threat and intimidation--that’s a new ingredient for us here.”

“You try not to let it affect you, but it has to,” said Roy Nordos, a member of the Minneapolis police SWAT team that specializes in raiding crack houses. The head of the team, Sgt. Doug Smith, added: “It’s frightening to see how life means so little to some of these people.”

Violence in Minneapolis and elsewhere has been heightened by struggles over drug territory between local groups and out-of-town gangs attempting to expand, the DEA report said.

Large-Scale Business

Initially, most crack was distributed by “independent, cottage industry traffickers,” the agency said. Then, about 18 months ago, DEA investigators “began to delineate a fundamental change in the structure of crack trafficking. Several large-scale trafficking groups, whose structure is beginning to approach that of mid-level cocaine or heroin dealers, have begun to emerge and are now overshadowing the presence of cottage industry groups.”

“Four major groups dominate the interstate trafficking of crack cocaine throughout the United States,” the report said.

In Southern California, it said, crack distribution “is mainly controlled by splinter groups of two black street gangs, the ‘Bloods’ and the ‘Crips’ based out of South-Central Los Angeles. These splinter groups are primarily composed of former gang members . . . who utilize the gang names as a means of identifying their organization.

“These subgroups are independent entities, often operating in competition with each other. Although crack operations are not centralized and controlled by one major group overseeing and coordinating activities of the splinter groups, law enforcement officers warn that these subgroups are highly organized and extremely violent.”

Gangs Expand Markets

The report said that crack trafficking “has become so competitive in Southern California that ‘Crips’ splinter groups have begun distributing crack in Phoenix, Denver, Salt Lake City, Las Vegas, Seattle, New Orleans and Portland, Ore. Former members of the ‘Bloods’ gang have recently opened distribution networks in Sacramento and Tucson.”

Jamaican gangs, also known as posses, “represent the largest crack trafficking network uncovered to date,” the agency reported. It said their operations stretch from New York, Miami and Washington on the East Coast to Minneapolis and Kansas City in the Midwest, Dallas in the Southwest and Denver in the Rocky Mountains.

“Virtually every geographic area experiencing a Jamaican posse problem has a tremendous increase in violent activity (i.e., homicides),” the report said. The Haitian traffickers include migrant farm workers and operate along the East Coast from Florida to Upstate New York, the DEA said, while the Dominican groups operate mainly in New York, Rhode Island and Connecticut.

The massive scope and immense profitability of crack operations were underscored earlier this month in Detroit when authorities announced the indictment of 22 persons in an investigation that they said had crushed a drug ring that sold up to $3-million worth of crack a day.

The Detroit group employed 275 people--many of them under 16--operated up to 200 crack houses and supplied 500 others, officials said. The investigation involved 107 search warrants and led to the seizure of 250 weapons, $500,000 in cash, $500,000 worth of jewelry and 41 cars, including Cadillacs and Mercedes-Benzes.

The investigation also uncovered the sophisticated marketing techniques used by the Detroit group, said U.S. Atty. Roy Hayes. “The crack houses were set up to compete with one another to increase the demand, to encourage sales and to eliminate competition,” he said.

Madison Avenue Methods

Madison Avenue-style marketing techniques are being applied by crack traffickers in New York, according to Bill Hopkins, director of the street research unit of the state Division of Substance Abuse Services.

Hopkins reported that crack is being sold in heat-sealed plastic bags stamped with brand names such as “Airborne” and “Sudden Impact.” The Airborne brand is so popular, he said, that its parachute emblem has been duplicated by competing dealers who sell an inferior product.

Throughout the country, authorities say that crack dealers make extensive use of juveniles as sales personnel and couriers.

While local officials say that crack usually takes root first among jobless and low-income adults lured by its low price, it inevitably spreads to schools. There, officials say, many teen-agers are tempted by the prospect of fancy cars, nice clothes and plenty of spending money to become runners, look-outs and even large-scale dealers.

“There’s almost a Miami Vice syndrome” among young people, said Birmingham Lt. Chuck Jordan. “It’s easy to identify them. They’re not trying to hide it.” The car, the clothes, the gun, he said, are all “just part of the dress.”

Gun-Toting Youngsters

“A lot of kids are towing heavy artillery,” said the Rev. Leon Kelly of a Salvation Army community center in Denver. “A 14-year-old came in here all excited because he had a .357 magnum.”

In Detroit last month, a 13-year-old who allegedly operated a crack house with a 15-year-old partner was charged with murder in the shooting death of a drug-addicted prostitute. “He ran the dope pad, she messed up the dope and he had to take care of business,” a prosecutor told the court at the youth’s preliminary hearing.

A week earlier in Washington’s Maryland suburbs, a high school football star died after officers approached him in a notorious drug-selling area. Police said he swallowed six small chunks of crack to avoid arrest. The youth, who the night before had signed a full athletic scholarship with the University of South Carolina, had been arrested in December and charged as a juvenile with possession of $1,000 worth of crack.

“The kids know this is easy money to buy fancy cars and clothes,” said Barbara Merriweather of Washington, who founded an organization known as Citizens Redirecting Youth, or CRY, after her 17-year-old son was gunned down in December by two other youths who wanted his radio. “What happened to my son is just part of the drug epidemic.”

The toll among the nation’s teen-agers is staggering. In Detroit during the first six weeks of this year, 27 youths under 17 were shot, four of them fatally. And Minneapolis has seen a wave of violence among teen-agers.

“This is just one child out of many,” Rozeann Gormann told the Minneapolis Star-Tribune after her teen-age brother was found shot to death, execution-style, in an alley.

President Reagan, citing surveys showing that cocaine use among high school seniors and other young adults dropped 20% last year to its lowest level since the 1970s, declared this month that “the tide of battle has turned and we are beginning to win the crusade for a drug-free America.”

Local officials say, however, that White House rhetoric isn’t enough, that far greater government efforts are needed.

“Just saying ‘no’ is not enough,” said Peter F. Luongo, director of a youth treatment program in Maryland. “We’ve got to do something.”

Eric Lichtblau reported from Minneapolis and Gaylord Shaw from Birmingham and Atlanta. Times researchers Edith Stanley in Atlanta, Dallas Jamison in Denver, Rona Schwartz in Houston and Siobhan Flynn in New York contributed to this story.