‘48 Hours’ Returns to a Hell Called ‘Crack Street’

On a hot summer afternoon, narcotics detectives strap on guns and bulletproof vests to raid a suspected crack house. Behind them as they burst through the door is Dan Rather, a long way from the anchor desk, in a bulletproof vest and followed by a cameraman from the CBS News series “48 Hours.”

Inside, the detectives find a suspect, a cache of crack--and seven more people hiding in the basement. The police have hit pay dirt--and so has “48 Hours.”

“The courts will have to decide the case, but the evidence is pretty strong that this was a crack house with a neighborhood network of runners, sellers and distributors,” Rather said in an interview. “We got what we wanted, which was to show the next rung up from selling crack on the street.”

From drug busts anchored by Dan Rather to portraits of hollow-eyed crack heads describing their descent into addiction, CBS News is offering a three-hour examination of the effects of crack in this country on “48 Hours: Return to Crack Street,” at 8 tonight (Channels 2 and 8).

In contrast to a traditional documentary, in which a lone film maker might spend months with the topic, “48 Hours” has dispensed numerous correspondents and crews around New York City to cover crack like an electronic SWAT team. Racing against a self-imposed clock, they will report on a variety of crack-related stories as they happen over a 48-hour period.

“Return to Crack Street” is the sequel to “48 Hours on Crack Street,” a controversial documentary that explored crack two years ago, when this cheap, highly addictive form of cocaine was a relatively new phenomenon. In 1987, the original “Crack Street” launched a weekly CBS News series, “48 Hours,” that has used the two-day format to cover a variety of stories, from Detroit police to lottery fever.

Nearly canceled due to low ratings, “48 Hours” recently has found a successful niche in a new, kamikaze time-slot, outranking the entertainment programming from ABC which is pitted against “The Cosby Show” on NBC. “Crack II” is the first installment of the fall season on the “48 Hours” series.

It is 7 p.m. on the August day before videotaping begins. Executive producer Andrew Heyward, an energetic version of the sergeant in “Hill Street Blues,” is giving last-minute instructions to the 50 staff members assembled in a room in the CBS News building on Manhattan’s West Side. (Before production is finished, about 90 people will work on the documentary.)

With its splashy subject matter, close-up camerawork and fast-paced editing, “48 Hours” has been criticized as “NTV” (a news version of MTV)--and praised as a new way to dramatize social problems. The series won three news Emmys for documentary programming Tuesday night.

“What we’re trying to do on ’48 Hours’ is to let the viewer experience the story firsthand, learning about the story as the reporter does,” Heyward says. “It’s a different approach from the nightly newscasts, where, with 22 minutes to tell the news of the day, a reporter must draw a conclusion and illustrate that with carefully edited sound-bites and facts. On ’48 Hours,’ the viewer is meant to come away with an understanding of an issue by having spent time with a variety of people enmeshed in the story.”

Despite the experiential power of “48 Hours,” its impressionistic style has its critics. “It’s an interesting concept, but it’s concept-driven,” says Richard Salant, who was president of CBS News for 16 years. “They’re in such a hurry that there’s no time to look at causes and futures. It’s journalism that has wrapped itself in time constraints, and there are serious issues that don’t lend themselves to this approach.”

Like the original documentary, “Crack II” will videotape drug busts, emergency-room care and other potentially dramatic situations. But to show the impact of crack on the community, “Crack II” will devote more time to individuals than to anonymous cameos from the street. To find real-life main characters who can add perspective to the crack problem, the producers have slightly hedged their bets on reality. Videotaping will be done on the “48 Hours” stopwatch, but some people and situations have been researched beforehand.

At 9:30 a.m. on Day One of videotaping, CBS News correspondent Bernard Goldberg is walking up and down grimy staircases in the South Bronx with New York City probation officers Joe Espanol and Miguel Ibarra. Trained as social workers, the two officers have been enlisted in a new city program to get crack-addicted parole violators into drug treatment.

“It’s getting much worse here, and the addicts are getting younger,” Ibarra tells Goldberg. Their conversation is videotaped by cameraman Karl Gilman, who moves fluidly with a lightweight camera on his shoulder.

One young man who is arrested exclaims, “I’m the star of the show!” But, surprisingly, others register almost no response to having a TV camera come into their apartment. “On all of our programs, I’ve been amazed that people don’t react to the cameras,” says Goldberg, the principal correspondent on the weekly “48 Hours.” “I think TV may be so ubiquitous that it’s accepted as part of their lives.”

Outside an abandoned building, the officers arrest a dark-eyed, paper-thin woman. Defiant at first, she agrees to answer Goldberg’s soft-spoken questions. She mentions a son, then starts to cry, saying that her 4-year-old would disapprove of her life as a prostitute to support her crack habit.

It’s uncomfortable to watch, but Goldberg believes that her brief story and the officers’ reactions to it are important to document. “We’re trying to show what crack has done to this country,” Goldberg says. “This woman is more typical of the drug problem than some big-time smuggler on ‘Miami Vice.’ ”

Late that same night, camera crews are videotaping at Lincoln Hospital in the South Bronx and careening in emergency medical vans all over the neighborhood. The medical staff say they are swamped with crack-related injuries and illnesses. One doctor practically cups in his hand a tiny, trembling crack baby. The emergency vans bring in several crack-related cases, from someone hit with a baseball bat in a drug deal to a man shot in a quarrel after smoking crack.

On the weekly series, producers normally would spend more time with their subjects. But, watching the hospital scene, producer Kathleen O’Connell acknowledges that the relationship is not easily defined. “Once we’ve spent time with people, it’s surprising how much they will let us into their lives,” O’Connell says. “You don’t want to invade their privacy, but you feel that you’re telling an important story.”

On the afternoon of Day Two on “Crack II,” Rather is in the Essex County sheriff’s office in Newark, N.J., swapping small talk with the narcotics detectives whose activities he is tracking. Sensitive to possible cynicism among the detectives about his being a “big-foot”--a network type who swoops down on the story as the cameras roll--Rather had gone over the night before. As it turned out, information gained that night led to a major drug bust that was witnessed by Rather and the “48 Hours” crew.

“This is an important subject that I’m into and that I know something about,” Rather says. “When we first talked about crack, people were gape-mouthed, saying, ‘It can’t be that bad.’ Well, it is that bad.”

Since “Crack II” centers on New York City, Rather will be able to report three major pieces for the documentary without missing duty as anchor on “The CBS Evening News.” Although Rather downplays his personal excitement at being on the scene, he reports his “Crack II” stories with the enthusiasm of a local reporter aiming for the big leagues.

“Being a network anchorman has its own rewards,” he says. “But this is more fun.”

Back at the CBS News building the next day, Catherine Lasiewicz, the No. 2 producer on the documentary, is beginning to look at the footage. Cameraman Aubrey Barnard has returned with a powerful series of portraits of crack addicts. They are considered so strong that they will be interspersed throughout the documentary as individual “witnesses.”

After an editorial meeting where producers bid for time for their stories (“We’d like to aggressively bid 12 minutes,” says Rather’s producer, Tom Flynn, referring to his pieces on drug-enforcement), the editing begins. “48 Hours” operates within traditional CBS News guidelines, but there is more attention to cinematic touches--for example, finding a connecting sequence of emergency-van doors opening and medical personnel leaning in, repeatedly asking, “What have you got?”

There is an inevitable compression of reality, but the editors say they do not simply pick the exciting shot over the tedious one. “This is not about a man sleeping, so the coffee break may not be in there unless it’s interesting and illustrative,” Heyward says. “But this is a bona-fide attempt to give (proper) weight and proportion to what happened.”

The walkie-talkies are silent, and the Chinese food has been through two rounds of leftovers in the “48 Hours” offices. The voices from “Crack II” have been heard many times from the editing rooms. Now what was seen at 2 a.m. in the South Bronx will be replayed in living rooms across the country. “Crack II: the Sequel” is on its way to prime time.