Chicago Has Been Spared Full Force of Crack Epidemic : Drugs: Local gangs and the luck of geography have lessened the substance’s impact, experts say. But the city’s suburbs, like the rest of the nation, have been ravaged.

On a wintry evening, chill winds raking the landscape, the barren South Side street corner seemed an unlikely spot for a start-up business.

It’s a bleak corner, of a piece with its surroundings, one of the more desolate swaths in a section of the city long ravaged by poverty and drugs.

Yet it was here, say the police, that a group of entrepreneurs last year chose to establish a briefly thriving enterprise. From an abandoned public housing unit, the police and federal agents used high-powered telescopic lenses to videotape the around-the-clock, $10-million curbside crack service--amazingly, the first of its kind known to exist here.

And when the police and Drug Enforcement Administration finished their six-month investigation of that South Side crack ring, arresting 18 people, Chicago was once again without a major crack operation, police said.

By the mid-1980s, use of the potent, smokeable cocaine derivative was reaching epidemic proportions in cities large and small across the nation, sparking turf wars and escalating drug-related violence. But Chicago--the nation’s third largest city and one that seemed as ripe as any for the new drug--has largely stood by as an observer.

From the beginning, one of the mysteries of the crack epidemic has been why it largely passed Chicago by.

Cocaine and heroin are plentiful. But crack, the scourge that first came to the attention of federal authorities in 1984, never became popular here as it did in New York, Los Angeles, Washington, Philadelphia and other cities.

“Crack’s been here for a couple of years in specific parts of the city,” said Irving A. Spergel, an expert in gangs at the University of Chicago’s school of Social Service Administration. But, unlike in other cities, the drug has not become wildly popular here and did not spread beyond specific locations.

Sgt. Jim Brady, head of the police crack task force, said 90% of the crack in Chicago is made at home and is not mass distributed.

As an illustration of how relatively slight the crack problem is here, Cmdr. Raymond Risley, head of the police narcotics division, said: “Thirty days ago we were focusing on only four locations in the city of Chicago where crack was alleged to have been sold. I think two of them were positive. . . . I haven’t been able to substantiate one of them and one turned up to be false.”

But, while Chicago police say the city has been spared the presence of large-scale crack warehousing and distribution operations, some of its poorer suburbs have been ravaged by the drug.

“Our problem with crack has been astronomical,” said Lt. Robert Warren of the Robbins Police Department. He said there had been 94 crack arrests in the depressed Chicago suburb in the five-month period from June through October.

Suburban Harvey has been similarly plagued. “It used to be that about 10% of our drug arrests were crack related,” said Police Chief Nick Graves. “Now it’s 90%. It’s the drug of choice right now.”

Both police departments report that crack became a large problem in their communities within the past two years.

Graves disputes the contention that the city of Chicago does not have a serious crack problem. The first crack arrests made in his town, he said, were of Chicago teen-agers who said they were members of the Disciples street gang.

“Chicago’s saying they don’t have a problem and we do. In five minutes I can go to Chicago and I can go to a crack house and I can buy crack,” he said. “They have it. . . . Chicago has a problem just as big as ours.”

Risley does not deny that someone wanting to buy crack can find it on Chicago’s streets. “Crack is on small farms, it’s in Alaska,” he said. “If crack exists there is a crack problem because crack shouldn’t exist. But you’ve got to distinguish between a crack problem and a crack epidemic.”

Seizures of crack in the city increased in the past year, but it still is found in only small quantities, police said. Brady said that from January through October, 1989, the task force arrested 39 dealers, seized 274 grams of crack--a little over a pound--and served search warrants on 33 crack houses. In 1988, a little more than 100 grams of crack were seized.

Even the definition of a crack house is different here. Crack houses in New York, Washington and Detroit are abandoned buildings used by crack users to buy and smoke crack. There have been reports that authorities in some cities attribute an increase in the incidence of AIDS to the sexual favors being traded in crack houses in return for crack.

While some suburban police departments report the existence of crack smoke houses, Risley said of Chicago: “That is not occuring here.”

First gaining popularity in coastal cities, crack quickly spread to heartland cities such as St. Louis, Cleveland, Detroit and Kansas City and eventually to places like rural West Virginia, south Georgia and Alabama.

In each of the cities in which crack gained popularity, police reported an alarming increase in the amount of drug-related violence. The murder rate in Washington shot up from 148 in 1985 to nearly 300 in 1988 after crack had taken hold. Sixty percent of the 1988 deaths were reported to be drug related. In Kansas City, 91 homicides were reported in 1985. After the introduction of crack it increased to 131 in 1987.

Federal authorities have pointed to Los Angeles gangs and to Jamaican gangs as being responsible for much of the spread of crack throughout the country. Chicago police say those gangs never established a foothold here.

Spergel credited the strength of Chicago’s home-grown gangs and the alertness of the police for keeping outside organizations such as the Bloods or the Crips from infiltrating here.

Risley agreed that Chicago gang dominance kept outsiders out--”They’d be killed,” he said--but that alone shouldn’t have stopped the spread of crack. “It’s easy to make crack,” he noted. “All you need is water, baking soda, ether and cocaine. . . . You can’t tell me our street gangs don’t have enough smarts and need somebody from Los Angeles to teach them how to make crack.”

Another theory for the relative scarcity of the drug here is that the Herrera family of Mexico, which authorities say controls much of the city’s drug trafficking, and local gang leaders have worked to keep crack out because they feared it would cut into their heroin and powdered cocaine business.

Risley and Brady discount that theory. They said they believe luck was the most significant factor in sparing Chicago.

“We’re lucky to be geographically placed in the center of the country,” Risley said. “This drug was introduced in the coastal areas first.”

He theorizes that because of the time lag between the time crack surfaced on the coasts and its appearance in the Midwest, people here had been made aware of crack’s dangers.

Risley credits the media’s quick and “maybe overdramatic” focus on the crack problem after it gripped New York and the cocaine-related death of University of Maryland basketball star Len Bias for slowing its spread in Chicago. Medical investigators said after Bias’ death that they suspected he had been using crack.

“There’s a lot of evidence that human beings will modify personal self-destructive habits after exposure to quality information,” Risley said. “We found early on in the going that some people were saying to drug dealers, ‘Do you have any of that Len Bias stuff?’

“These were the suicidal members of the drug-taking community, but it is evidence that they were aware of what was going on. Most drug takers are not suicidal.”

The police developed a crack task force immediately after they squashed the South Side crack ring. Brady said the special squad was not created because of concern over a rising crack problem, though. “It’s to try to ensure against an increase,” he said.

Sgt. Richard D. Irvin, state police narcotics supervisor for northern Indiana, said authorities in his area, which almost abuts southern Chicago, are similarly holding meetings to discuss ways to keep crack out of their area.

While the portion of Indiana closest to Chicago so far has been spared a large crack presence, the Ft. Wayne, Ind., area farther east has been plagued by crack dealers importing the drug from Detroit, he said.

Whatever the reasons, while other large cities--and some of Chicago’s suburbs--now are bracing themselves for the expected onslaught of other, newer drugs such as ice, a smokable form of methamphetamine, Chicago is yet to experience the full force of the last drug trend.

“Cities, regardless of how big or small, have different patterns of behavior,” Risley said. “Citizens of cities have different patterns of behavior. The assumption is false that what drugs people do in New York are going to become what drugs people do in Chicago or that what drug trends arise in Los Angeles are going to arise here in Chicago.”

Researcher Tracy Shryer contributed to this story.