‘Crack Family’ Cited in Warning That Drug Trade Uses Children

The policemen raced up the subway station stairs, looking for two men who had robbed a passenger at knifepoint. They ran into the park and almost bumped into a girl holding out a plastic bag of crack.

“Her jaw dropped,” said Officer William Smith. “And my jaw dropped.”

She was just a child, all baby face and wide eyes. Then she opened her mouth.

“She called us every name you can think of,” Smith said.

Jeanette, at 12, was carrying a beeper and 20 vials of crack. Twelve days before Christmas, in the middle of Herald Square, she became one of three dozen boys and girls her age arrested last year on felony narcotics charges.

Jeanette was not the first in her family arrested in connection with crack. A year earlier, her mother, known on the street as Miss Candy, was arrested at the same spot; police said they found 430 vials of crack inside her brassiere.

Now, they say, she has someone else to hold her wares: her children.

Jeanette--the Associated Press agreed to a judge’s request not to divulge her last name in return for access to Family Court hearings--turned heads in the prosecutor’s office. But more and more children are entering the lower levels of the cocaine business as touts, lookouts, runners, holders and dealers.

In the first 10 months of 1989, New York City police officers arrested 1,330 children 15 and younger on felony narcotics charges, a 20% increase over 1988 and a 530% increase over 1983, when the crack epidemic was just beginning.

Nationally, according to the FBI, arrests of children 16 and younger for dealing in cocaine or heroin have risen 900% in five years.

To a drug dealer, a child can seem the perfect employee: inconspicuous, loyal and--perhaps their chief attraction--almost immune from the law.

Children are often overlooked by officers who cannot believe that the kid in braids on the corner is a drug courier. If arrested, children go free faster than adults; if convicted, they are less seriously punished. In one crucial sense, children are more reliable: They are less likely than older teen-agers to use crack.

The kids are rewarded with danger, long hours and irregular wages. Terry Williams, a sociologist who has studied the crack trade in New York, says that big payoffs are a myth; children are attracted, he said, because legitimate opportunities are so limited.

The crack kids don’t get rich; they just get hard.

“When you read ’12 years old’ in a newspaper, that sounds young,” said Officer Thomas McHale, who patrols the area where Jeanette was arrested. “But these kids are 30-year-olds.”

Jeanette’s mother says she was herself a crack addict. She does not admit to dealing but says that “in the world of survival, anything is possible. . . . I’ve had to do a lot of things in my life to make ends meet.”

She is a big woman--almost 6 feet tall, well over 200 pounds. Her hair is pulled back in a neat bun. In conversation, she is articulate, forceful and intelligent.

Jeanette is hefty, too. She has smooth chocolate-colored skin, large brown eyes and short, curly brown hair. At a recent court appearance, one tuft protruded from under her knit hat, sticking out over her forehead.

Her lawyer, a young public defender, rejected requests for an interview with Jeanette, who was found guilty of crack possession and faces confinement in an institution for up to 18 months.

Her mother told the family’s story.

The mother was born 34 years ago in Harlem. Her own mother wasn’t around much, so her father placed the children in foster care. She had her first child when she was 15. A year later, she married a man who was not the child’s father. They had four children but were divorced after he infected her with a venereal disease and she caught him with another woman.

Besides Jeanette, her children are Keesha, 18, who has one child and is expecting another; Edward, 16, who has been arrested several times on drug-selling charges; Jalanda, 11, who has stayed out of trouble, and Rasheen, 10, who has one robbery arrest.

About five years ago, the family was evicted from a Brooklyn housing complex for not paying the rent. They wound up at the Martinique Hotel, the city’s most notorious welfare hotel.

The Martinique, built in 1897, was a massive essay in French Renaissance elegance. By the time the family moved in, it was an urban refugee camp. Roaches roamed the rooms; pimps, pushers and muggers roamed the hallways.

The children of the Martinique literally played in traffic. Some imitated drug dealers in their games. Some went further.

“Children never recover from an environment like that,” the mother said. “My kids sort of went astray. . . . Jeanette got in with a bad crowd at the hotel.”

The family was crammed into two rooms. Outside, the only place to gather was Greeley Park, a concrete and asphalt triangle in the middle of bustling Herald Square.

On Aug. 6, 1988, the mother said, she was sitting on a bench with her boyfriend, handing out bags of potato chips to neighborhood children. The four officers who arrested and searched her found a black zippered pouch in her bra, crammed with 430 vials of crack.

Despite the amount of crack seized, charges were dropped. The office of the city’s special narcotics prosecutor recalls a flood of drug arrests that summer, and the case was bounced to four different lawyers. It eventually was dismissed because of a state law requiring speedy trials.

In December, 1988, the city moved the family to a seven-room apartment in a housing development in Queens, a few blocks from the beach. Ten months later, the family was in trouble again; the mother placed Jeanette, Jalanda and Rasheen with the city’s Department of Special Services for Children, which turned them over to a foster-care agency.

The mother said she was too ill to care for the children and went to South Carolina to stay with a relative. The special services department said that state law prevents it from saying anything about people in its care.

Twice, the foster-care agency sent the three children to a former estate north of the city where it cares for abused and neglected children. Twice, Jeanette ran away. When placed in a group home in Brooklyn, she ran away again. The agency gave her back to the Special Services for Children Department on Oct. 29.

Jeanette says she lived with a friend’s family in Brooklyn for more than a month because her mother was still in South Carolina. The mother says that the special services department never told her Jeanette had left its care, a charge to which the agency cannot respond. So it is not clear who, if anyone, was caring for Jeanette when she was arrested at 9:50 p.m. on Dec. 13 in Greeley Park.

At a hearing in Family Court, Jeanette admitted that she had had a bag with crack that night but said it was given to her by a neighborhood boy named Sean. “He didn’t say (what was in) the bag. He just asked me to take it to Brooklyn for him.”

The judge who convicted Jeanette described her story as “incredible.” Smith says he saw Jeanette near the park about 10 days after her arrest--at 1:30 in the morning. “She just smiled at me and said hello. I didn’t know what to say.”

The mother blames the Martinique period for Jeanette’s run-ins with the law and, notwithstanding the girl’s arrest, maintains that her daughter has been better behaved since the family moved. She says Jeanette regularly attends junior high school, where she does well in reading but needs work in math. Other than that, she stays home and helps care for the younger children.

“Jeanette loves the house,” the mother said. “She doesn’t like to jump, to go out . . . . She loves singing. She’s always wanted to write rap music.”

The mother was standing on the street, next to her boyfriend’s car. As she spoke, Jeanette looked on silently, occasionally nodding in agreement. Finally, bored, she slapped a cassette into the car tape deck, closed her eyes and moved to the rhythms of rap.

When police officers are told the mother’s story, they laugh.

“She’s running the park”--controlling crack sales there, McHale said. He said he had not seen her at night in several months but was told she now has youngsters, including some of her own, doing most of the street dealing.

The family members continue to visit Herald Square, even though they now live almost an hour’s subway ride away, even though they complain of police harassment.

The mother said they return because they know the shops and the people; Smith says it’s because “they know the neighborhood and the customers. That’s their turf.”