Hispaniola to New York Streets: Immigrant Dreams Gone Awry : Narcotics: Would-be drug dealers take a deadly path between Dominican Republic and Washington Heights.

The streets of Washington Heights are not paved with gold--they teem with drugs and violence. But certain young men in the Dominican Republic, 1,600 miles away, will risk their lives to come here.

Their vision of the immigrant American Dream is to amass a fortune by selling drugs, primarily cocaine. Their violent ways overshadow the lives of thousands of Dominicans who hold legitimate jobs.

“They’re entrepreneurs and they’ll kill you just as soon as look at you if you walk on their turf,” said Detective Jerry Giorgio of the 34th Precinct, which covers the neighborhood at the northern end of Manhattan.

“These kids come here and find out how lucrative selling drugs can be. They send a message back down to the D.R.--you may not live past the age of 22, but you’ll live like a king.”

Over the last decade, Dominicans have established a thriving cocaine trade worth hundreds of millions of dollars annually, according to federal law enforcement officials.

After Dominicans expanded into heroin two years ago, the FBI formed a special investigative squad targeting Washington Heights.

“It’s the violence that brought us in to look at this,” said Charles Domroe, who oversees the squad. “The Colombians and the Asians are bigger traffickers, but none of them are as violent as the Dominicans. The drugs up there have destroyed whole neighborhoods and created so much fear.”

In 1983, there were fewer than 100,000 Dominicans in Washington Heights; now there are more than 350,000. Crime has risen sharply, especially since crack cocaine hit in 1985. Homicides in the “three-four” went from 57 in 1987 to 122 in 1991, topping every other precinct in the city. In 1992, there were 98--also the highest in New York.

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Since 1985, more than 400 young Dominicans from one town--San Francisco de Macoris--have been killed in the United States, most in drug-related murders in New York. To say nothing of the lives that have been ruined.

“Follow me,” said a painfully thin, Dominican-born woman named Maria. She walked up the steps of a once elegant brownstone and knocked at an apartment at the end of a dank hallway.

The door swung open. The silhouettes of three people could be seen slumped on couches in almost total darkness. A lamp with a bare bulb was hauled out to illuminate a tiny living room with a battered coffee table littered with crack paraphernalia.

“The more you smoke, the more you want,” said Maria, as she pulled out a knife and began cutting the crack on a mirror on the table. It was a little after 4:30 p.m.

As Maria heated the crack in a tiny metal pitcher, the two women and a man seated on shabby sofas watched in a polite stupor, as if she were preparing afternoon tea.

The room was quiet except for the hissing sound as Maria lit her pipe and passed it around. Most other like her turn to prostitution, she said, but not her--she cleans rooms for drug dealers in exchange for drugs.

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Dozens of Dominican Mafia-like family organizations control drug operations in the Heights, according to the FBI.

Drug dealers have taken over whole blocks, particularly at the southern and northern tips of the area, scaring people away from even using pay telephones. Cars are routinely double- and triple-parked on most streets, and salsa music blares night and day on expensive car stereo systems.

Young men stand in front of the buildings steering “clients” from cars with New Jersey, Connecticut and Pennsylvania license plates into apartments bare except for couches, tables and drug scales.

At $30 to $40 a gram, the cocaine in Washington Heights is a bargain, especially for out-of-state customers who might pay up to $20 more per gram where they live.

Police have had some success targeting the white suburbanites; more than 300 cars have been seized and 400 people arrested during periodic sweeps at the George Washington Bridge.

But stymied by a lack of cooperation from Heights residents, authorities have had less success in cracking down on violence and drug-dealing in the Heights itself.

“In a homicide investigation, nobody saw nothing,” said Giorgio, the detective.

Eddie, 24, a 10th-grade dropout and street-level drug dealer, works the area around 162nd Street and Broadway. He said he usually has a stash of about 200 grams of crack in the apartments he uses.

“You gotta be out here seven days a week to make money,” said Eddie, who did not want his Spanish name used. On a typical night he can make up to $1,000, he said, “It’s all about not getting caught. You just want to survive another day.”

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The words “ENVIOS DE DINERO” cover the windows of the dozens of travel agencies in the area, meaning they send money back to the Dominican Republic.

Much of the drug profits are sent back or reinvested in cocaine. Dominicans buy from the Colombians, acting as wholesale retailers, said the FBI’s Domroe.

Both street-level dealers and kingpins commute between the two countries, federal officials say. Unlike the immigrants of yore, many Dominicans dislike New York and sell drugs here in the hope of retiring as millionaires in their homeland.

Rafael, 20, a drug dealer who would not give his last name, stood on the corner of 163rd Street and Broadway one night, his eyes red from the effects of the same cocaine he sells.

He was dressed in a white linen blazer from the Gap, Calvin Klein jeans and Timberland shoes.

“It’s like a tropical Sicily,” Rafael said dreamily, describing his hometown. “You can do anything you want down there, go to the social clubs, go swimming, play pool, gamble. I just want to make enough money here to go home and never come back.”

Twenty-three-year-old James (Kiko) Garcia did return to the Dominican Republic permanently, although not in the way he planned.

Officials said Garcia was involved with drugs; his family and neighbors said he worked in a grocery store. In July, 1991, Garcia was killed by police, setting off six days of rioting in Washington Heights.

Garcia’s family took him home to bury him. Then they returned to New York.

When Regina Garcia, Kiko’s 59-year-old mother, lived in San Francisco de Macoris, she made about $10 per month cleaning rooms in a school. Now she makes $216 a week working in a factory in Hackensack, N.J., enough to rent a two-bedroom apartment with four other sons.

“I have to stay here,” she said, “because there’s no other way to support my family.”