AS BROADWAY CUTS UP through the Upper West Side of Manhattan and into Washington Heights, it gradually turns into a giant Caribbean bazaar. The avenue abounds with bodegas, farmacias, unisex beauty salons, bargain clothing outlets, restaurants serving pollo and platanos, and travel agencies offering bargains to the Dominican Republic. Women squeeze mangoes, children lick flavored ices, men play hard at dominoes, all to the accompaniment of a hundred different radios blaring salsa music. Long a magnet for immigrants, Washington Heights today is home to large colonies of Irish, Jews and, most numerous of all, Dominicans. As the ever-present crowds make their way up and down the street, the Heights seems a living embodiment of the American Dream - a vibrant, energetic urban melting pot.
Wander off Broadway, though, and the neighborhood quickly seems like an American nightmare. On side streets in the 150's and 160's, clusters of tough teen-agers wearing beepers, four-finger gold rings and $95 Nikes offer $3 vials of crack, the high-octane, smokable derivative of cocaine. On every block there are four or five different ''crews,'' or gangs, each touting its own brand of the drug, known to aficionados as ''Scotty'' (as in ''Beam me up''). Some blocks are ''hotter'' than others, depending on the availability of the crack. On the hottest blocks Scotty is available ''24/7'' - 24 hours a day, seven days a week. So much business is transacted on these streets that Washington Heights has gained a reputation as the crack capital of America.
How did it happen? How did a drug once confined to a handful of large-city neighborhoods make its way to Main Street in just a few short years? Much of the answer can be found in data generated by the Federal Government's unprecedented intelligence-gathering operation against crack. In 13 cities across the country, crack teams created over the last three years by the Justice Department are methodically tracking the importation, distribution and consumption of the drug. In New York, the United States Drug Enforcement Administration (D.E.A.) operates a special Unified Intelligence Division staffed by experts from a dozen agencies, including the F.B.I., the I.R.S., Customs, Immigration and the local police department. Twenty-four hours a day, the information pours in - from wiretaps and surveillance teams, witnesses and informants, police raids and drug busts. By combining this data with testimony from D.E.A. agents, police captains, sociologists, undercover agents, community leaders, criminologists, prosecutors, addicts and treatment experts, it is possible to trace crack's destructive sprint across America.
WASHINGTON HEIGHTS HAS COME NATU-rally by its status as the nation's crack capital. It would be difficult to design a better location for marketing a new drug. First, the area is highly accessible. To the west, the George Washington Bridge brings in potential customers from New Jersey; to the north the Henry Hudson Parkway pulls them in from Westchester County. For residents of Passaic or Peekskill who want a quick high, the Heights offers easy-in, easy-out convenience. By all accounts, Washington Heights transacts more out-of-town drug deals than any other neighborhood in New York City.
The neighborhood itself provides a substantial pool of users. For every newcomer who has made it as a shopkeeper on Broadway, there are others who have dropped out of school, had a child out of marriage, become permanently unemployed -likely candidates for drug use. Here, as throughout the country, crack does best where Americans -especially minorities - do worst.
Finally, Washington Heights is home to New York's most enterprising drug dealers. No, they are not Colombians. Although most people associate Colombians with cocaine and crack - especially now that open warfare has broken out between the drug lords and the Government in Bogota - Colombians are not generally involved in the retailing of crack in the United States. They just produce cocaine in South America and smuggle it into the United States. The Colombians living in New York are too few in number and too insular to have the array of contacts necessary to move drugs on the street.
The Dominicans, New York's fastest-growing immigrant group, do have such contacts. They also have the marketing talent. Crack dealing, like more legitimate lines of work, requires the ability to exercise quality control, hire a dependable workforce and develop a steady clientele. At all of this, the Dominicans (only a small percentage of whom are involved in the drug trade) have had a lot of experience. In the Caribbean, they are known as merchants and tradesmen. In New York, they have applied their savvy to become highly successful shopkeepers - and the city's top crack traffickers.
ALTHOUGH CRACK'S ORIGINS RE-main obscure - no one really knows who invented it - the Dominicans are generally credited with having first developed it for a mass market. The breakthrough seems to have come about by accident, an improvised response to shifting consumer tastes. Until 1983, cocaine was used almost exclusively in powder form (known as cocaine hydrochloride). Extremely expensive, the drug was often consumed at parties and discos, where it was sprinkled on mirrors and snorted - usually through a high-denomination bill.
Gradually, though, many snorters, seeking a more intense high, turned to freebasing. This involved treating cocaine powder with ether and reducing it to a crystalline base, which, when smoked, produced a sharp, pleasurable rush. Unfortunately, freebasing was complicated and messy, the subject of instruction booklets running on for many pages. It was dangerous, too, risking explosions like the one that hospitalized the comedian Richard Pryor. To avoid the hassle, customers began demanding that their dealers convert the powder to freebase in advance.
This presented dealers with a dilemma. For, when cocaine is converted to freebase, it loses much of its weight. If they wanted to sell ready-made freebase at popular prices, dealers would have to absorb the loss - unless they could find an undetectable filler .
The search was on. One researcher who observed it was Terry Williams, a sociologist at the City University of New York who in 1982 began hanging out with a teen-age cocaine gang in Washington Heights. Williams, who recounts his experiences in a recently published book, ''The Cocaine Kids,'' recalls that the local Dominican gangs ''came up with something called 'comeback,' '' a chemical adulterant akin to lidocaine, a prescription anesthetic. ''When comeback is blended with cocaine powder and cooked, all of it remains in the mix,'' Williams explains. ''This became the first chemical that you could cut freebase with.'' The result was the prototype for crack.
Take two ounces cocaine hydrochloride. Mix with two ounces comeback and one ounce Arm & Hammer. Add water. Bring to a boil. Let cool into a solid mass. Break into small pieces. Smoke. Intense rush should follow instantly. Serves 2,000.
Before long, Dominican dealers were out on the streets of Washington Heights peddling the new substance in pellet form at a few dollars a pop. (The name came from the crackling sound the drug made when smoked.) The ''champagne'' of drugs, once limited to the elite, was now available - somewhat diluted - to drifters and dropouts, welfare mothers and unemployed youths. Dealers set up shop across the street from schools, enticing teen-agers with free samples. They also offered two-for-one deals and ''Mother's Day'' specials timed to coincide with the arrival of welfare checks. Soon, customers were seeking out dealers rather than the other way around, helping establish Washington Heights as America's first major crack market.
The Dominicans then began fanning southward into Harlem and eastward into the South Bronx. They also began supplying cocaine to other ethnic groups. In Harlem, in South Jamaica, Queens, in the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Bushwick and Brownsville, poor young blacks - jobless, uneducated and desperate - hungered for a piece of the ''crazy money'' crack offered. To get started, it took as little as an ounce of cocaine, an investment of perhaps $1,000.
Obtaining it was not much of a problem. By the mid-1980's, cocaine was arriving in New York by the ton. Importation was controlled by the Cali Cartel, Colombia's second-largest syndicate, after the Medellin Cartel. Desperate to unload their supplies, the Colombians found dependable customers in the Dominicans of Washington Heights. The two groups got along well, joined not only by a common language but also by similar entrepreneurial values. The Dominicans became New York's chief middlemen. As sales boomed to aspiring young dealers outside Washington Heights, the city was eventually carved up along ethnic lines, with Dominican-supplied blacks controlling Harlem, Queens and Brooklyn, and the Dominicans dominant in upper Manhattan and the South Bronx.
FROM THE START, CRACK'S DISTRI-bution system distinguished it from all other drugs. Heroin, for instance, was highly centralized. From poppy cultivation to street sales, the trade was dominated by a single organization - the Mafia, which, though ruthless, imposed a certain order on the trade. Gang wars were rare, and police officers were never fired upon. Because distribution was so tightly controlled, it was possible, with diligent police work, to put an entire network out of business, as occurred in the French Connection case.
If heroin was the Fortune 500, crack was Mom and Pop. A typical crack organization would have no more than seven or eight people - a street seller or two, a steerer to direct customers, a guard to protect the merchandise, a police lookout, a weigher (known as a ''scale boy''), a manager and a ''Mr. Big'' to count the profits. Competition was intense. In busy areas like Washington Heights, one block might host four or five crews, all contending for the same consumer dollar.
With no overall hierarchy or command structure to impose order, turf wars broke out over the most lucrative spots. Dealers regularly ripped off customers and stole from one another, leading to frequent shootouts, stabbings and executions. Crack created a new breed of urban guerrilla, members of a fierce, proliferating army that left the police badly outnumbered and outgunned.
By late 1985, when crack first came to the attention of the national press, it was deeply entrenched in New York's poor neighborhoods. In the rest of the country, only two cities - Los Angeles and Miami - had comparable crack problems. All three cities were major distribution points for cocaine, so it was natural that crack would engulf them first. Soon, however, the drug began to move out from these gateway cities and into the heartland. It would travel via a fearsome new set of traffickers - illegal immigrants from Jamaica - who would quickly and radically transform the way crack was distributed around the country.
DELROY EDWARDS GREW up poor in the tough, stifling shantytowns of Kingston, Jamaica. In 1980, at the age of 20, he went to work as a street enforcer for the Jamaica Labor Party of Edward Seaga. Seaga was locked in a bitter election duel with the People's National Party, headed by Michael Manley, and each side was forming armed gangs to intimidate the other. The gangs did their job only too well, killing 800 people by election day. After his victory, Seaga launched a crackdown, and many gang members, feeling the heat, headed for the United States. Among them was Delroy Edwards. Slipping into Brooklyn on a tourist visa, he eventually made his way into the marijuana business, selling nickel bags out of a neighborhood storefront.
At the beginning of 1985, Edwards learned to make crack. Soon he was selling little else. He worked out of two ''flagship'' spots in Brooklyn - one, a two-story house, the other, an abandoned brownstone near a housing project. Enough poor blacks coughed up enough $5 bills to enable Edwards to buy a $150,000 home on Long Island - and to pay for it in cash.
That wasn't enough for Edwards, who began looking to expand his business. Unfortunately, New York was already crowded with crack dealers; outside the city, however, lay plenty of virgin territory. In Washington, Baltimore and Philadelphia, for instance, crack was just beginning to catch on. Enterprising local dealers would travel to New York, buy a few ounces of cocaine, return home, convert it into crack, and sell the product for three or four times the New York street price. In the fall of 1986, Edwards traveled to Washington and set up shop; by the following spring his lieutenants had established thriving businesses in Philadelphia and Baltimore as well. At its peak, Edwards's organization, known as the Rankers, employed 50 workers and made up to $100,000 a day.
The glory days did not last. Edwards - nicknamed ''Uzi'' for his taste in weapons -was pathologically violent. People who crossed him were pistol-whipped, beaten with baseball bats, shot in the legs. One 16-year-old worker, suspected of cheating, was beaten unconscious with bats, scalded with boiling water, and suspended by a chain from the ceiling until he died. Eventually, the police caught up with Edwards, and in July a Brooklyn jury convicted him on 42 counts of murder, assault, kidnapping and drug dealing. Edwards is now awaiting sentencing. The Rankers have disintegrated.
But there are 40 other groups just like the Rankers, running crack out of New York and Miami to points across the country. Posses, they're called, after their members' affection for American westerns (and the guns used in them). Most, like the Rankers, took shape as gangs during the 1980 Jamaican election, then fled to the United States and regrouped. Here, their 10,000 to 20,000 members, organized in posses with as few as 25 members and as many as several hundred, keep incessantly on the move, slipping in and out of the many Jamaican communities scattered across the country. To maintain loyalty, each posse generally restricts membership to the residents of a particular neighborhood in Kingston. Posse members travel with fake IDs, making it tough for policemen to identify them. Sometimes, as a cover, they attach themselves to reggae groups touring the country. Today, Jamaicans are believed to control 35 percent to 40 percent of the nation's crack network.
''They're very good businessmen,'' says John A. O'Brien, an agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (B.A.T.F.), the Federal agency that most closely monitors the posses. ''They follow the law of supply and demand. When they see that a vial of crack selling for $5 in New York will get $15 in Kansas City, they'll move in.'' New York is their ''training school,'' O'Brien says, ''like going to Wharton. They'll take a guy doing a good job in Harlem and send him to open an office in the Midwest.'' On his arrival in the new area, the posse sales rep will rent a motel room and conduct a market survey of sorts to determine the most lucrative spot in town. Then he'll rent an apartment or, better yet, get a single female to lend him one in return for crack.
When asked how the posses move the drug from city to city, Bill McMullan, the assistant special agent in charge of the D.E.A.'s Washington office, jokingly cites the title of a recent movie: ''Planes, Trains and Automobiles.'' Amtrak, Greyhound, commercial airlines, Federal Express, U.P.S. - the posses use them all, regularly.
To carry cocaine on commercial flights, the Jamaicans tend to recruit overweight women able to conceal one- or two-pound packages on their person. Also popular are rental cars, preferably Volvos, sent over the nation's highways, preferably Interstates. ''When I see some of the places the posses are operating, I can't find any other explanation than the presence of a nearby Interstate,'' says Stephen Higgins, the B.A.T.F.'s director in Washington.
In deciding where to strike, the Jamaicans generally follow the path of least resistance. Cities with well-organized criminal groups, such as Newark, St. Louis and Chicago, tend to get bypassed. At first glance, Chicago would seem to be an ideal posse target. It is a major transportation hub, has a vast inner-city population and offers block upon block of public housing projects, a favorite crack target. But Chicago also has plenty of established homegrown gangs doing a brisk business in cocaine and heroin. Intent on protecting their trade, they have worked determinedly to keep outside traffickers from entering. ''When crack first appeared, some groups did try to come here and stake out some territory, but they quickly left,' '' says Vincent Lang, chairman of the Chicago Housing Authority. ''They wanted to remain alive.'' Today Chicago is awash in powder cocaine, but crack is very hard to find. Perhaps wary of the anarchic market forces crack has unleashed elsewhere, local dealers have opted out of selling it themselves.
In other cities, dealers tend to be too weak and disorganized to stand up to the posses and their tactics. The Jamaicans are fanatics for weapons. Taking advantage of lax gun laws in Texas, Florida and Virginia, they have stockpiled Uzis and AR-13 assault rifles. When breaking into a new area, the Jamaicans come in with all barrels blazing. ''One cause of the violence we're seeing in many cities is Jamaican traffickers pushing out American blacks,'' says Jonny Frank, a prosecutor in the Delroy Edwards case.
According to the B.A.T.F., the posses have been responsible for approximately 1,000 murders since 1985. Washington, Philadelphia, Dallas, Houston, Kansas City, Denver - all have suffered Jamaican invasions. In New York, the posses have succeeded in taking over much of Brooklyn and Harlem, establishing themselves as the city's second largest traffickers, after the Dominicans.
Many smaller cities have been hit, too. New York-based posses have set up a thriving operation in Hartford, shipping their merchandise there via bus and train. In New York State, the Jamaicans are moving crack up Interstate 87, hitting such tiny Hudson Valley towns as Newburgh, Kingston and Saratoga Springs. In West Virginia, the posses have established crack houses in Martinsburg (population 13,000) and Charles Town (3,000). From there they have moved out along Interstate 81, shipping crack as far north as Chambersburg, Pa., and as far south as Roanoke, Va.
Roanoke! It would be hard to imagine a more unlikely setting for crack. A town of only 90,000, Roanoke is nestled in the heart of Virginia's dairy and orchard country, several hours' drive from the nearest city. Yet members of the Shower posse, the largest in the country, have managed to find their way there from New York.
On closer examination, though, the presence of crack in Roanoke is really not so surprising. Even towns with Norman Rockwell-like reputations have pockets of alienation and despair, open sores in which crack can take hold and fester. Roanoke has its own modest ghetto, beset by the same social ills afflicting larger cities. ''We have a sizable minority community, and that's where the Jamaicans set up,'' observes Tom Bondurant, an assistant United States attorney in Roanoke. Demand was obviously high: crack was selling for $25 to $30 a vial - more than enough to catch the attention of big-city traffickers.
Roanoke's case is typical. Across the country, crack has displayed remarkable consistency, taking root in those sectors of society least able to resist it. In places like Charles Town, Newburgh, and even Fort Wayne, Ind., crack has found a foothold among poor blacks and - to a far lesser degree - Hispanics.
Will it stay that way? Or will crack break out like some threatening contagion into the middle-class population, white and black? In some places, it already has. In Washington - the city with the nation's highest rate of drug-related violence -crack has leaped across the city lines into the middle-class suburbs of Maryland and Virginia. Until June 1988, for instance, crack was virtually unknown in Howard County, a tranquil, middle-class area midway between Washington and Baltimore; today the drug is being distributed in 20 locations, including some attractive town houses.
TodAY'S REALITY, meanwhile, is most visible in Kansas City, Mo. A year ago, the city was declaring victory in the war on crack. A Federal organized-crime task force had succeeded in dismantling a thriving crack operation run by the Waterhouse posse. Working out of a fortresslike house in the heart of the inner city, the Jamaicans had employed an estimated 1,000 people at one point. Demand was so great that the posse had had to import Jamaicans from New York and Miami. This proved to be its undoing. The new workers felt little loyalty to the group, and, when arrested, tended to talk, providing the task force with invaluable information. In late 1986, the Feds struck, raiding ghetto crack houses and rounding up dealers. Eventually, 178 traffickers were prosecuted and 25 more deported. By the start of 1987, no more than 75 posse members remained in town. Across the nation, Kansas City was hailed as a stunning success story.
Los Angeles's black street gangs are the fastest-growing set of crack traffickers in the country. Already they have established a national network second only to that of the posses. They are grouped into confederations known as the Bloods and the Crips, each with its own color (blue for Crips, red for Bloods), slang and hand signals. Fiercely territorial, the gangs have traditionally concentrated on fighting one another over impoverished patches of south-central Los Angeles.
Crack has changed that. Sensing the enormous profit potential in the drug, the Bloods and the Crips are now paying less attention to one another and more to transporting crack. Today, more than 10,000 gang members are at work in some 50 cities from Seattle to Baltimore. Generally, they emulate the tactics of the posses, infiltrating black communities by working through local contacts. So far, the gangs and the posses have avoided fighting one another. In fact, they seem to be dividing up the country between them -the gangs working eastward from California, the posses westward from New York. The two national networks are gradually crisscrossing - with devastating consequences for towns caught in the middle.
Indeed, even if the posses and L.A. gangs were somehow tamed - an extremely unlikely prospect - there are plenty of other groups ready to take their place. Both Cubans and Guyanese have established fledgling interstate operations, while Haitian traffickers based in Fort Pierce, Fla., are transporting crack along the East Coast, via migrant farm workers. In Miami, Detroit and countless smaller cities across the country, local black rings are at work, looking intently for opportunities to expand.
Stutman cites a Dominican organization in Washington Heights that, in three short years, went from being street-corner peddlers to becoming a multitier conglomerate selling more than 10,000 vials of crack a day. The group was so well organized that it marketed its crack under a brand name (''Based Balls''). Such practices eventually attracted the attention of the D.E.A., which, after an intensive investigation, put the group out of business.
Unfortunately, the D.E.A.'s efforts had little effect on the supply of crack in New York - the usual outcome of law-enforcement action aimed at the drug. No matter how determined the effort to root it out, crack seems always to thrive. That has been the experience in Kansas City. In Brooklyn, crack continues to sell for $3 a vial despite the prosecution of Delroy Edwards. In Washington, the police recently seized Rayful Edmond 3d, allegedly the city's largest dealer, but crack remains available in 120 locations throughout town. ''Right after we locked up Edmond, the homicide rate slowed down for a while,'' says Collin Younger, commander of the narcotics branch of the D.C. police. ''Now it's beginning to pick up again as other dealers fight over his territory.'' Crack is getting so plentiful in the District of Columbia that Younger expects the price to drop any day now.
As if crack weren't enough to contend with, a new drug has recently appeared on the horizon. Called ice, it is a smokable version of methamphetamine, or speed. It creates a high that lasts for up to 24 hours, compared with crack's 20-minute high, followed by a ''crash'' so severe that it can resemble paranoid schizophrenia.
President Bush's anti-drug strategy, unveiled on Sept. 5, calls for a heavy reliance on police and prosecutors. Fully 70 percent of its projected $7.9 billion spending will go for law enforcement, including $1.6 billion for new prisons and $3.1 billion for state and local police. The remaining 30 percent will go toward treatment, prevention and education.
Judging from the record of the police to date, though, the Bush plan seems unlikely to make any real dent in the amount of crack on the streets. A sense of resignation is settling over America's drug agents. More and more of them are beginning to sound like Francis Hall. For four years, until his retirement in March, Hall served as commanding officer of the New York Police Department's narcotics division, making him, in effect, New York's top narc. Hall helped design the Tactical Narcotics Teams (T.N.T.) -the special police units that carry out sweeps through drug-infested neighborhoods - that today are the city's principal weapon in the fight against drugs.
The Vietnam analogy might be taken a step further. The Vietcong grew largely because of the social, political and economic breakdown engulfing Vietnam. No matter how much firepower the United States expended, the guerrillas always managed to regroup, nurtured by the poverty and injustice around them. Much the same is true of crack in America. No matter how many sweeps, raids and busts our police departments mount against crack traffickers, they always manage to resurface. Only when we address the conditions that have given rise to crack - the desperation of our inner cities - will we begin to see the light at the end of the tunnel.
Michael Massing, a New York writer, is a 1989 Alicia Patterson Fellow.