Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bro (10 page)

In June 1987, the Drug Enforcement Administration, in conjunction with the New York Police Drug Task Force, brought the Torres brothers down. Boy George moved swiftly. Instead of delivering $65,000 to his connection, he set up a processing mill. He bought heroin, mannitol (a dilutant), a glass table, six chairs, a triple-beam scale, and glassine envelopes. Then George, Miranda and a friend, Rascal and one of Rascal’s girlfriends, and an older Jamaican man named 10-4 gathered around the table and settled in. The next day, 166th and Washington reopened for business with Boy George’s new brand. He named his heroin Obsession. The Obsession logo, stamped on the glassines in red ink, was a miniature king’s crown.

10-4 handled the administrative details of the expanding operation, including payroll and personnel. George had met 10-4 during his tenure with a brand called Checkmate. 10-4 drove a livery cab. Before hooking up with George, he had shuttled another well-known Bronx drug dealer on his rounds. Drug dealers often used cabs to make deliveries because livery cabs—a common mode of transportation in the ghetto—were less conspicuous than pricey cars. George had been one of 10-4’s biggest tippers. 10-4’s war stories impressed George, and whenever he needed a cab, he requested him; 10-4 was his dispatcher code. Sometimes George kept 10-4 on hold for days. 10-4 worked the relationship. A seasoned hustler, he supplemented his income running welfare schemes. Before driving cabs, he’d been fired from the post office for stealing envelopes with donations to religious charities. 10-4 had a knack for helping Boy George with what he needed—phony guarantors for leasing cars; friends in real estate who’d rent apartments under other people’s names, to be used for mills; fraudulent business certificates. It was 10-4 who bought Boy George his stamp for Obsession. Shortly after George launched the brand, 10-4 became the organization’s right-hand man.

Business grew steadily. Boy George and Joey Navedo stayed in touch. George appreciated that Joey treated him as a peer. Joey provided an introduction to a contact for weapons; he also lured a buyer for some low-quality heroin George needed to unload. Joey even escorted the man to the meeting place, the Baychester Diner, and oversaw the exchange himself. To have found a friend and business ally in the man who had given him his street name seemed to Boy George an auspicious sign.

But Joey Navedo’s generosity extended in both directions: for years,
he’d been moonlighting as a confidential informant, filing reports with the New York Drug Enforcement Task Force and the DEA. Perhaps Joey’s flamboyant disregard for the law had something to do with his confidence in his usefulness to investigators, which granted him a measure of immunity. Duplicity was a taxing fact of ghetto life. The high expectation of betrayal raised the premium on loyalty.

By the time George met Jessica, in 1988, he owned five selling locations and was the youngest major-league heroin dealer in the South Bronx. Obsession ranked as one of the market’s most popular brands. He parked a Ferrari, a Lamborghini, a Bentley, and a Porsche in his garages. Through a phony business of 10-4’s called Tuxedo Enterprises, George leased a stable of Jettas, Maximas, and other cars for daily use. James Bond, one of George’s heroes, inspired the $50,000 worth of special features added to the 190 Mercedes in which he’d taken Jessica on their first date: radar detectors manned the car’s front and rear; the license plate slid into a side compartment and a strobe light blinded anyone following him; secret compartments in the door panels and the floor hid weapons and suspicious amounts of cash. One device gushed gobs of oil from the tail, while a hidden switch flipped a box in the trunk that sprayed nail-like tacks.

Meanwhile, the case file for Obsession was growing thick.

During the eighties, a good amount of the heroin on the New York market was controlled by bosses of Chinese social associations known as tongs. The dope traveled through gangs like the Flying Dragons, to which one of George’s suppliers belonged. Drug dealers at Boy George’s level usually purchased their bulk heroin from middlemen, who controlled quality and flow and marked up the price of their dope 30 to 50 percent. Low-quality heroin, or a lengthy dry spell, damaged the brand, but street dealers had to accept what they could get. The potency of the dope weakened the further it moved down the line.

Relationships with direct sources were nearly impossible for dealers like George to acquire because preventing such connections was crucial to the middlemen’s livelihood. But like so much about the drug trade, the game as it was imagined by nonparticipants and described in the press sounded far more organized and sophisticated than what really happened on the street. Dealers made dumb mistakes. Employees overslept. Lookouts watched for girls instead of for undercover cops. Lots of people worked drearily long hours and barely scraped by. Some boys spent down a day’s wages on junk food for themselves and their friends. Other workers
smoked up their earnings or took an advance on the product and never climbed out of debt. The business earned its reputation for violence, but plenty of people went down for foolish mistakes and capriciousness. For most, living large remained a fantasy. Those who did well in the trade—who survived it and had something to show for it later—tended to be not only ruthless and calculating but lucky. For a time, George was all three.

In April 1988, George’s supply underwent a dry spell; he urged 10-4 to keep trying to reach one of his Chinese sources, a guy named Ryan, but Ryan and his people were looking for dope as well. During this time, a young Puerto Rican named Dave introduced George to a man named Pirate, who Dave claimed could help George out. George invited the Chinese in on the deal, and each contributed $300,000 for the much-needed heroin. Boys from both crews surrounded the duplex where the exchange had been scheduled, heavily armed in case something went wrong. And then something did go wrong: Pirate entered the building with the money, but then snuck out an unknown rear exit. Who was double-crossing whom wasn’t initially clear, and the situation could have quickly turned into a massacre. But George managed the delicate situation professionally: he reimbursed the Chinese their $300,000 and absorbed his own loss; he should have cased the building himself before the deal went down. “Excuses are for assholes,” he often said.

According to Rascal, George drove Dave to the Henry Hudson Parkway, where he made him kneel, then shot him in the head; George told Rascal that if he hadn’t gone after Dave, the Chinese would have gone after him. Rascal also claimed that George hired a man named Taz to take care of Pirate, and that soon afterward, Pirate disappeared. George’s quick response to the slipup cleared the way for direct dealings with the Chinese connection.

George himself had no patience for overdue accounts: “Don’t fall for tricks, about ‘Oh, I’ll see you tomorrow, blasé blasé blasé,’ when you are dealing with someone who owes me money. You say, ‘Listen, homie, I want to eat today. So I’m not going to wait to tomorrow to eat. I want to eat right now. I’m hungry. Pay up, dude. That’s it.’ ”

George and the Chinese source, whom he privately called Fried Rice, conducted their business efficiently, scheduling their meetings in the parking lots at Kennedy Airport, on various corners in midtown Manhattan, and in commercial neighborhoods all over Queens. Once the routine was established, Boy George delegated the responsibility to his friend Rascal and another boy who worked for him named Danny. Rascal and Danny were supervised by 10-4.

Rascal and Danny collected the bricks from the source. The bricks were the size of the small boxes of soap from the vending machines at a Laundromat. 10-4 followed twenty or so minutes later with the cash. Or the cash went first, and 10-4 awaited the drop. He once collected in a booth at an International House of Pancakes. Over the telephone, they referred to the bricks as “girls,” as in “How many girls do you need?” The $100,000 girls brought back $240,000.

Bricks of heroin were diluted and packaged for retail sale at the mills. Renting a dealer a room for a mill was a better way to make money than renting out your apartment as a stash house: the risk was high but temporary. George rented apartments, or rooms of apartments belonging to his employees, their mothers, girlfriends, or friends. Mills lasted from a week to several months, and the workers moved along if the apartment got hot. Heat usually came from too much human traffic, or from the fumes, which might draw a neighbor’s attention and—if bribery or threats didn’t work—the police.

George’s mills were heavily armed. Robbers worried George. Mills were an obvious source of cash, and robbing drug dealers had become its own lucrative business; dealers rarely reported their troubles to police. At one point, after an attempted robbery at a mill on 213th Street, George briefly relocated to the Manhattan Marriott Marquis.

At first, Boy George had paid someone $50 to deliver the heroin to his store, or spot. Now, delivering the dope to his block managers was a full-time job. Rascal and Danny fed the stores. By this time, George ran five: 166th and Washington, where he had gotten his start; 122nd and Second Avenue; the block-long abandoned building on 139th and Brook; 153rd–156th and Courtlandt, a playground in a public housing development; and 651 Southern Boulevard, better known as St. John’s. George, respecting local custom, closed the spots while children walked to and from the school nearby.

Spot managers broke the milled bricks into smaller bundles, and dealers stored them where they could—in mailboxes, under the wheels of parked cars, inside baby strollers, or wrapped in a diaper in a girl’s baby bag. The severity of criminal charges depended upon the weight of the drugs one carried, so no one wanted to work around bulk. Accordingly, the lookout carried nothing but information. The steerer brought the customer to the dealer. The dealer took the money. Another steerer sent the customer to a pitcher, who delivered the glassines.

The managers also stored the bricks at a main stash house, usually an apartment or rented room. Ideally, a manager wanted access to several
empty apartments within one building to split the stock and the risk. Some managers paid a building super for an empty or illegal unit or bought temporary access from a tenant who’d moved. Some covered the rent for a single mom and threw in milk and cereal money for the kids. If the tenant used drugs, managers could take over the place for little more than a handful of glassines of heroin or vials of crack. Some managers bullied their way into the apartments of former girlfriends—whom they called project holes—and refused to move out.

Profits varied by location: Washington Avenue and Courtlandt and 122nd each generated $40,000 daily; $150,000 was normal for St. John’s. George explained that it was “in the right place—good, good junkies, good access of all kinds.” Good access meant right in the ghetto, but also right by an exit off the Bruckner Expressway, which made it easy for suburban commuters to pull in, buy their drugs, and get out again. The squalid residential building was in Hunts Point on a stretch that law-enforcement officers called the Westchester Strip. Cars idled three deep, and the constant clog of traffic made surprise visits by the cops almost impossible. Four lookouts were stationed on the sidewalk outside the building; others perched on nearby fire escapes. Two runners steered the long lines of pedestrians into the building; you didn’t stop at #1C unless you wanted some of what Boy George’s people sold. Cement framed the apartment’s thick metal door. Behind the hole in the door stood a pitcher, who handed out Obsession glassines.

Red, yellow, and green bulbs flashed from a homemade panel nailed to the floor. Upstairs, in another apartment, the dealer placed the tiny bags of heroin on a makeshift dumbwaiter and sent them down. The pitcher could only escape the first-floor apartment by going up: he was locked in during the shift, and sheet metal, pipes, and bars barricaded all the windows. Boy George briefed the pitcher. He didn’t speak loudly, but he explained the rules only once: “If I look out the window and I could see a cop, I give it the yellow switch. You see it, and you slow down. If there’s no movement in the upstairs apartment—no signals coming—you know something’s up and you bum rush. Bum rush. If I hit the red switch, pack everything up, get in the dumbwaiter, and go. Green’s green, dude. The material come down and the money go up. That’s all you need to know, ready? Breakfast or lunch or dinner? We’ll send a runner for a hero and one of those big, big Cokes.”

At the end of the day, the manager deducted his 10 or 20 percent of the day’s profits and paid his lookouts, pitchers, dealers, and any other employees from that. Rascal and Danny collected the rest and delivered
it to 10-4 for counting—often in sneaker boxes, a familiar sight around the neighborhood. Business was so good that even with several counting machines and everyone skimming, 10-4 fell garbage bags behind. Every week, he paid himself $12,000 and Rascal and Danny $2,500 each and brought the rest to George. George stored some of his money in safes in empty apartments. Sometimes he crammed duffel bags full of cash in the trunk of a car he’d parked in a long-term garage.