Chasing the Scream

by Johann Hari

  I found out later that Chino was transitioning to living as a man, and considering gender reassignment surgery. At his request, I refer to him throughout this book with masculine pronouns—even though he was regarded as a woman by the people around him and by the legal system for most of this time period—because he always felt, inside, that he was male.

  On that first afternoon, I noted that Chino spoke very fast and in a rhythm, as though there was always a beat behind him that I couldn’t quite hear. But after a while, I felt I began to hear the beat. It was one of many things Chino has taught me.

  Almost seventy years2 after Arnold Rothstein stood on his street corner in New York City waiting for a pile of cash to walk on by, Chino had, he explained, been doing just the same. Like him, he scared people just by being there. He had a pit bull by his side, and gold fangs attached to his teeth. His hair was pulled back into a baseball cap, and in the brim he had stashed little baggies of crack. Hidden nearby, in a trashcan, he kept his gun, a 9 mm Smith and Wesson. He had a crew called the Souls of Mischief, and they did what he said, when he said. He was fourteen years old.

  “Are you holding?” his customers would ask as they drove up.

  “Yeah, I’m holding,” he would reply.

  He stood at the junction of East Thirty-Eighth Street and Church Avenue in East Flatbush, a slum stretch of Brooklyn. The brand names of Manhattan vanish this far out, leaving only small businesses with names like Michael’s Prime Meats, White Sheep Laundry, and endless 99-cent stores, broken only by evangelical churches promising the path to salvation. The houses must have looked new and glossy when they first rose in the 1950s, but they seemed to have been slowly sighing back into the earth ever since.

  Chino’s crack came in white slivers that looked like chips of soap. At first, he stashed them in his mouth, but they made his cheeks and tongue go numb. Then he held them in his hand, but they started to dissolve, and nobody wanted to buy that. So he learned you had to get creative. He sometimes stuck them under a nearby parked car, attached to a magnet. Later, he got a collar for his pit bull, Rocky, and kept the crack in his collar—“so Rocky sold crack, too,” he laughed. But on that day—and the endless days like it—they were in his cap and up for sale.

  There was once only one Arnold Rothstein in New York City. In the seven decades of escalating warfare ever since, there has come to be an Arnold Rothstein on every block in every poor neighborhood in America. The fragmentation that began with the bullet to Rothstein’s gut had continued to this block in Brooklyn on this day.

  Chino went out onto his corner selling whether it snowed or rained or the sun shone down. It was the only route to riches he could see in this neighborhood—and the only way to be safe. He knew that would seem strange to outsiders; how does becoming a gangster make you safe? But looking out over his block as a kid, he concluded that in East Flatbush, in the crosshairs of both the war on drugs and the war for drugs, you have to feed, or you will be food.

  You could see the Souls of Mischief on the corner—Chino and four of his homies, all boys. Chino was the unquestioned top dog. When Chino said move, they moved. When Chino said go, they’d go. They were entirely obedient. They watched his anger and aggression with awe, as if he was not a person but an electrical storm with skin.3

  Even then, he dressed as a boy and acted like a boy. They called him Jason. They knew he was “biologically” a woman at that point but they treated him as a man, and he was careful to be twice as brave just to underline it. He never told his crew to do anything he wouldn’t do himself: he would always get his hands dirty with you. If the crew had to attack, he would be at the front. And sometimes it was necessary to attack.

  Their crew was part of a wider network called Brooklyn’s Most Wanted, who controlled the Thirties in Flatbush. He got his drugs from Peter, a guy in his twenties from Chino’s block, and he answered to him. Peter first approached him when Chino was thirteen, asking if he wanted to make a lot of cash. He explained: you take the bags, you work the corner, you keep up to $500 a week. After that, everybody knew he was under Peter’s protection. You couldn’t touch him without retaliation from Peter, and he was one of the three or four biggest dealers between Utica and Flatbush. It meant Chino had power, and respect, and a name, and as much freedom from fear as he would ever get.

  And money. He would spend the money on going to the movies, treating his friends, buying clothes he would wear only once. And he spent a lot of time at Coney Island, riding the Cyclone, or playing Mortal Kombat.

  To protect this way of life, you have to be terrifying. As we learned under Rothstein, you can’t go to the police to protect your property or your trade. You have to defend it yourself, with guns and testosterone. If you ever crack and show some flicker of compassion, he tells me years later, “everybody’s going to fucking rob you . . . They’ll just move in on your turf, take over your block, do whatever they want to you. You have to be fucked up to survive in this fucked-up paradigm . . . You got to be violent to not have violence done to you . . . You set examples. You make examples out of people. Some of them are completely justified and called for. A lot of them are not.”

  So the crew shot at trees, shot in the air, killed animals. Sometimes Chino would shoot in the direction of people—rival crews he needed to scare shitless. He will tell me that his bullets never hit them. He will also tell me there are things he can never tell anyone.

  Sometimes the gun jammed and everyone else was too frightened to unjam it. Not Chino. “I would cock that bitch back,” he says, “let that bullet come out, put it back in the clip and put the clip back in.” Two of their rival gangs were called the Autobots and the Decepticons, after the Transformer toys that were popular at the time, and that they still played with. These child soldiers lived in a mental landscape they constructed from scraps of TV cartoons, hip-hop, and a policy decision that handed them a crucial place on the delivery line for one of the biggest industries in the world.

  One time, some older men arrived on the block to try to claim it as theirs. Chino remembers it this way: “We had some cats come through . . . some older cats . . . we welcomed them, smoked with them, laughed with them. Basically, they were trying to son us [that is, treat them like kids—like their sons]—tell us what to do as if we didn’t have our own set. Some altercation happened between them and one of my soldiers, and before you know it, we was beating their ass . . . We jumped them . . . and beat the shit out of them. We hit them with bottles, garbage cans, and we let them run out of the neighborhood and told them to never come back.” About this need to defend his teenage crew against older aggressors, he says: “It’s almost like in the animal kingdom—in our minds it’s no different . . . They thought they were the bigger, older lions . . . but we’re not necessarily lions, we’re like packs of hyenas. If you’re going to play by animal kingdom rules, you got to know the right animal.”

  This violence was taken for granted in the neighborhood. “If you don’t hear a gunshot,” one resident told a reporter in 1993, “you’re amazed at the quiet.”4

  It wasn’t only rival gangs that Chino had to discipline with violence—it was his own soldiers. His number two, his right hand, was named Smokie, a Jamaican boy from his block. One day Smokie started a fight with some Crips—one of the main gangs in the United States—outside Chino’s house because he wanted to establish that this was unequivocally their turf: they owned it, and they commanded respect on it.

  “Who the fuck is that talking loud on my block?” he demanded of them.

  “Yo . . . you just grew the fuck up,” they spat, taunting him.

  Suddenly, Chino saw Smokie had picked a fight he couldn’t win; they were getting into his face and they outnumbered him, so he had to step in—only to find he had created a situation where “I can’t be diplomatic . . . that would be a sign of fucking weakness.”

  He told Smokie to take his knife and go slash them, to prove nobody could mess with this crew or their trade. But they just laughe
d at the knife. They snatched the gold chain from his neck, and Smokie lost his nerve, and ran.

  Chino knew that this situation was potentially fatal for his crew and its reputation. If they could humiliate his number two, the next step would be to humiliate him and take his patch. He would be left with nothing. Carolyn Rothstein said about Arnold: “He never failed to fashion5 a punishment for the one who had offended against his omniscience.” He must do the same. His pit bull was growling at them, but the dog couldn’t do much—Rocky had all the heart, but not a lot of the equipment. They were smelling fear.

  Chino pulled a knife. He had to show them—in a slash—that he would use it if he needed to.

  Suddenly, he got sucker punched, and everything went woozy.

  But he had made his point: His crew wouldn’t just run in the face of threats. They would fight, even when it was a girl up against two guys.

  But now Chino had to deal with Smokie. He had pulled the crew into danger and then vanished. When he skulked toward Chino after it was all over, he claimed he had run to get a gun to defend them—but Chino couldn’t make allowances for cowardice, not here. The crew took him to the 235 Park nearby, a grassy patch, and poured water on his shirt.

  Then Chino took off his belt, and he lashed Smokie, thirty-one times.

  That was the standard first phase of punishment for cowardice. Then he had to embark on the second phase. He had to go find the opposing set and slash one of them. Smokie staggered off—but something went wrong. He didn’t slash a rival. Terrorized and half-crazed and hyped, he looked for anyone he could attack—and he slashed an old man in a store, which isn’t what Chino wanted at all. Soon he was back in prison. Chino was furious: the point he needed to be made was that his set was strong and nobody should ever try and fuck with them or take their drugs or mock their status. By attacking an old person, he says, he “actually made us look weaker.”

  That was the careful balance of terror he had to negotiate every day. For Chino, the war on drugs was not a metaphor. It was a battlefield onto which he woke and on which he slept. He explains: “I can live with you breaking my heart, but I can’t live with you making other people think I’m weak. I literally can’t live with that . . . [because then] they come for me.”

  I would leave my meetings about Chino and pore over academic studies and explanations of the drug market, trying to see how this fitted into the story he was telling me.

  Slowly I began to see the patterns underlying it. When we hear about “drug-related violence,” we picture somebody getting high and killing people. We think the violence is the product of the drugs. But in fact, it turns out this is only a tiny sliver of the violence. The vast majority is like Chino’s violence—to establish, protect, and defend drug territory in an illegal market, and to build a name for being consistently terrifying so nobody tries to take your property or turf.

  Professor Paul Goldstein of the University of Illinois conducted a detailed study in which he and his team looked at every killing identified as “drug-related” in New York City in 1986. It turned out 7.5 percent of the killings took place after a person took drugs and their behavior seemed to change. Some 2 percent were the result of addicts trying to steal to feed their habit and it going wrong. And more than three quarters—the6 vast majority—were like Chino’s attacks. They weren’t caused by drugs, any more than Al Capone’s killings were caused by alcohol. They were, Goldstein showed, caused by prohibition.

  Just as the war on alcohol7 created armed gangs fighting to control the booze trade, the war on drugs has created armed gangs fighting and killing to control the drug trade. The National Youth Gang Center8 has discovered that youth gangs like the Souls of Mischief are responsible for between 23 and 45 percent of all drugs sales in the United States.

  I discussed this one afternoon with Chino, and he nodded. He explained the gang didn’t exist only to sell drugs, but “it gives the gang way more power. You have access to money and resources to buy guns, to be extravagant, to actualize the persona of being a big shot. The clothes, the jewelry.” The gang—and the violence required to be in it—is made far more attractive by the fact it controls one of the few profitable industries in the neighborhood.

  But when he was sixteen, Chino began to break one of the cardinal rules of dealing, one made famous by Biggie Smalls: Don’t get high on your own supply. To understand, I had to go back with him, to the start of his story.

  Chino had always, he told me, been puzzled by one thing about his mother. Since she was openly a lesbian, how did she end up becoming pregnant—and by a cop, the species of man she had good reason to loathe the most?

  He found out the answer when he was thirteen. He explained his confusion to his aunt, Rose, who then offered, coldly, a story. In 1980, Chino’s mother, Deborah, was raped by his father, Victor. Deborah was a black crack addict. Victor was a white NYPD officer, there to arrest her. So Chino is a child of the drug war in the purest sense. He was conceived on one of its battlefields.

  Chino had already known the vague outlines of his mother’s life. He constructed a story that strung together his own fragmented memories of her and the hushed conversations he overheard from his relatives. Deborah was abandoned by her biological mother in the hospital as soon as she was born—perhaps because her mother was herself a drug addict, soon to be sent to prison. The baby was adopted by a distant relative, Lucille Hardin, an old and old-school Southern black woman who had come to New York from South Carolina and earned her living making brassieres. Mrs. Hardin didn’t talk much about her childhood in the segregated South, except to say proudly that she never said “yes’m” to any white man, and that she worked on the assembly lines in World War Two to save her country.

  Lucille Hardin raised Deborah as her own child, adoring her and spoiling her as if she were a little doll. But the word in the family was that at some point in her adolescence, Deborah was kidnapped by a group of men and gang-raped. She was never quite the same again. Nobody seems to know the details of it, or when she started soothing the pain it caused with the jab of a needle and the numbing of heroin. Mrs. Hardin paid for Deborah to go to rehab a few times, but nothing worked for long. She was sunk far enough into addiction to catch the first wave of crack in the early 1980s.

  Deborah would break in and take anything she could to get her next fix from the local gangsters. Her adopted mother would frequently have to call the police on her. It was on one occasion, when Deborah was twenty-two and in her mother’s house, that Victor showed up.

  Long after, Chino will describe this, the night of his conception, with a controlled anger. Cops could rape with impunity “because who’s going to believe a drug addict, right? Who’s going to believe somebody who’s addicted to a substance and will do anything to get that substance, including lie? Who’s going to believe somebody who’s been in and out of prison the majority of their adult life?”

  He came into the room that had been Deborah’s all her life and was going to be Chino’s for all of his childhood, too. Nobody knows now what took place next. Rose told Chino it was a rape, because that is what Deborah told her. Years later, Chino will wonder: “Maybe—I don’t know. I totally think he raped my mother. But I also think that—maybe—some prostitution stuff happened. Or [she] traded freedom for sex.” Was that common then? “It’s common now,” he says in 2012.

  Deborah went into labor in a bar. Chino was born with a severe blood disorder, in a hospital a few blocks away from where Arnold Rothstein died. He weighed only a few pounds, and he had a thin layer of skin over his eyes. The doctors said this was the result of his mother’s drug use during pregnancy, and they thought he was blind and would be mentally disabled.

  Just as her mother had abandoned her, Deborah immediately abandoned Chino—and the same Mrs. Hardin, now in her sixties, took in the baby and raised him, too, as her own. She was a strict grandmother: she had grown up in a place and time when disobedient kids were told to go to the woods to find a branch to be beaten with.
It was called “picking your switch.” But, at the same time, she was an old woman, and her powers to discipline, or to understand this new little child, were fading.

  Chino called Mrs. Hardin “Ma.” Every now and then, he was taken to a strange place to see Deborah. He saw only that she was a short, wiry woman who wore men’s clothes and had a smile just like Chino’s. Deborah, he says later, “was my biological mother [and] only in that sense.” Some part of Deborah never forgot her child, and longed for him. One day, she turned up in Flatbush and took the toddler Chino away by the hand, so he could be hers, for once. They hid out for days, not telling anyone where they were. It was a motel. The police arrived. They said they were looking “for Victor’s daughter.”

  All those years, it turned out, Victor had kept an eye on his child from a distance, and when he heard Chino had been kidnapped, his colleagues rallied to find the kid.

  Years later, Deborah snatched him again. When I spoke to him about it, Chino remembered playing in a dollhouse with a little girl and eating chips, when—suddenly—a woman Deborah owed money to took him by the hand to another room. Chino saw a blade with brass knuckles on it. It is only years later that Chino would realize where they were: in a crack house. Out of nowhere the woman was trying to insert this blade into Chino’s vagina. Chino managed to hit her with some toys and scream as loud as he could. Deborah appeared and saw what was happening. Deborah and her friend dragged the woman onto the roof of the crack house. They began to beat her as hard as they could. “I don’t know if she lived or not,” Chino will remember, “but I remember a lot of blood, and the woman not moving anymore.”