Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bro

by LeBlanc, Adrian Nicole

  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 pitch
er. 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.

  By the spring of 1988, business got even better: George’s sources rewarded him for his savvy handling of the Pirate fiasco and let him buy more weight directly, which increased his profit by an extra $100,000 for every brick. Suddenly, George needed new mills and extra workers to process the dope; this was when he hired Jessica.

  Jessica may have been desperate for money, but love was what she wanted. She wasn’t planning on laboring long as a mill girl. She still had her eye on the boss.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Jessica was equipped with a beeper and briefed about the company codes. Double 0—00—represented work. Add five to the number before the 00 and that’s the time she was due in; arrival times were staggered to reduce suspicion and avert potential robberies. When two mills were open, the number 1 or 2 designated which table she was to report to. Millworkers, like lawyers who worked long hours at big law firms, were collected and delivered home by car service. On Jessica’s first day, she rode to work in luxury.

  She reported to a mill in an apartment on Holland and Burke, and the apartment impressed her as well. The place had carpeting, a kitchen set, a bedroom set, and a huge TV. Two large glass tables had been pushed together. Garbage cans filled with lighter fluid flanked each end, in case the police arrived (the heroin would be shoved into the cans, and sulfuric acid—kept on the table—would be dumped on top in an optimistic attempt to destroy the evidence). Guns rested on the table in case of stick-ups—.357s and .38s, a .45, Uzis, an automatic shotgun, and a Mossberg.

  Preparing heroin was tedious and exacting. The millworkers tended to be girls and women, girlfriends and ex-girlfriends and sisters of exgirlfriends of male employees. George hired by word of mouth; he held the person who referred a girl responsible for any trouble that followed her. At one end of the table, a worker crushed the brick while it was still in its packaging before cracking it, like an egg, into a metal cup and crushing the chunks into powder. At the other end of the table, someone weighed out mannitol, measuring the chalky substance on what would become a fixture of evidence in the decade’s drug trials and a popular reference in gangsta rap: the triple-beam scale.

  If the supply had recently undergone a dry spell, less cut was added, and the bags were made bigger to jump-start the sales. As soon as business picked up, however, the bags shrank and the heroin got weaker. If George was at the mill, he added the cut himself. The success of Obsession owed much to its potency; George diluted his dope just like other dealers, but the product he was getting was remarkably pure—87 percent. He compared it to the difference between dollar-store soda and Coke.

  The heroin would then be ground in a coffee grinder and repeatedly strained until it was sufficiently fine; then another woman, using playing cards like salad forks, would toss the mannitol with the heroin. Potent heroin was toxic, and the other workers routinely cleared out of the room at this point. Some wore surgical masks to diffuse the noxious smell. The glassines had been stamped ahead of time with the Obsession logo by somebody’s sister or mother or grandmother, who did it as piecework at home. Finally, after the heroin had been carefully measured into the glassines with a plastic coffee stirrer from McDonald’s, Jessica taped the bags closed. In 1987, soon after Boy George first launched Obsession, his mill processed one hundred to two hundred grams of heroin per day, five days a week. By the time Jessica was hired, the mill regularly processed seven hundred grams every sit-down, or shift.

  When George wasn’t around, the table could almost feel like family. Workers listened to music and gossiped. A woman might leave the table for the kitchen and cook for everyone. Some sniffed cocaine to stay awake throughout the long shifts. The atmosphere stiffened when George arrived. Some drug dealers believed the best way to protect themselves was to remain hidden, but George had little interest in invisibility. His management style was a familiar combination of bribery and threat. He lorded over the millworkers like an ornery factory owner. He docked workers $300 for showing up late and fired them after one absence—although he often took them back. George also believed in incentives. He sent his table managers and prodigious workers on fully paid vacations to Puerto Rico and Disney World.

  George’s ex-girl Miranda was managing the table the first night Jessica reported in to work. At the time, Jessica struck her as unremarkable. She worked slowly, and it baffled Miranda why George was bothering with a scrawny girl who complained about the vinegary smell of the heroin. Then Jessica got her temporarily fired. Miranda and another worker were ragging about George’s predilection for expensive silk shirts, and Jessica reported the gossipers to George. George rehired Miranda, but from then on, she resolved to keep a close watch on her new coworker. Jessica’s mill gig proved short-lived, however; she lasted less than a week.

  George promoted Jessica to errand girl and started seeing her regularly. She was pretty, interested without being nosy, quick to recover from his insults, and sharp enough to adjust to the wider world he was inhabiting. He also gave her a place to live: after one of his apartments became hot, he’d rent another and move Jessica into the hot one to cool it down. She shopped for groceries and collected his dry cleaning. Jessica wished for some commitment, but she accommodated him. Sometimes she accompanied him in public, but she often passed the time without him just as she had without the other boys—talking on the phone, cleaning, waiting, watching TV.

  George frequently traveled to Puerto Rico, where his wife, Vada, now lived with their son. Sometimes he brought Jessica along; once, he even put her up at the house. George told Vada that Jessica worked for him, but Vada was skeptical: “She must be a good worker if you brung her all the way here.” After George gave them both money and sent them off to a mall together, Vada kept needling Jessica: “You sure you work for him? You must be a pretty special worker, his most favorite worker.” When they got back, Vada reported loudly to George, “Shoo! This girl can talk to men. You shoulda seen the way she was handing out her number!”

  “Why you got to say that?” Jessica whispered.

  “Why does it matter to you?” Vada answered, not whispering back.

  George’s rules at home were as strict as those he imposed at the mills: no visitors—not family, not friends. Never give out his telephone or beeper or cell numbers. No one needed to know where he was headed or where he’d been. No one needed to know his real name if they called asking for him by any of the aliases he used—Tony, or Manny, or John—just take a message. Under no circumstances was she to reveal who he was or where she was or where he lived or which of the other apartments were or were not occupied.

  Jessica knew the routines of lying and bluffing and keeping secrets. She was better suited to her life as a concierge than as a mill girl. She loved to interact with people, she had a pleasing phone voice, she was personable and organized. She graciously accepted deliveries. She met George
’s rigorous standards for a clean house. “He always liked everything spotless—house, clothing. He never liked to see anything dirty,” Jessica said. “He’d bring home a whole lotta videos and I would just watch TV. I didn’t have to get a job. I was to cook and clean and take care of the things, and I would get an allowance at the end of the week.”

  For the first few weeks, the allowance was excellent—$1,000 or more. George surprised Jessica with jewelry. He didn’t want her gold to be thin and bendable, with clasps that broke. It had to be thick. If Jessica liked a necklace—a heart of sapphires, say—George said to his jeweler, “We’ll take that, but make it different.” He added rubies to her diamond Rolex. He bought her a belt buckle with Jessica studded in emeralds. Poverty, which limited neighborhood people to shopping at the same cheap neighborhood stores, meant looking like everybody else. He wanted Jessica customized, like his cars.

  Boy George also demanded color coordination. “He matched me up,” Jessica said. No white clothes in winter, nothing stained or borrowed, no jeans with the yellow sheen from the cheap soap at the Laundromat, no vinyl belts sewn to the waist of the pants. He drove Jessica to Greenwich Village and introduced her to the $50 rule. Nothing under $50 was to be taken off the rack. No $10 stores, no V.I.M., no Jimmy Jazz, no Payless. He was generous with his money. After he bought her things, he didn’t demand sex.