by Tracy Kidder
Many people ask a lot of a new town. They expect it to change their lives without their having to change themselves. Samson was no different. He couldn’t give up crack on his own, but maybe this place would help him do it. In the meantime, he just wanted to be left alone to smoke a little less in this mellow atmosphere and enjoy the change from Holyoke. After his worker’s comp ran out, he’d figure out what to do next.
Samson was a pioneer of sorts, or else he was like a seed on the wind. He may have been the first—certainly he was one of the first—to bring crack to Northampton. You couldn’t buy it here when he arrived. But it was easy enough to travel down to Holyoke or Springfield, in a cab or a bus or the car of one of his new friends, and carry back some rocks. And his favorite kind of crack pipe was everywhere for the taking in the parking lots, in the form of car radio antennas. You broke one off and turned it into what was called a straight shooter.
Samson had always made friends easily. Soon new friends here had given him a nickname: Sammy. Then a fateful encounter occurred. He was riding a bus back from the mall in Hadley. He had his eyes closed but wasn’t asleep. He felt a hand shaking him by the shoulder, and a female voice with a Hispanic accent said he was going to miss his stop. Samson opened his eyes and found himself looking at a short and buxom woman. “This is Hampshire Heights,” Samson told her. “This isn’t my stop.”
“Yes, it is,” she said. “You wanta have some coffee?”
Her name was Carmen. Samson moved in with her, and before long married her, in a civil ceremony. The town was providing everything he’d hoped for then. If you asked other residents, those with families, what bound them to the city, most would say that even though the high school had some serious problems, this was a great place for children, a place where the main thing you worried about was that your kids wore their helmets when they rode their bikes. Samson’s Northampton had a different kind of innocence. No one, he figured, would recognize the smell of crack coming from his wife’s apartment. And then there were the local police, another good reason for staying. He’d run into a lot of cops in Holyoke and Springfield. The ones he’d met here in Northampton were amazingly polite and affable by comparison. “Like, gentlemen.”
Samson shared the common tendency to judge professionals according to the size of their jurisdictions. “The cops up here, they’re, like, hicks,” he would remember thinking. “Like boneheads.”
In his first five years on the job, Tommy was a diligent, enthusiastic, and inflexible patrol officer, the sort who volunteers for every special training course available and who, imagining a cop’s true measure lies in numbers of arrests, handcuffs everyone he can. But a gift of gab can be a great asset in detective work, and the members of the department’s detective bureau decided to try him out. Rusty Luce, the most senior of them and one of the young O’Connor’s heroes, took him aside. “Just because somebody breaks the law doesn’t mean you have to hate ’em,” Rusty said. “A lot of people out there hate ya, Tommy. They do! They’re your eyes and ears out there. If you’re gonna be a detective, you gotta learn to cut some slack.” Tommy listened. He passed his try-out. A year later he volunteered for narcotics work.
When Tommy was eighteen, one of his best childhood friends turned up dead in a Northampton apartment. Though he’d never know it for a certainty, he believed drugs were the cause. He remembered listening to the evening news on WHMP and hearing Ron Hall’s deep voice announce the death. Friends from his old neighborhood were not supposed to end up dead at eighteen. In that moment, he would say, he had learned to hate drugs. He could think of plenty of other reasons now, examples of their poisonous effects on other lives and families and places. He’d heard most of the arguments against the so-called war on drugs, and he didn’t buy them. He didn’t know why anyone would want to legalize drugs. Alcohol and tobacco were bad enough, he’d say.
The local authorities had never worried much about narcotics, at least not openly. The police department had never assigned a detective exclusively to drug work. But in 1992, the results of a professionally administered survey of Northampton schoolchildren hit the papers. The high school seniors were using illicit drugs at considerably higher rates than their counterparts nationally. And not just marijuana, but also the entire range of hard drugs. Even a few eighth-graders reported having used powder cocaine, hallucinogens, and heroin. In no time, Northampton had joined the regional drug task force, which provided money for drug buys and equipment. Tommy used some of it to buy a disguise, the wig and fake mustache now in a trunk at home. He was given an undercover drug car, a small, low-riding Japanese model. He put an air freshener in the shape of a crown on the dashboard to make it look like a Latin drug dealer’s. If he took away the crown, the car became a white or Asian dealer’s. “The multicultural car,” Tommy called it.
Northampton had a lot of users and dealers, and they weren’t used to being pursued. A lot of them were amazingly careless. In one month, Tommy made twenty arrests in a single parking lot, behind Hugo’s bar on Pleasant Street—most of the culprits were either selling or snorting powder cocaine. He worked with the state drug cops at the D.A.’s office and he often worked alone. Typically, he spent most of a day in court testifying about his arrests and then spent the evening, sometimes most of the night, making more arrests—nearly two hundred in his top year. In the afternoons Tommy headed out in his cruiser, unmarked but an obvious cop car. He was dressed in civilian clothes but with his bald head uncovered and shined up with aftershave. He toured the various places where drugs often changed hands, talking jive to everyone but especially to the people who his informants said were dealing. Then he’d go back to the station, put on his mustache and wig, tie a bandanna around his forehead, and make those same rounds in the multicultural car, looking for drug deals, gathering intelligence. No one recognized him, even though occasionally the mustache came halfway off. He hid in the bushes at the edges of the projects and parks. He skulked through alleys and parking lots. He took off his disguise before he pounced, so that it was always the fast-talking, bald-headed detective who emerged and made arrests.
The idea, Tommy’s own, was to make himself conspicuous and frightening. He wanted the users and dealers to wonder how he knew what they were up to and how he managed to keep showing up at exactly the right times. And he wanted the ones he caught to spread the word about him to the ones he hadn’t met. For this, he counted on the size of his town—small enough so that many people involved with drugs knew each other—and on the universal tendency to exaggerate, especially pronounced in youth. He wanted to become “almost a ghost figure” to the denizens of the overlapping drug worlds of Northampton. He wanted the dealers and users to think he might be anywhere, on the theory that fear might slow them down, and he imagined that stories about the bald-headed narc might make a kid at the high school hesitate when first offered pot or cocaine or heroin.
Part of the plan clearly worked. Some years later, a young man who had been a member of the high school druggie crowd but had never actually met Tommy said, “Guys were goin’ unmarked and then suddenly, I don’t know what happened. Cops were coming out of the bushes everywhere.” More than once a parent came to the station complaining to the captains and the chief that Detective O’Connor was harassing his child. Tommy told his bosses with perfect candor, “I don’t even know the kid.” He smiled. “But I’ll be looking for him now.”
Many times people who could have run away or come at him with a weapon surrendered without even arguing. “It was like they thought the hammers of hell would come down on them,” he said. The process had its own momentum. “My reputation. It was almost like they created it for me.”
What many people find repulsive in drug work is the cultivation of the snitch. Personally, Tommy didn’t like most informants. “Rats. There are very few who won’t roll over on friends or family members,” he once said. “Nobody takes responsibility for their own actions. You get caught doing something, you do the time. Don’t rat out you
r friends.” Tommy understood the dangers of giving informants special powers, the importance of keeping them under his control, of verifying their information through other sources. But he had no qualms about making use of them. And they weren’t hard to find. He arrested a lot of people who were eager to become informants in return for leniency, and soon every dealer in town who wanted to rat out a rival dealer knew that O’Connor was the person to call. His pool of informants grew along with his out-sized reputation. But he still didn’t have a high-level informant, one who could lead him to people who dealt significant quantities of hard drugs. And he still had a lot to learn.
The antennas, for example. Several citizens had come to the station complaining that someone had torn the antennas off their cars. “Kids,” Tommy thought. The antennas weren’t just broken off and left behind. So he figured they must have become a new teenage weapon of choice. Meanwhile, he was mystified by the capsules he kept finding in the parking lots and the alleys behind the rooming houses, little empty vials with screw tops, the sort you might find in auto parts stores holding things like ball bearings. He thought they must be significant without knowing why. Then a cop from Holyoke showed him one of those capsules with a five-dollar rock of crack cocaine inside it. And then someone else told him that crack smokers used car antennas as pipes. Tommy had heard of crack, of course, but he hadn’t known it had arrived in Northampton. He was galled. He thought, “Jesus Christ, O’Connor, how many crackheads have gotten over on you?”
The avuncular detective Rusty Luce had taught Tommy the mechanics of a controlled drug buy: how you handled the confidential informant, recorded the serial numbers of the bills, established probable cause for a search warrant. Tommy had also attended a two-week course in drug investigations, taught by agents from the federal Drug Enforcement Administration. Rusty and the DEA had been Tommy’s high school. He’d been a detective for about two years when he met his Harvard and his Yale.
The first time he ran into Samson Rodriguez and got his vital statistics—Samson’s wife had taken out a restraining order against him—Tommy went to the station and ran a Bureau of Probation check, a “BOP,” and then an interstate check. And when Tommy saw that the man’s record was virtually unblemished, he said to another detective, “No way this guy is who he says he is.”
This wasn’t the most pressing of issues, but it sat in the back of Tommy’s mind like an unfinished chord, and he felt a little quickening in his pulse when, on a spring afternoon in the early 1990s, he came to work and, looking through the arrest book, saw that Samson had been locked up and then bailed out the previous night for violating his wife’s restraining order.
Several times wives had ratted out their husbands to Tommy, usually as last-ditch efforts to get their men off drugs. A wife could be a good way in. Tommy drove to Hampshire Heights in his unmarked cruiser.
For most people in Northampton, this housing project was a secret place in plain view, one they often passed and didn’t have to think about. It was built in the 1950s to house returning Korean War veterans. People liked to say there used to be no shame in living there, and yet when he was a boy Tommy never went inside the place. He had made some friends in school who lived in the project, but they had always come over to his house to play, never invited him to theirs. Tommy knew most of the current residents. Some of the Hispanic families had given two of their children the same first name, such as Jose. “Hose-A and Hose-B,” Tommy said.
He was on friendly terms with many of the people who lived here. Until about a year ago he’d allowed himself to imagine that some of them were friends. But no one had tried to help him the time when he was arresting Danny Cruz on a warrant and ended up perilously close to losing his gun in the fight. A few people came up to him afterward and in effect apologized: “I wanted to help you, man, but, you know, I have to live here.” He didn’t blame them. No matter how friendly he was, he came to the place only as a cop, preserving the professional distance that makes other people’s troubles easy to bear, and he realized he’d expected the residents to respond to him with a deeper commitment than he’d ever make to them. He felt a reciprocal warmth like friendship with most of the children, but it often didn’t survive adolescence.
A battered chain-link fence surrounds the Heights, a warren of flat-roofed, two-story buildings. To Tommy all the units had that hole-in-an-institutional-wall look, like identical stables or cells. Outside several front doors, residents had created little gardens, surrounded by miniature white picket fences. On the other hand, Dumpsters stood out front along the asphalt streets, and the snow had melted, uncovering all of last fall’s trash, scattered across the scruffy lawns. Carmen answered the door. She spoke with a Hispanic accent. Tommy told her he wanted to get some information about Mr. Rodriguez’s 209A violation. Could he come in? He sat on a battered sofa in front of a coffee table littered with beer bottles, an overflowing ashtray, and half a dozen empty screw-topped vials.
Carmen said that Samson did terrible things to her.
“What kinds of things does he do?”
“It’s very hard for me to talk about.”
Out of the corner of his eye Tommy caught glimpses of empty vials all over the living room floor. “Well, like what, ma’am?”
“Unnatural sex.”
“This oughta be pretty good,” Tommy thought. Carmen had a fairly long record herself, made up mostly of drug offenses. “Unnatural sex, ma’am?” he asked.
“Yes,” she whispered. “He made me have oral sex with him.”
He looked in an imaginary mirror, keeping a straight face until the silent laughter slid away. “These vials, ma’am. Tell ya straight out, it looks like someone’s been smoking a lot of crack in here.”
Carmen said those vials were Samson’s. He was a terrible addict.
Tommy said he could well believe it. This was a bad guy. Samson could get her evicted and in a lot of other trouble. She agreed with that. Tommy thought, “Boy, I’m glad she’s not my wife.”
Many people let Tommy search their cars and houses, even if they had something to hide. It was usually just a matter of asking the question the right way, of saying, “You don’t mind if I take a look inside, do ya?” amid a bunch of other fast, friendly talk, as if the question were just incidental and rhetorical. As if, once given permission, he wouldn’t bother to search. And then, of course, he always searched. Did Carmen mind if he looked around the apartment? She did not. Every room was strewn with empty vials. “Mind if I go down cellar, ma’am?” In the basement, he found two large empty canisters of laughing gas. “Samson’s?”
She nodded sadly.
At the door he thanked her for her cooperation. He told her it would be in her best interest to continue it, laying out all the many ways in which this man could harm her more than he already had. She said she would help.
A few nights later Carmen called, and the night after that, Tommy stood in the front door of the station, saying to Samson Rodriguez, who stood at the foot of the steps, “Sammy! What’s happenin’, man? Come on in. I got your welfare check.” Tommy kept up a steady stream of talk as he escorted Samson inside. He chattered away, telling Samson he couldn’t allow Carmen to hold the check, not with a 209A outstanding. He said Samson should be careful about restraining orders in a town like this where there was a lot of sympathy for women who claimed to be abused, which wasn’t a bad thing but Samson knew the game.
The skinhead detective talked so fast that Samson hardly noticed where they were going. Through the door into the station proper, across a linoleum-tiled floor—shabby-looking under fluorescent lights—and around one corner and then through another door into a room that Samson recognized, but was for a moment too confused to place. The room had a desk and a chair in front of it. “Sit down, Sammy,” the detective said. “I’ll go get your check.”
Samson looked around. There was padding on the walls. He’d gotten booked in this room before. “I might as well relax,” he thought. “I’m gonna be here
for a while.” Then the skinhead detective was back, standing over him and handing him a photograph, a mug shot of a man holding a nameplate under his chin.
“Sammy, you ever see this guy before?”
“Wow. Francisco Sandoval. No, I never met the guy.” Samson looked up at the detective earnestly. Tommy was grinning down at him. Then Samson turned into Frankie, and started laughing.
The mug shot was a good likeness but it didn’t capture the person, Tommy thought. The man in the photograph looked dour. Now he was howling with laughter, his head tilted back, his hands gripping his jiggling stomach. He was laughing so hard he began sliding off the chair. Watching, Tommy started laughing too—more sedately, of course.
Tommy didn’t lock him up right away. He took him to his office and let him put his feet up on a chair. A bunch of fancy-looking hash and pot pipes sat on Tommy’s desk, campaign souvenirs. “Nice pipes,” said Frankie.
There wasn’t time that night for more than the merest sketch of Frankie’s life and times. Unlike the fictitious Samson, he had been born in the Dominican Republic, during the reign of the dictator Trujillo. When he was still a boy, his grandmother spirited him out of the country under an assumed name, which she had taught him to think of as his own—his grandfather had been strangled in his own bathtub, probably on Trujillo’s orders. Frankie did the rest of his growing up in an Italian neighborhood in Springfield, Massachusetts, learned English by immersion, earned American citizenship, and built up a successful business with his father, the cornerstone of which was a large bakery in Springfield’s North End. It thrived until the recession hit in the 1980s. “I was like a Boy Scout until about ten years ago. Then it was like, what’s the sense of being a Boy Scout? I’m gonna go for whatever I can get,” Frankie said. “That’s when the bakery blew up.”