Alphaville: 1988, Crime, Punishment, and the Battle for New York City's Lower East Side

by Michael Codella; Bruce Bennett

  If opium was just a medicinal blessing and a recreational curse, it might have gone away eventually. But what really put it over is that it was incredible business. The demand opium created in the brains of the people addicted to it was a conscience-free capitalist’s dream come true, as long as he controlled the supply. The British not only traded and sold it in the Far East, they seized on it as insurance against uprisings when they helped themselves to what they could grab of China. An alternately stoned or jonesing populace couldn’t really raise their axes together to throw off their shackles if they were occupied with scoring, dosing, and floating away.

  Opium changed the map but morphine, a distillation of the active ingredient in opium discovered in the first years of the nineteenth century, changed medicine. The chemical process that created morphine became one of the procedural backbones of pharmaceutical pioneering. Morphine synthesis opened the door for a whole dynasty of chemical step-children, from caffeine to cocaine. The doctors and chemists who began prescribing morphine and putting it in various patent medicines and mixtures believed they had solved the problem of how to numb people’s brains for good reasons without stringing them out and fucking up their lives. All the inventors of morphine really succeeded in doing was cranking up the potency and streamlining the whole process of getting wasted and hooked, especially after the invention of the hypodermic needle in 1824.

  Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, and Hiram Maxim, the inventor of the machine gun, each believed that they had come up with an innovation so ruthlessly lethal that it would cause the world to see the error of humanity’s addiction to conflict and stop waging war forever. In his inaugural address, Abraham Lincoln famously referenced “the better angels” of human nature. Like Nobel and Maxim, the scientists and doctors who kept trying to civilize opium just didn’t count on what might be called “the bitter angels” that drove people to shoot each other, blow each other up, do dope to check out on life, and deal it to get rich. On the eve of a new century, an ambitious thirty-eight-year-old German chemist named Heinrich Dresser helped midwife a host of bitter angels. Dresser not only streamlined opium and morphine, he supercharged it and the illegal narcotics trade in the process.

  Dresser was an accomplished second-generation scientist with a full professorship at Bonn University. An old school European clotheshorse with a taste for the finer things in life, Dresser was keenly aware that scientific discovery could go hand-and-in hand with financial opportunity. While four years in an academic ivory tower did a lot for Dresser’s prestige, it did nothing for his bank account. He turned his back on academia and cut a research and development deal with Johann Friedrich Weskott and Friedrich Bayer—two aging businessmen and chemists who had been successful in the commercial dye-making business.

  In much the same way that some companies sought to extend their corporate lives in the early 1990s by expanding into computers, Weskott and Bayer sought to diversify into the growing field of patent medicines. In exchange for ceding professional credit and patent rights for synthesizing new drugs, Dresser would steer Bayer’s research and development division on the most commercial course possible. What Dresser got out of the deal was a tidy profit royalty for each successful drug his team worked up and he green-lit.

  Like Lucky Luciano, Dresser knew his clientele and he knew his times. The leading causes of death in 1890s Europe were pneumonia and tuberculosis. How best to wipe out these diseases was still being debated, but Dresser understood that the main symptom of pneumonia and TB evoked uniform terror in layman and doctor alike. Both illnesses were characterized by a racking, hacking, phlegm-spouting cough. When anyone with TB or pneumonia coughed they shot an aerosol of infection into the public air. The contaminated phlegm they coughed up and carelessly spat onto the sidewalk got tracked into homes, schools, hospitals, and everywhere else on the soles of the shoes of the uninfected and the sick alike. In the minds of most of Dresser’s contemporaries, particularly in big cities, a hacking cough was a potential gateway to the morgue and combating it was the foremost challenge to the 1890s medical establishment. Giving doctors a wonder elixir that would calm their patients hacking with ten times the strength of codeine, the current star in the opium-derivative stable, would make Dresser and the company bearing Bayer’s name rich.

  Also, like Charlie Lucky, Dresser understood the value of building on the groundwork of others. The scientific boom of synthesizing opium into morphine had quickly turned into a social bust. Morphine in various patent medicines and over-the-counter mixtures like laudanum became the mother’s little helper of their era. Scores of housewives, professionals, and even kids began to beat a path to the family medicine chest when withdrawal threatened their fragile narcotic health. Conventional scientific wisdom of the day suggested that refining and strengthening opium’s good side—ending pain—would somehow defeat its bad side—an addictive component that ruined people’s lives.

  In 1874, a British chemist named C. R. Alder Wright spent a few months tinkering with morphine in the hopes of finding a less addictive alternative. Toward that end, Wright—the future author of The Threshold of Science, a textbook that collected “simple and amusing experiments” for beginning scientists—conducted a simple, successful, and ultimately catastrophic experiment that wouldn’t make it into his book. By boiling a quantity of morphine and a chemical agent over a stove for several hours, Wright got a saucepan full of an extremely potent opium derivative that cooked down and dried up into a fine, light-catching white powder.

  After Wright sent the powdered result to a colleague for testing on animals, he received a description that anyone who’s ever been around junkies will find all too familiar. Among the grocery list of effects that test dogs showed after being dosed, were, Wright’s consultant wrote, “eyes being sensitive…pupils constrict…considerable salivation…slight tendency to vomiting…respiration was at first quickened, but subsequently reduced…the heart’s action was diminished, and rendered irregular…marked want of coordinating power over the muscular movements…loss of power in the pelvis and hind limb.” What the dogs couldn’t tell their Dr. Feelgood was how high they were or how much they’d like some more once that first dose wore off.

  More a researcher than a businessman, Wright took note of what he learned and moved on to those “simple and amusing” lab pursuits that would wind up in his book. A few decades later, at Dresser’s urging, a Bayer staff chemist named Hoff man duplicated C. R. Wright’s results. Measured purely for its cough suppressant abilities, the substance, diacetylmorphine, was substantially more effective than morphine or codeine. Test subjects with advanced respiratory problems reported that this new drug nearly wiped out their coughs (in a late seventies interview the Rolling Stones’ Keith Richards said one of the upsides of smack addiction was that he never had another head or chest cold once he became a junkie). The test group also characterized their experiences as having an additional side effect of a powerful and very pleasant euphoria that brought with it a quality of heroisch—the feeling of being safe, emotionally cocooned, and impervious to pain and harm of any kind—in a word, heroic. Dresser dosed himself and agreed.

  As a bonus, Dresser’s new product could be marketed as a non-addictive improvement on morphine, which now claimed some three hundred thousand addicts in the United States alone. Just as the original advocates of morphine became convinced that refining the pure opium experience would combat addiction, Dresser and his team persuaded themselves that their new cough mixture and pain medication, called heroin after its apparently irrelevant euphoric side effect, would quell the morphine epidemic, too.

  In November 1898, Dresser presented Bayer’s new drug to the Congress of German Naturalists and Physicians. Medication at the time was distributed primarily by physicians, so Dresser’s pitch was the single most important step in Bayer’s march to the marketplace. The Industrial Revolution was a boon for doctors and the pharmaceutical companies that supplied them. People never before had so many new ways
to get sick and so many corresponding ways to treat their symptoms. The world’s physicians looked to the group and their annual meetings as a forecast and update on what was new and noteworthy. Treatment with heroin would, Dresser told the medical congress, control coughing like never before and help well-to-do addicts and their well-compensated doctors end their morphine addictions with little withdrawal discomfort.

  Dresser’s presentation received thunderous applause and offers of support from the assembled members of the medical community. Bayer wasted no time shipping thousands of free samples with illustrated labels depicting a lion and a globe behind the brand name “Heroin” to doctors all over Europe and the United States. Company literature trumpeted their new invention as “preeminently adapted for the manufacture of cough elixirs, cough balsams, cough drops, cough lozenges, and cough medicines of any kind.” The Boston Medical and Surgical Journal agreed, adding that heroin “possesses many advantages over morphine,” particularly that, “it’s not hypnotic, and there’s no danger of acquiring a habit.” Within eighteen months, Bayer was exporting over a ton of heroin to some twenty-three countries. The U.S. had a growing constituency of middle-class morphine addicts and doctors eager to believe the truly bizarre premise that a stronger version of the same thing would straighten them out. A pre-FDA America in which “the business of America is business” attitude applied to drugs, and middle-class consumers held a general obsession with spoon and bottle and magic bullet “cures,” bit into heroin like a grizzly into an Eagle Scout.

  Lucky Luciano wasn’t averse to a little opium now and then himself and at a business level he knew a good, bad thing when he saw it. Dope wasn’t just stronger than morphine; it was a hell of a lot easier to ship. In its basic powder form, junk was compact and light. It was also easy to resell at a markup. Cutting or stepping-on pure heroin with a benign and inexpensive powder of a similar consistency like milk sugar or baby laxative was a no muss, no fuss proposition. No wonder large quantities of the drug began to vanish from the labs making it and reappear for resale on the waterfront and tenements of the Lower East Side. With the right raw materials (opium, a couple of processing chemicals, and something to cook them in) heroin was a breeze to make as well. Bootleg heroin, the narcotic equivalent of bathtub gin, began to change hands on the black market alongside the bonded stuff.

  The shine came off the crystalline new wonder drug pretty quickly. After their initial narcotic honeymoon ended, patients treated with heroin began to need higher and more frequent doses of the drug just to function. The “hypnotic” quality the Boston medical journal declared nonexistent wasn’t just a risk, it was inevitable. By 1905, there were already over 180 clinical reports from American doctors confirming the dangers of continued heroin use. Nevertheless, the following year the American Medical Association approved heroin for prescription use. If higher doses were what the doctor ordered, then Bayer was only too happy to oblige. Whatever Bayer and physicians couldn’t, and eventually weren’t allowed to provide, the East Coast mob would gladly supplement for a price.

  Police noted a sharp spike in crime and a disturbingly high incidence of perps who turned out to be heroin addicts, particularly in New York. The U.S. government responded by passing regulating laws on opium, morphine, and heroin in 1914. By 1924, heroin was for all intents and purposes illegal in the U.S. and Bayer was out of the smack business completely. But the genie was out of the bottle. American dealers like Three Fingers Brown and Lucky Luciano laid pipe for an international heroin conduit whose spigot was located in New York.

  No matter what anyone may have said in the The Godfather, nobody in the Mafia was able to resist milking a cash cow as lucrative as dope. The Luccheses reached out to the Corsican mob, the Genovese and Gambino families to the French and pre-Castro Cuba. The New York families didn’t just sell dope on their hometown streets, they middle-manned it to organized crime outfits in Chicago, Kansas City, San Francisco, and elsewhere. Once Prohibition was repealed, the Mafia, rich from the spoils of the illegal liquor racket, foregrounded heroin as a central illegal commodity. Through the thirties and forties what began in America as a legal middle-class drugstore abuse became a criminal problem initially confined mostly to working-class whites. With organized crime’s help, heroin was here to stay and New York remains its black-market American hometown today.

  Dresser meanwhile grew wealthy and increasingly eccentric. His arrogance and habit of bringing a fat pet dachshund with him everywhere alienated his more straitlaced lab-coated colleagues. It didn’t matter. The marketplace fallback that made Dresser rich enough to leave the pharmaceutical business behind and that kept Bayer afloat was another drug synthesized on Dresser’s watch—ASA, or, as it became known commercially, aspirin. Set up in an academic research institute bearing his name, Dresser was beyond the pain of embarrassment. He may have been beyond pain of any kind. Rumors circulated that he was not only heroin’s biggest champion but also a user himself. He died rich the same year that the United States pulled the plug of legal use and manufacture of his great discovery. The legacy he inadvertently left behind was Bayer aspirin and generations of fucked-up lives in the addict capital—New York City—and all over the world.

  The memory of those dealers I’d seen selling heroin at the Avenue D projects on the way to the police academy was still fresh. Dope was where the action was and Alphabet City was where the dope was. As soon as I had enough time in, I put in a transfer to PSA 4 on the Lower East Side. Jack caught wind of it almost before the ink was dry on the forms.

  “What’s this I hear about you going to the City?” he asked me after roll call.

  “Yeah, I’m transferring,” I told him. There wasn’t much more to be said and I already was feeling a little guilty.

  “Well be careful down there,” Jack offered. “There’s a lot of dope, a lot of cash, and where there’s cash there’s dirty cops and where there’s dirty cops, there’s IA.”

  I shrugged my shoulders. “I’ll be okay, Jack.”

  He gave me a weird smile for a second, and then walked away. I could tell he was disappointed—disappointed that I didn’t see Coney Island as enough of a challenge or a home as he did and disappointed that whatever camaraderie he’d awakened between Philly, Louie, and me wouldn’t be enough for us all to keep working together. We were a big success for him, and he was proud of us.

  If I had any doubts about Alphabet City being where the action was, they didn’t last long. I logged my first dope bust there before I even officially reported for duty. A few weeks before I was scheduled to start working I dropped by my new Command to check things out. After dumping some stuff in my locker, I decided to take a drive around my new beat. What I saw was shocking. Even though it was January and one of the coldest days so far that year, there were dope deals taking place on nearly every corner I passed. Junkies and dealers shivered together, exchanged dope and money, and parted company. A group of users followed one after the other into an abandoned building lobby being used as a “toilet” or a designated spot to shoot up indoors. Some nodded in front of liquor stores. Others stumbled out into the street from between parked cars. Seemingly immune to the cold and gravity, one guy stood on the corner of Avenue D and Fourth Street bent over nearly ninety degrees at the waist in a full nod without toppling over. As I turned the corner I saw him take a tiny step forward to sort of regain his balance, even though he was dead to the world. Predatory kids were just about licking their chops as they gathered in small groups and eyed potential victims among the visiting dope users who had to get in, cop, and get out without being robbed. It was worse than what I saw driving to the academy a few years before. But now I had a badge and a few years in so it just looked like there was a collar on every corner.

  I knew that if I was really going to catch bad guys, I was going to have to bend the rules to do it. And if you’re going to improvise, you need people around you that aren’t married to the Patrol Guide, either. One of the guys I met at the academy was a kid na
med Gio from a Brooklyn neighborhood like mine. Growing up in a neighborhood with divided loyalties gave me a pretty accurate moral barometer and I recognized the same thing in him. Gio was clearly a knock-around guy and like me took a similar outlook when it came to doing things 100 percent by the book. Crooks always operate on the assumption that the ends justify the means. And I knew for myself and I suspected in Gio that we both had a similar philosophy when it came to our side of the law.

  Gio had turned up in PSA 1 for a few weeks during part of his training. We’d worked together then and kept in touch after he was transferred to Alphabet City. When I told him I was making the move to his precinct, he set the wheels in motion at his command and arranged with his sergeant for the two of us to be in the same squad once I got there. Part of the deal he cut was an unofficial agreement that we’d work the roughest sector of what was already a really rough piece of criminal real estate.

  After my driving tour of the LES, I met up with Gio and his partner Gene, who I’d be replacing once I started work for real.

  “You guys looking to collar up?” I asked them, window to window with their marked RMP.

  “Sure,” Gio said, sizing me up. “Why not? If you can get us a collar, of course we’ll take it.” We didn’t know each other’s sense of humor yet and the way Gio said it, I felt like he thought he was calling my bluff. I wasn’t bluffing.

  “Cool,” I said. “How about I go back outside and look and see who’s dealing. I’ll find somebody, make sure he’s dirty and come back and get you guys. How’s that?” Gio nodded.

  “Okay.” Gene shrugged and nodded, too.

  I slipped my snubnose .38 deep down the small of my back, put handcuffs in my pocket, threw my badge under the front seat, got out of my car and headed for Avenue C and Fifth Street, just a few blocks away from where we had met up. Sure enough, right on the corner in front of me was a Hispanic guy standing around in the freezing cold, looking sort of pissed off and resigned to the fact that he wasn’t going home anytime soon. It dawned on me suddenly that I’d never done this before. Sure I’d nailed junkies coming out of a liquor store front on Coney Island, and collared guys for possession, but I’d never bought drugs off anyone in my life, let alone pretended to in order to arrest them. What if he ignored me? What if he ran for it?