Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (13 page)

The police didn’t want to investigate the murder—they didn’t want to lift the lid and unleash on themselves all the criminal and official forces swirling around Rothstein’s corpse.
⁶¹
“It was as if no one,
⁶²
lawman or criminal wanted to be close to this murder in any way,” Rothstein’s biographer, Nick Tosches, wrote. Eventually, a rival gambler named George McManus was charged with the murder, but he was acquitted by the jury.
⁶³
From then, Tosches says, “until today, the mystery has grown. Speculation has run and roamed wildly in a desire to identify not only the hand that pulled the trigger, but also the interplay of hidden forces that controlled the hand.”

It was only a year after I first learned about this, on the streets of the deadliest city in the world, Ciudad Juárez, that I realized the significance of that moment.

This was the bullet at the birth of drug prohibition, and nobody knows where it came from, even now. It is like the bullet that claimed the Archduke Ferdinand at the start of the First World War: the first shot in a global massacre.

Rothstein’s domination of the East Coast drug trade shattered as that trigger was pulled—from that moment on, drug dealers would be engaged in a constant conflict to control the distribution of drugs.

The drug war analyst Charles Bowden says there are in reality two drug wars going on: there is the war on drugs, where the state wages war on the users and addicts, and then there is the war for drugs,
⁶⁴
where the criminals fight each other to control the trade.

The war for drugs was launched in earnest in the Park Central Hotel in Manhattan as Arnold Rothstein lay bleeding.

There would be many more bullets, but I was going to learn on my journey that Arnold Rothstein has not yet died. Every time he is killed, a harder and more vicious version of him emerges to fill the space provided by prohibition for a global criminal industry. Arnold Rothstein is the start of a lineup of criminals that runs through the Crips and the Bloods and Pablo Escobar to Chapo Guzman—each more vicious because he was strong enough to kill the last. As Harry Anslinger wrote in 1961: “One group rose to power over the corpses of another.”
⁶⁵
It is Darwinian evolution
⁶⁶
armed with a machine gun and a baggie of crack.

And I was going to see that, like Rothstein, Harry Anslinger is reincarnated in ever-tougher forms, too. Before this war is over, his successors were going to be deploying gunships along the coasts of America, imprisoning more people than any other society in human history, and spraying poisons from the air across foreign countries thousands of miles away from home to kill their drug crops. The key players in the war continue to be either Anslingers or Rothsteins—the prohibitionist and the gangster, locked together in a tango unto the far horizon. The policy of prohibition summoned these characters into existence, because it needs them. So long as it lives, they live.

The scream that tore through Harry Anslinger, the bullet that tore through Arnold Rothstein, and the laws that tore through Edward Williams’s medical practice—they are part of all our lives, whether we have a direct relationship to illegal drugs or not.

To see how that came to be, seventy years later I traveled from city to city and realized I had come to understand these dynamics best through the stories of three people.

One was trying to be Arnold Rothstein.

One was trying to be Harry Anslinger.

And one was sitting outside on her porch, playing with a doll.

Part II

Ghosts

Chapter 5

Souls of Mischief

I closed the files on Harry and Arnold and Billie and resolved to find myself a drug dealer. I wanted to see how the dynamics set in train by these men so long ago were playing out today, not only in academic papers or in polemics about the drug war but on the actual street corners of New York City, where Arnold fought and Billie died. The scraps left to history can only get you so far. It was time for me to watch the drug war’s history unfold in real time.

A friend of mine
¹
who works in drug policy reform in New York gave me the number of a person called Chino Hardin. Go meet him, he said. Nobody can explain it better.

I first met Chino outside a diner in Greenwich Village. He walked into my life smoking, and he has been smoking almost continuously ever since. His hair was tied back tightly, and a bright bandana covered his head. He was wearing a big baggy sweater with the Incredible Hulk on it: he was waving his big green fist at the world. His voice, I noticed, was deep and husky.

We took our seats in the diner and Chino watched me carefully as I told him what I wanted to know—how drug dealing works from the inside. I couldn’t tell if he was suspicious or anxious, but I was aware he was sizing me up. And then he said to me, quite abruptly, as if he had made a decision: “I grew up in East Flatbush, Brooklyn . . . I was born in Kings County Hospital, down the road from my house.” And from that starting point, in interview after interview, we talked through the story of his life. We would continue talking about it for three years and counting.

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 years
²
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.
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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.”
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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.