Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (14 page)

“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 laughed 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 fashion
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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—the
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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 alcohol
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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 Center
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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.”

His little eight-year-old self felt happy. It was a moment when his mother most appeared to love him.

Deborah appeared every now and then in Chino’s life after that, but infrequently, in manic jags. Why did she keep circling back? “I think her circumstances didn’t allow her love for me to ever fruitfully grow,” Chino speculates. “The seedling hatched, it pulled out [of] the ground, but it never bore any fruit.”

He always wanted boys’ toys, especially GI Joes. He only liked the toy oven he had been given because he could melt the GI Joes’ heads in it. “My grandmother had to beat me into a dress,” he remembers. From about eight years old, he pushed his hair up, demanded to be called Jason, and put socks down his underwear. His grandmother asked him why, and he said that “being a girl sucks. And in my life, it did suck.”

Deborah was the first person ever to punch Chino in the face. When he was twelve, Chino found his mother sleeping in a bush behind the house, and he was embarrassed and angered—anybody could see her, homeless, openly gay, filthy—and so he turned the hose on her. He figured he had enough time between Deborah getting up and him getting back into the house, but he miscalculated—so Deborah “lumps me up like Mike Tyson,” as he put it.

Chino learned to lash out first whenever his mother appeared: he threw a pot at her out of a window once and cracked Deborah’s head open. He threw scissors out the window and opened up Deborah’s finger, so the next day she caught Chino after school, and beat him again. And yet sometimes Chino went looking for Deborah, in the park, on the benches, or on the corner where should could be looking for business, because Chino wanted her. Usually, she was nowhere to be found.