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Battlefield report: BUYS, BUSTS and BAD GUYS
There is nothing glamorous on the front lines
of the war on drugs on the South Shore
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AMELIA KUNHARDT/The Patriot Ledger Police say there have been frequent drug deals near the corner of Belmont and Main streets in downtown Brockton. |
In downtown Brockton, construction crews are expanding the public library, a new courthouse presides over Main Street and skinny kids with their toughest faces screwed on lounge around outside the YMCA.
The district attorney’s office is less than 100 yards away, but low-level drug dealers have become so comfortable on their corners they’ve stopped going through the motions of hiding their business.
The drug problem is like a stubborn root here. It burrows underneath the city, destabilizing already rickety three-family homes and overrunning neighborhoods with filth, addicts and crime.
| Brockton is a drug hub. People from other South Shore towns travel there to buy drugs, and Brockton dealers bring their merchandise to the suburbs. |
And yet Brockton is lifting itself up by its bootstraps. Many crack houses are parking lots now. Trouble spots have been dismantled and cast off one block at a time.
The city is taking big steps, but the road ahead is longer than the one behind.
For three months, undercover State Police officers from the Plymouth County District Attorney’s office have cruised Main Street, buying cocaine, heroin, marijuana and anything else people shoot, snort or smoke.
They are targeting low-level dealers who “pump,” or sell, along Main Street.
Brockton is a drug hub. People from other South Shore towns travel there to buy drugs, and Brockton dealers bring their merchandise to the suburbs. Law enforcement successes in Brockton directly influence the suburban communities on the South Shore.
State Police Sgt. Tony Thomas, on the drug beat since 1987, sits parked in his undercover car, watching the crack whores glide by, the junkies scuttling across the street and kids playing “dealer.”
This isn’t the big time. The people on the corners are addicts, not entrepreneurs, and they sell drugs or disrobe to support their habits.
“I sometimes wonder how they went wrong,” Thomas says as he eyes the scene through binoculars. “Where’s that fork in the road where these people get taken down? They were something before this.”
Thomas has chestnut hair, olive skin and powerful hands. He is 40 and dresses sharply from his Bill Blass ties to his Allen Edmonds shoes.
“I made a buy from a kid who was 9 years old,” Thomas says, wincing. “The dealer had a 9-year-old deliver the heroin.”
Kids are everywhere. They ride by on chrome BMX bikes, dressed like “gangstas” in MTV videos. Some are so young they look like they’d have a tough time swinging a baseball bat.
The older dealers are gaunt and they look dirty. There’s no heroin chic here, just the ugly red boil that is addiction.
A team of state troopers and Brockton officers has been buying drugs from the dealers for three months. They’ve made more than 30 buys and will be back in a few weeks to round up the people who sold to them.
“Look, there they are,” Thomas says, pointing at two undercover officers as they approach the dealers.
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AMELIA KUNHARDT/The Patriot Ledger Plymouth County Assistant District Attorney Glenn MacKinlay reads a list of the names of accused drug dealers taken into custody during a bust. |
The agents go undercover carefully and they dress the part. One wears rolled up sweat pants and a V-neck undershirt. The other opted for the burnt-out hippie look, more Jimmy Buffet than P. Diddy.
The dealers slouch irreverently outside Sweeney’s, a local bar. Police have busted patrons for everything from brawling to dealing drugs.
It is early afternoon and the junkies congregate like vultures, forcing those who work downtown to step around them or walk on the opposite side of the street.
“The problems are magnified in the cities because you have more people,” Thomas says of the open-air drug market. “The people in small towns go to urban areas to get drugs.”
The dealers know most of their customers, but they’ll take new ones with a few questions. If an undercover agent can complete a buy, it is more likely the dealer will end up in jail.
“An agent’s testimony is a lot stronger than any other,” Thomas says. “He can testify in the first person because he participated in it. There’s no hearsay involved.”
Through the looking glass of Thomas’ windshield, everybody seems suspicious. Unremarkable activities take on a menacing quality.
A man pauses in front of the dealers before he crosses the street, and Thomas notices.
| “There’s a war out
there,” he says. “I don’t know if we’ll win the war, but every battle we
fight, we’ll win that. As soon as we arrest someone, there’s another person
we need to get. We’re in it for the long haul.” – State Police Sgt. Tony Thomas |
A teenager chats on his cell phone and leans against a chain-link fence. Again, Thomas takes an interest.
People walk by, ride their bikes or run errands, and Thomas assesses.
He uses his eyes, his ears and his instincts to separate the menace from the masses.
A run-down woman limps by and lingers near the car. Her eyes seem hollow. Thomas says she has been exchanging sex for drugs for years. She knows Thomas is a cop, that he’s sitting less than 50 feet away from the dealers, but she doesn’t walk over to tell them right away. Eventually she leaves.
The undercover agents arrive outside the entrance to the bar. They are wired and Thomas can hear every word they say through a speaker in his back seat. They lean against the building and pass the time shifting from one foot to the other, criss-crossing their arms and watching the cars pass by.
They don’t have to wait for long.
“What you need?” a dealer mumbles in view of more than 20 pedestrians.
‘‘Dope,’’ the agent tells him. Dope is slang for heroin.
“Are you a cop?” the dealer asks. “You look like a cop.”
“I ain’t no cop, man,” the hippie says, sounding angry. “I’m just doing my. ...”
“You look like a cop. I don’t know you,” the dealer says and makes like he’s going to walk away.
The line goes quiet. The agents act annoyed.
“People here know me,” the agent says. “I’m around.”
After a bit more foreplay, the dealer decides the cops are legit.
He doesn’t have the heroin on him but asks the agents for $10, saying he’ll be right back with the dope.
He leaves his driver’s license with them, “as security,” and sets off to get the drugs.
Thomas says every junkie is a con artist and tries to charge too much, sell molasses instead of heroin or powder instead of coke.
While the dealer is gone, the agent reads his name and address out loud. Thomas writes it down.
The dealer returns and escorts the agents to an area with less foot traffic, but the exchange takes place in plain sight.
The agents get a used KENO ticket with a thick blob of what the dealer calls heroin on it. It looks like creamy excrement smeared on paper.
A lab test later determined the substance was counterfeit. But the dealer will be charged with selling a counterfeit substance and, if convicted, could serve up to a year in jail.
Catching dealers is an imprecise science. Sometimes, they get away without being identified. Other times, they rip off the police.
The prostitute who lingered near Thomas’ car appears in front of Sweeney’s and tells the dealers and the two undercover agents that Thomas is watching them.
“He’s over there,” she says, pointing at Thomas, who is parked within sight. The dealers and the undercover agents stare directly at him.
“Later,” one agent says, acting put out by Thomas’ presence. The dealers nod good-bye and go into the bar with the prostitute. The agents cross the street and head out of sight.
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AMELIA KUNHARDT/The Patriot Ledger State Police Sgt. Tony Thomas, center, confers with Brockton Detective Jeff Costello, left, and State Trooper Rich Long before heading out to round up a group of drug dealers. |
The police are going after the dealers with hopes that removing them will improve the downtown Brockton experience. There is no need for confrontation. The police have what they came for, their cover is intact and they’ll return another day to make their arrests.
Thomas pulls out and heads to a prearranged rendezvous point.
“It’s a quality of life issue. Merchants are complaining,” Thomas says. “Dealers are selling on downtown streets. They asked us to do something. ... In time, they’ll go to jail.”
He doesn’t expect the dealers to stay away forever.
“I believe they’ll move out for a period of time,” Thomas says. “Six months, maybe a year.”
In the worst neighborhoods of Brockton, there are good people. They’re new to the area or they’ve been there most of their lives.
In one of the roughest residential sections of town, an 85-year-old grandmother lives on the second floor of a two-family home she’s owned for 50 years. She asked not to be identified by name.
“It’s terrible around here,” she says over ginger ale in her kitchen. “It was wonderful when I moved here.”
The woman lives around the block from the house she grew up in. She’s less than a quarter mile from the section of Main Street where the police are making their undercover buys.
“I don’t rent it out no more,” she says of the vacant first-floor apartment beneath her. “Good people don’t move here no more.”
She says 11 people live in one neighborhood apartment and it’s “drugs galore.”
The woman is a spunky “natural” brunette, her house is spotless and she passes her time listening to a police scanner that sits on her kitchen table.
“I love this neighborhood,” she says, gripping her kitchen table. “I don’t want to leave it. I want to die here. I lock the doors, stay inside and I watch things. Do you see the filth?”
The street outside is dirty. Houses on the block and neighboring streets are boarded up. Some were once crack houses. Others nearby still are.
“We’ve got pigs around here,” she says. “Litterbugs. They’re selling drugs. The nice neighbors down the street say, ‘Does anybody in this neighborhood sleep at night?’ And I say it’s quiet now in the middle of the day. They’re sleeping now.”
A month has passed since the undercover buy on Main Street and in that time police have gotten warrants to arrest 22 dealers who sold them drugs.
Today they will round up those they can find. The operation begins at 11 a.m.
The officers gather in the parking lot of the Brockton police station. They team up in twos and travel in groups.
The first stop is Stillman Street, inside a Brockton Housing Authority development.
“Nobody knows what they’ll find until you go through the door,” says State Police Detective Lt. Bruce Gordon, Thomas’ supervisor. “Two years ago, you hit a door and one out of 10 locations you’d find a weapon. Today you find a weapon at 6 out of 10.”
Three carloads of officers in T-shirts with “Brockton Police Department” and “State Police” silk-screened on them pull into the Stillman Apartments, a 121-unit cluster of two-story buildings that look more like brick boxes than homes.
The officers approach numbers 56 and 62, where suspects Margaret Y. Mack and Jennifer E. Robinson live.
Their neighbors trickle outside and stand warily by their doors, watching the police. In minutes, more than 30 people have gathered.
Neither suspect is home. A neighbor says Mack is at Wal-Mart buying a dehumidifier and Robinson has been away for “a while.”
“Let’s drive around,” Thomas says. “They never venture far.”
From the car, Thomas scans broken sidewalks, empty side streets and overgrown parking lots.
“There’s a war out there,” he says. “I don’t know if we’ll win the war, but every battle we fight, we’ll win that. As soon as we arrest someone, there’s another person we need to get. We’re in it for the long haul. We’ll continue to do it until we’re done. We’re law enforcement officers. We know what our job is. I’m never going to give up.”
Voices of other cops crackle over the radio.
“We just got the suspect over at Wal-Mart,” one says, announcing they’ve arrested Mack.
Thomas smiles, but his satisfaction doesn’t last for long.
As he drives down Main Street, a known dealer sees him and puts his hands up high, his palms flat against a building and spreads them in a “V.”
It is an exaggerated “Come and arrest me” dance - and the dealer shakes his head and wiggles his butt, daring Thomas to arrest him.
The man knows the heat is on and figures, correctly, if Thomas had anything on him, he’d have arrested him already.
“He’s been out there for a while,” Thomas says. “But we don’t have him this time.”
NUMBERS
Click
to see graphic showing the high profit of crack
184
Arrests in one year in Brockton for selling or manufacturing drugs
159
Arrests in one year in Brockton for possession of drugs
60
People under 18 arrested in Brockton in one year for selling or manufacturing drugs
15,000
Deaths each year in the U.S. directly caused by using illegal drugs
500,000
People in U.S. jails and prisons exclusively on drug charges
$15B
Annual cost to U.S. health care system from illegal drug use