TROUBLE ON TUPPER

Crack dealers and junkies are disrupting life in downtown Shaughnessy
Village and residents wonder what they can do about it

Gazette reporter Sidhartha Banerjee spent the last month shadowing drug
dealers and junkies in what has become one of downtown's busiest crack
areas. What follows is an account of residents being held hostage as brash
dealers sell crack round the clock and take over the neighbourhood, just
blocks away from a Montreal police nerve centre on Guy St.

Showtime.

It's just before midnight and like clockwork everyone is in place. Two
lookouts have positioned themselves at the corner of Fort and Tupper Sts.,
in front of a highrise apartment.

Apart from looking out for police cars and potential clients, they have to
keep an eye in the air. Some people have resorted to tossing water-filled
balloons to get them away from the curb.

At the corner of Lambert Closse and Sussex Sts., two others have taken up
their lookout posts. The lineups start - junkies, addicts and homeless
people.

Periodically through the night, suppliers and moneymen pull up to different
apartment blocks on Tupper, driving expensive cars with their stereos
blaring rap music. In the last three nights, a BMW, a PT Cruiser and a
Lincoln Navigator have been the ride of choice.

The suppliers and moneymen go in through a front entrance, but always leave
by a side door or fire escape. They are always gone within half an hour.

It used to be that everyone would go in individually and the sound of the
door buzzer could be heard throughout the night. With experience, though,
the dealers have gotten smarter; now one person goes in for everyone.

At street level, meanwhile, dealers travel in packs of two or three -
sometimes more. Occasionally, there is even a prostitute with them.
Sometimes dealers from rival groups chase each other through the darkened
alleyways that also double as a place to get high in privacy. This game will
go on late into the morning, and possibly long after the sun is up.

It's what residents of Tupper - in the heart of the Shaughnessy Village -
have had to deal with most nights for the last few months, ever since drug
dens started to spring up and apartment units were turned into crack houses
almost overnight.

"What the f--- are you looking at?" a dealer snarls at a fellow tenant who
has stopped between floors to glare at him.

The stare-down continues for a few seconds before they both go to their
respective apartments. It's just another unsettling moment when you share an
apartment building or a neighbourhood with drug dealers.

A typical week on Tupper might go like this:

A female tenant in her early 20s has her breasts grabbed by a junkie. It's 4
p.m. and she's heading up to her apartment while he's trying to make his way
downstairs, obviously high and one step away from a tumble.

A Longueuil man is arrested on an outstanding warrant. Police nab him after
a tenant calls 911 about a man on her fire escape trying to get into her
bedroom. Other neighbours rat him out. He, conveniently, has no ID on him.
He is spotted back in the area later in the week.

Three junkies lose their rock of crack down a sewer. After yelling at each
other briefly, they spend nearly two hours fishing in the sewer for it.
Lifting off the heavy manhole cover, the three shabbily dressed men first
use a stick to try to pick it out of the filth. When that fails, they take
turns hopping into the sewer. They never find the rock.

After repeatedly warning a drug supplier not to come back to their building,
residents throw him down a flight of stairs and out the front door. But the
man returns soon after.

And it's only Wednesday.

Jeff Allain is a 28-year-old professional who lives in one of the more
problematic buildings on the street, near the corner of Fort and Tupper Sts.

Until recently, he hadn't had a decent night's sleep in months. The junkies
yelling outside his second-floor apartment and the constant sound of the
door buzzer and footsteps going up and down the stairs was enough to drive
anyone mad.

When he'd get home, Allain says, he would see crack addicts sitting in the
hallways or dealers and suppliers coming in and out.

Just to be safe, he has added a few more locks to his door.

"There's a serious housing shortage in Montreal, and it's not that this is
such a great catch that I'm going to stay here for the rest of my life," he
says.

"But this is my home. And your home is supposed to be your sanctuary and
it's supposed to be a safe place. That's not the case now."

Allain's building houses mainly young professionals who work in graphic
design, marketing, technical support and pharmaceuticals.

They are all between 25 and 28 years old and make decent money, but they are
paying off debts and student loans, and can't take on the added burden of a
mortgage.

Most of them say they got more than they bargained for when they moved in.

Four women have been attacked in the building - by junkies for not handing
over money and by dealers who see themselves as untouchable. None of the
women has had her apartment broken into, but they all have a story about a
run-in with a dealer or an addict.

John, a student who lives in the neighbourhood, remembers a particularly
sweltering hot summer day when he was cooking in his kitchen and an addict
wandered into his apartment through an open door.

"I freaked," he says. "I just started yelling at him, 'Get the hell out!'

"Now I keep all my doors and windows locked."

Keeping your windows closed goes without question if you live in a
downstairs apartment.

"We don't dare (leave a window open)," says a female student who lives in a
ground-floor unit.

"If we leave the windows open, the junkies try to get in - if the dealers
don't let them in."

Ask any resident who lives in the area of Fort and Tupper, and he or she
will be able to identify just about every crack dealer, supplier, lookout,
junkie, drug runner, money man and prostitute in the area. They know some of
them by name and others by appearance. They know the apartment buildings
where they're located and which number to buzz to get inside. Some can even
quote you a price if you're looking for a rock or two.

Apartment dweller Martin Hasler, a resident of Tupper for six years, says
the number of non-drug users walking on the street has dwindled to almost
nothing.

"When you start walking down the street and you've got a couple of guys
hanging around one corner and people coming out of the shadows, the
doorways, the alleyways, and sitting on the stoops ...," Hasler says. "It's
screwed up. This wasn't a drug-infested area before. Now, there's always a
lineup of druggies."

In some of the buildings, junkies line up behind law-abiding residents to
try to get inside the dealers' apartments.

Hasler doesn't get many visitors.

"My friends don't even visit any more. They tell me, 'No thanks man, you're
in the ghetto,' " he says.

Some women who have to walk along Tupper opt for the middle of the street
rather than the sidewalk.

"This way I don't have to get harassed," says one woman who has parked her
car and is walking toward a high-rise near Fort. "It's just easier this
way."

In recent days, Montreal police have noticeably stepped up their presence in
the form of foot patrols and cars circling the neighbourhood. Just knowing
they're around reassures some residents.

Personal security is taken seriously for residents who live in the area. A
lot of them feel threatened.

One woman says that when she leaves her home on Tupper to walk the half
block to the Canada Post offices on Ste. Catherine and Fort Sts., she makes
sure all three locks in her apartment are secure and the alarm is set.

Some residents take it a step farther and feel obliged to carry weapons or
sleep with them near their bed.

"You can never be too safe," says one resident, who doesn't live in any of
the apartment buildings where dealers have set up shop, but has had a run-in
with them. "Are you going to assume that some crackhead is just joking
around? Any crackhead who needs another fix will do somebody for 50 cents if
they have to."

Residents of the crack-infested apartment buildings and general
neighbourhood say they often sleep with weapons to feel safe. And they carry
them while on the streets. Such items include:

BB gun,

axe,

baseball bat,

long hunting knife,

X-Acto knife,

pepper spray.

"We might not all tell you what we carry," one resident says, "but none of
us wants to be caught in the street with our hands in our pockets."

Jason is in his mid-20s and by no means a small guy. His family has lived in
the neighbourhood for about eight years. He's never felt unsafe walking the
streets. But he started questioning that after a dealer threatened him when
Jason helped to have him arrested for breaking and entering.

"We can't let them push us out," Jason says. "We're not going to sell and
leave, because, by cowering, we're not going to get anywhere."

Talk to the dealers and they plead innocence and ignorance.

One says constant police intervention is nothing more than harassment.

"We didn't do anything. This is harassment; it's not illegal to have people
over at your apartment," he says shortly after police stop him. He declines
to give his name, but adds: "If they wanted to arrest me, they should do it;
if not, leave me alone."

The dealers walk around like they own the place. They come in all shapes and
sizes. They are young and old, loud and brash. And during the summer months,
they get louder and bolder.

At one point this summer, the dealers started handing out business cards as
a way to land more clients. The card bears a company name, OPM (a play on
opium) Holdings, with a pager number to call and place an order. A line at
the bottom of the card reads: "Blessed be thy name."

"I couldn't believe it," says one Tupper St. resident. "I didn't believe it
until I saw it myself."

A Seymour St. resident adds: "That's a real slap in the face to the people
who live here and it's just shameless on the dealers' part."

But it's clear why they chose the Shaughnessy Village area.

Tupper St., the heart of the Village, is a collection of older heritage
homes and apartment buildings at the western tip of the Ville Marie borough.

It's quiet, largely residential and easily accessible. It's why people like
to live here.

It also provides a great spot from which to deal. There are few street
lights and at night the alleyways and laneways are extremely dark. A tunnel
provides escape routes into St. Henri and Little Burgundy if, and when,
police officers arrive.

It's not uncommon to spot someone smoking or shooting up in the back
laneways behind Tupper St. homes, or in the dark alleys of Hope St. or
Seymour St.

A local resident who asked that she not be identified was walking in a lane
with her 21/2-year-old granddaughter when they found a makeshift crack pipe
fashioned out of a medicine bottle and a plastic tube.

Other residents say they have spotted people openly defecating in laneways
or having sex. Others have found needles. It's not uncommon to find cars
broken into the next morning or homes that have been vandalized.

Tupper St. resident Greg Parent once heard a compressor had been stolen from
a Seymour St. porch. The two junkies who'd swiped it, not knowing what the
object was, offered to sell it to him as "a motor" early one morning.

With the dealers came the junkies.

With the junkies came the rash of break-ins, as the junkies looked for
anything that could be peddled for a quick buck and get them their fix.

Police confirm a story from almost six weeks ago. A woman was asleep in bed
when she heard a noise in the middle of the night from the first floor.

"Who is it?" she called down.

"It's Peter," a voice replied out of the darkness.

"What do you want, Peter?" she asked, still in bed.

"I want $20," he said.

She said she only had $10, and the man took the money and left.

He had offered to leave through the window he came in through, but the woman
insisted he leave through the front door.