CROSSING THE LINE

One morning three years ago, Ansley Hamid was awakened by a thumping on
his door. First, the anthropologist says, he thought it might be the
pest-control man. It wasn't. "This is the police. Open up!" Groggy and
shirtless, Mr. Hamid complied, peering out above the security chain.

He asked if he could get dressed and began to close the door. But one of
the federal agents stuck his toe inside, keeping it open. Once the
professor let them in, there was a flash of activity: four men, one woman,
guns, badges. They took pictures, looked in closets. There was talk of
misusing a federal grant, of snorting heroin, of arrest.

Minutes later Mr. Hamid was handcuffed and heading for jail. The next
morning, his arrest made headlines. The New York Daily News trumpeted: "Nab
Drug-Study Prof in $2.6M Grant Scam." The New York Times was more
restrained: "Prosecutors Say Scholar Misused Funds and Drugs." Then the
television reporters arrived, including one who had interviewed Mr. Hamid
back when the City University of New York professor was prophesying the end
of the crack epidemic.

The final indignity came over the phone one morning when a radio disc
jockey called. "Are you naked and getting high and listening to Mariah
Carey?" he asked the stunned professor, who had been accused of using grant
money to buy albums by the pop diva. "Could you just say 'Mariah Carey' for
our listeners?"

Mr. Hamid, after a suspension and a fight to keep his tenure, is retiring
from John Jay College of Criminal Justice. The criminal charges of
embezzling and misusing federal grant money, though eventually dismissed,
spelled the end of his academic career.

Those 1999 news reports provided only a glimpse of the more complicated
truth. The heroin use, which Mr. Hamid later admitted to but was never
charged with, made juicy copy. Beneath the headlines, however, troubling
questions remain. Did an anthropologist lose his career because he "went
native"? Could John Jay have handled his management failures without losing
a professor whom even his critics call brilliant? Or did Mr. Hamid act so
irresponsibly that his fate was a foregone conclusion?

With the legal battles over his dismissal finally complete and his official
connection to John Jay College of Criminal Justice ending in January 2003,
Mr. Hamid is left to wonder where his career went. He says it's simple:
Jealous colleagues bent on destroying him conspired against him, like Iago
against Othello. But others on the stage in this drama don't see the Moor,
as Mr. Hamid calls himself at times, but instead a tragic man brought low
by his own hubris.

Maybe the answers lie in his own words. When first accused of using heroin,
he denied it in a letter to the federal drug-abuse agency that gave him a
grant to study heroin users. In a deadly accurate foretelling of his own
troubles, he wrote that the only way to explain an ethnographer's getting
high with drug users he is studying is "bravado, a folly bordering on
insanity, or a will to professional suicide."

Hitting the Jackpot

It took years for Ansley Hamid, or "Andy" as everyone calls him, to hit the
big time. He wasn't unknown, but he wasn't a star either. The professor,
who earned his Ph.D. from Teachers College of Columbia University in 1980,
came to John Jay in 1985, carving out a niche as an ethnographer of drug
users and dealers and developing theories on the life cycles of drug markets.

John Jay was a strange fit for Mr. Hamid. The college is home to many
former and future law-enforcement officers and policy makers. Mr. Hamid
doesn't look the part. His dreadlocks long ago disappeared from his
now-balding pate, but his beard is white and frizzy, like Santa Claus if he
were an East Indian from the Caribbean. One former student says she loved
it that, unlike so many of her strait-laced professors, Mr. Hamid was a
"wack-job hippie."

Mr. Hamid received small grants during his early years at John Jay, but in
1996, he struck the mother lode. The National Institute on Drug Abuse gave
the college and Mr. Hamid $3.1-million to study heroin culture in New York
City. It seemed like a mountain of money to an anthropologist used to
scraping together awards of $50,000 or $100,000. It was the largest grant
John Jay had ever been awarded, and the "Heroin in the 21st Century"
project catapulted Mr. Hamid to the top of the pecking order. Within
months, the college was told informally that Mr. Hamid and his team would
get another $3.1-million grant, this one on the convergence of
international drug markets. It was the pinnacle of his career. In time, it
would prove to be his ruination.

The grants were won by Mr. Hamid and his longtime friend Richard Curtis.
The two met in the mid-1970s, when they were studying applied anthropology
at Teachers College with Lambros Comitas, a renowned Caribbeanist.

Mr. Hamid and Mr. Curtis formed an unlikely pair. Born in Trinidad to
upper-class Indian parents, Mr. Hamid is boisterous and effusive. Mr.
Curtis, a white man from Maine and a decade younger, is calmer and more
measured. Over time though, they became close. Mr. Curtis looked after Mr.
Hamid's young sons, and for a while, after Mr. Hamid's first marriage
ended, the two shared an apartment.

Years later, Mr. Hamid backed the hiring of Mr. Curtis as an adjunct
professor at John Jay, even though Mr. Curtis's graduate work had stalled.
Mr. Hamid says he encouraged his friend to finish his Ph.D., thinking it
would make the two a stronger team on their joint applications. He even
lobbied at Columbia to get Mr. Curtis his degree nearly 20 years after he
started. "If Andy didn't push it through me," says Mr. Comitas, "[Mr.
Curtis] wouldn't have gotten his Ph.D."

After the big money arrived, the two became inseparable. They would spend
the morning together, working on the project at Mr. Hamid's home near
campus. Then they'd walk to the college gym for a lengthy workout --
StairMaster, abdominal exercises, and a 100 laps in the pool, swimming in
neighboring lanes.

The Limit of Loyalty

When different people describe Mr. Hamid, it is difficult to believe
they're all talking about the same person. Lisa Maher, who worked with him
when she was a Ph.D. student, describes him as demanding, rigorous, and
"the best teacher I ever had." Serena Nanda, a professor emerita of
anthropology at John Jay, says his research was first rate, and she liked
him personally.

A former researcher on the project, who requested anonymity, agrees that
"Andy got a bum rap." But even he says the professor was arrogant and, at
times, irrational. Others describe a man high on his own success, cursing
at his staff, ignoring rules he didn't like. Judith McGuire, who worked on
the heroin project as a student, sums up the views of many of his critics:
"I think he's really intelligent. And I think he's out of his mind."

During the first summer of the grant, "I got no guidance from Andy other
than screaming and yelling," says Travis Wendel, then a graduate student
and among the first researchers Mr. Hamid hired for the project. Ms.
McGuire says the authority Mr. Hamid had been given to run the project went
to his head, and that the professor once screamed at her until she cried.
"Andy has to be the alpha dog," she says. "And if he's threatened, he
lashes out."

His own memorandums to the staff depict a self-reverential researcher. One
time, in asserting his right to make decisions about the project, he wrote:
"A democratic committee couldn't spend Picasso's $7-million grant ... only
Picasso could paint Picasso, with assistants Picasso chose."

Mr. Wendel, whom Mr. Hamid eventually fired with what the younger
researcher calls a curse-laden tirade, says the professor once challenged
him to a fight. Mr. Curtis, however, tried not to take sides. "Ric was kind
of like the mother with the abusive husband: 'Oh, he doesn't really mean
it,'" says Mr. Wendel. "Ric was trying to promote peace, and Andy was just
nuts."

But in the fall of 1997, Mr. Curtis's loyalty to his old friend
disappeared. Mr. Hamid showed Mr. Curtis a draft of a letter firing him,
accusing him of unprofessional behavior that "seriously set back our work."
Mr. Curtis went to the department chairman and told him about the letter
and of researchers' complaints about Mr. Hamid's abusiveness.

Mr. Curtis declined -- at the college's behest -- to speak to The Chronicle
about Mr. Hamid. "It doesn't profit us to go into the details of the story,
to stoop to [Mr. Hamid's] level," he says. "It's an ugly story."

But some of those familiar with the case supply other motives for Mr.
Curtis's turning on his old friend. "Maybe Ric was feeling too much like a
second fiddle," says Mr. Comitas. Or maybe Mr. Curtis and his wife were
exasperated by Mr. Hamid's calls to their house at 4 a.m. Richard Mack, an
anthropologist and a fellow student at Columbia says, "Ric is an
unconfrontational person. My problem is that Ric wants to be all things to
all people. As a result, he's often abused."

Mr. Hamid now paints his former best friend as a hanger-on who owes his
career to Mr. Hamid, as the cunning Iago to his naive Othello. But others
saw the relationship differently. Bruce Johnson, the director of the
National Development and Research Institutes, where both researchers worked
in the past, says the pair would do fieldwork together and Mr. Curtis would
write all the notes.

"Andy would claim that he was doing all the work," says Mr. Johnson. "He
was the one that believed that everyone stole his good ideas."

After Mr. Curtis made his complaints, administrators began an internal
investigation, questioning the project staff and suspending their work.
Some staff members wrote letters of support for Mr. Hamid, angered by what
they saw as the college's overreaction. "We were protesting the way they
went about it," says Alix Conde, one of the ethnographers. "It reminded me
of something you see in Guatemala or Nicaragua. They come in to this
university office, lock the doors, and nobody can get access. It was kind
of heavy-handed."

Mr. Conde and Mr. Hamid say they were soon told the investigation was
complete and that Mr. Hamid could return to the office. But then, Mr. Hamid
says, administrators got the field notes he wrote describing his
experiences using heroin.

Professional Suicide?

A few months into the study of heroin users, Mr. Hamid felt the need to
walk in their shoes. In September 1996, he bought twelve bags and began to
experiment with snorting the drug. Unfortunately for his career, he also
felt the need to write it down.

Mr. Hamid claims that his friend Mr. Curtis must have given the field notes
describing the heroin use to administrators. Others say they were turned
over by the project's secretary, who was angered by Mr. Hamid's insulting
her ethnicity.

The secretary did not return calls from The Chronicle, but however the
notes ended up in administrators' hands, an ethnographer's field notes are
supposed to be confidential, argues Mr. Hamid. Mr. Conde, one of the
researchers on the project at the time, wrote a letter of protest to John
Jay, arguing that field notes are off limits. Using the notes "was
definitely inappropriate," he says. Mr. Hamid's critics maintain that the
confidentiality is meant to protect sources, not researchers recording
their own lawbreaking.

Perhaps a bigger mystery, bigger than how administrators got the notes or
whether they should have used them against him, is why Mr. Hamid was taking
the heroin in the first place. Didn't he know this would jeopardize all
that he had worked for?

The professor chalks up his experiment as necessary for "believability" --
taking heroin helped him understand the drug users he was studying. Also,
he was curious about the withdrawal symptoms, noting that some people
seemed to have no trouble when they stopped using. He was intrigued as well
by users who were energized by the narcotic. "There was tremendous
mystery," he says. "What does it feel like, being controlled by something
else?"

He describes the drug as a "gracious painkiller" that gave him a sense of
euphoria. "Things become effortless, and you have a boundless kind of
optimism," he says. After a month, he stopped. "You can see how you can
fall in love with the stuff," he says. "But you can see how you can control
it."

Years later, while Mr. Hamid doesn't dwell on his experiment -- referring
to it euphemistically as "the field note" -- he doesn't shy away from
defending it. "Name me one researcher who hasn't done that," he says.
"Isn't that what Marie Curie did with radium? Isn't that what Albert
Hoffman did with LSD? You stick your finger in it and put it in your mouth."

Anthropology indeed has a long history of researchers who "go native," or
absorb the culture they are studying. George Bond, a former professor of
Mr. Hamid's at Columbia, agrees that such research presents moments where
the correct decision seems less than obvious. "If you're sitting around
with people drinking beer from a pot, if you sit down and drink with them,
are you to be condemned?" he asks.

But Mr. Mack, the former Columbia student, says there is a line you cannot
cross. And Mr. Hamid, his old classmate, did. "It's like being an
undercover cop and shooting up," says Mr. Mack. "When do you stop being a
cop and just become another illegal drug user?"

The field notes were the only evidence of Mr. Hamid's drug use, but once
confronted by John Jay officials, he acknowledged his experiment with
heroin. They suspended him from the grant project and reassigned him to the
classroom, teaching in both the spring and fall semesters. He was later
suspended from the college with pay. By December 1998, officials had begun
proceedings to strip him of his tenure, charging that he had used heroin,
had asked a staffer to buy heroin for study participants, and had
threatened and verbally abused others on the project.

Ten months later, the police would knock on his front door, the newspapers
would publish their stories, and Ansley Hamid would hit rock bottom.

Questioned Expenses

When allegations of Mr. Hamid's mismanagement of the grant surfaced,
Jonathan A. Schofield, an agent with the inspector general of the
Department of Health and Human Services began investigating. In October
1999, he filed a six-page affidavit, charging that Mr. Hamid had "embezzled
and misapplied" about $32,000 from the funds for the "Heroin in the 21st
Century" project to pay for unrelated personal and professional expenses.

He accused Mr. Hamid of using $9,000 from the grant for trips to Hawaii,
Miami, and Trinidad, and about $21,000 to pay research assistants to work
on unrelated book projects. The professor was also accused of using the
grant to buy $2,000 worth of compact-disc equipment and CD's by artists
such as Mariah Carey, the Jackson Five, and Whitney Houston with the grant
money.

Paul Shectman, Mr. Hamid's lawyer, says the affidavit "was replete with
more errors than any complaint I've ever seen. All you had to do was look
at the records." Much of the controversy stemmed from the second federal
grant that the university had been told it would be getting. "The second
grant had been approved, and he was spending some of the money from the
first grant to do preliminary work," Mr. Shectman says. "Technically, that
may be wrong, but he told the school what he was doing."

Records of the CUNY Research Foundation, which administers the grant, show
that Mr. Hamid made advance travel requests, which were approved. He
clearly stated the purpose of the trips: "to appoint staff for new grant"
and "to recruit staff for the drug-convergence grant."

The CD's were for a paper one of the researchers was working on about
heroin's role in popular music, Mr. Shectman says. Indeed, many other
investigations of financial mismanagement involving more money are resolved
with civil remedies.

Of course, this case featured accusations that a researcher had used
heroin. While those charges proved to be irrelevant to the case being made
on misuse of federal funds, and Mr. Hamid was never charged with drug use,
they were a red flag that the news media -- and the investigators -- could
hardly ignore.

In April 2000, federal prosecutors asked a judge to dismiss the charges
against Mr. Hamid, six months after he was handcuffed in his apartment at 7
a.m. Their motion was granted, and, predictably, that development got
little attention. The Times ran a short article inside its Metro section;
the Daily News didn't mention it. The television reporters never came back.

Prosecutors declined to say why they had dropped the charges. The federal
government allowed John Jay to substitute a new project investigator to
manage the heroin grant, but because of the allegations and Mr. Hamid's
suspension, it canceled the second grant for the study of international
drug markets.

In the end, the college, according to some of the researchers who worked on
the grant, bears responsibility for any financial shenanigans. "John Jay
was utterly complicit," says one, who asked to remain anonymous. "They
signed off on everything."

Administrators saw Mr. Hamid as the "800-pound gorilla" and let him do what
he wanted, that researcher says. "They knew about [the financial problem]
and tolerated it because he had brought in the biggest grant in John Jay
history," says another former researcher.

College officials, however, aren't talking. Administrators declined
requests for interviews, and a series of written questions garnered only a
general response: "Procedures continue to be in place to insure the proper
administration of research studies." Jerry Capeci, a spokesman for John
Jay, says: "The story's over."

Earlier this year, the two sides reached a settlement in a lawsuit Mr.
Hamid filed for discrimination in 1999. As part of that settlement, Mr.
Hamid got $30,000 and agreed never to teach at CUNY.

Travis Wendel was hired back to work on the heroin project after Mr. Hamid
was suspended. He now teaches as an adjunct at the college.

Richard Curtis also remains at John Jay. He is an associate professor, and
now the chairman of the anthropology department. The heroin project finally
ended in 2001, and Mr. Curtis recently completed a $250,000 project from
the National Institute of Justice to study drug markets on the Lower East
Side. "Ric is almost blameless in all of this," says Mr. Johnson, the
director of the National Development and Research Institutes. "If there's
anything he did wrong, it was the extent to which he continued to support
Andy's research career."

Candle Man

On a sleepy block in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn is a small
candle shop called Sixth Sense NYC. There, every afternoon, in the shadow
of 100-year-old brownstones, amid the incense and smudge sticks, sits its
owner, Ansley Hamid.

The professor now lives just a few blocks away, alone in a one-bedroom
basement apartment. He spends most afternoons and evenings on the orange
iMac in the shop, working on his research. He talks of getting a new
academic job, but the fiasco at John Jay, the criminal charges, the
newspaper stories have all but quashed that aspiration. "For all intents
and purposes," says his former mentor, Mr. Comitas, "it ruined him. Period.
Whether it was right or wrong or what, ... this guy didn't do anything to
deserve that. ... It seems so silly, such a waste of talent."

He has applied for a few jobs -- one at Boricua College, in Brooklyn,
another at a Manhattan high school. But Columbia's Mr. Comitas is
pessimistic about his former student's chances. "I'd take him," he says,
"but he'd never make it in open competition."

In January, as part of the legal settlement reached with John Jay, he will
officially retire and finally leave the college's payroll -- he's earned
$350,000 over the last five years while suspended. He says he'll keep
writing books. His latest, Ganja Complex: Rastafari and Marijuana, is being
published next month by Lexington Books.

Now he spends much of the evening sitting in a wicker chair outside the
candle shop, waving and chatting to passersby, nearly all of whom know him
by name. To them, he's the portly bearded man selling smudge sticks and
scented candles, just another neighborhood character.

Mr. Hamid still sees himself as the Moor, the persecuted one. But even
Shakespeare's Othello, after killing Desdemona, asks his friends to "speak
of me as I am" -- as one who "threw a pearl away."