DRUG SALES, MINUTE BY MINUTE

[PHOTO CAPTION] The parking lot of the Alexander Hamilton housing project
in Paterson serves as an open-air drug market. Photo by Dawn Benko

PATERSON -- It is barely dusk on a Monday evening in September, and the
customers trickle into the parking lot by the Alexander Hamilton projects.

Some walk. Some ease their cars over speed bumps toward a knot of young men
in T-shirts and shorts standing at one end. Others park at the corner,
cutting across a patch of dead grass on foot.

Three, then four, then five men are in the knot, milling restlessly in
front of the apartment buildings. They watch each arrival, ignoring some,
meeting others part way.

The knot sometimes moves as one, four men running across the parking lot to
meet a pedestrian, lurching to a stop in front of him, framed for watchers
by parked cars and scraggly brush.

8:02 p.m. The arrival is white, wears brown boots and gray flannel over a
white T-shirt. He looks from one to the other of the young men in front of
him. They talk. He gives something to and then takes something from the one
on the left.

8:04 p.m. A tall man in a black shirt walks into the lot, then a man in red
shorts. A red truck with Pennsylvania plates stops briefly, met by one of
the men from the knot.

The man in the gray flannel shirt walks haltingly, then trots back over the
dead grass and up the street. The man in red shorts walks out. The truck
drives off, turning right, heading for Route 80. A man with dark receding
hair and a ponytail walks up to the knot.

8:05 p.m. The scene, watched from beside a Paterson vice squad detective on
surveillance duty, is a silent ballet, punctuated by the detective's voice
describing new arrivals into a radio. Scoop units -- unmarked cars and vice
detectives parked nearby -- are poised to pull over the truck, to stop the
man in gray flannel and arrest him.

8:21 p.m. A man with a light-brown mustache arrives, meets the knot, leaves
after less than 30 seconds, looking at something invisible in his hand. He
drops it in the intersection, bends over, searching, oblivious to the cars.
He leaves empty-handed. An hour from now, he will be back to meet the knot
again.

9:35 p.m. Some three dozen have visited the parking lot. Police have
arrested eight.

A slender girl walks uncertainly to the edge of the parking lot, blond hair
tied back with red cloth. She looks around expectantly, arms crossed
nervously.

The detective pauses, then says into his radio: "You guys got room for one
skinny little white girl?"

They do not.

9:49 p.m. At the Frank X. Graves Public Safety Complex on Broadway, five
men are in the holding room, giving detectives their names. Two teenagers
are locked to a pipe in the main room, waiting for their parents. A woman
with angry red needle marks running up her forearms fidgets nearby in
handcuffs.

The teenagers are 17, both from Montville. One is a doctor's son, one is
from the upscale Lake Valhalla section. Both are charged with buying nine
pieces of crack.

One of the Pennsylvanians is 22 and lived in Dover until he was 15, when
his family moved in part to get him away from drugs. He sits sweating in a
wooden chair, his skin bright red beneath his crew cut.

He began using heroin two years ago, he says. He sniffs two bags a day --
and would have snorted two just seconds after reaching Route 80 if the
police hadn't stopped the truck and found the 13 glassine folds of heroin
he and his friend bought for $100.

Midnight. The teenagers have been picked up. The adults are on their way to
the Passaic County jail. The detectives will be doing paperwork late, well
into the morning.

Back at the housing complex, the traffic hasn't let up.

Checked-by: Mike Gogulski