THE DEALERS NEXT DOOR

Open drug dealing in a quiet Riverside neighborhood is perfectly
ignorable if you're the police--but if you're a resident?

The neighbors to the right of us are moving, which bothers me like
you wouldn't believe. Good neighbors are hard to come by, and these
folks--a couple and their three small children--were good neighbors.
My wife talked to the husband, who confirmed what we already knew:
The family was moving to get away from the drug dealers.

If it were just he and his wife, they'd try to stick it out, he said.
But they had kids to think about, and the dealers were a problem that
wouldn't go away. They'd tried getting the city to do something, but
nothing had been done and there was every reason to believe nothing
would continue being done. For all practical purposes, our little
corner of central Riverside had been ceded to the drug trade. No one
at City Hall seemed to care, and the Riverside cops were invisible.

Was the husband bitter about any of this?

"I'm selling to the worst buyer I can find," he said. "For every car
the buyer agrees to park on the grass, I'm dropping the price $10,000."

From what we could tell, the plight of the neighbors to the right of
us affected the neighbors to the left of us not at all. Those
neighbors, who we refer to as "the dealers next door" to distinguish
them from our other neighbors, don't care about quality of life or
property values, and they sure as hell don't care about who lives
next to them. These neighbors--a constantly shifting assortment of
parents, adult siblings, aunts, uncles and assorted nephews and
nieces--appear to care about only one thing: making money as fast as
they can by selling drugs to anyone who wants them.

With an invisible police department and a city hall that can't be
bothered, business is booming.

Like casinos and 7-Elevens, drug houses are a 24-hour enterprise, and
the enterprise next door is no exception. Every hour of every day,
the local tweakers beat a path to our neighbors' door. My wife and I
hear them as we climb into bed at night and we hear them when we get
up in the morning, and if you're wondering how we can tell it's them
with the windows closed and the curtains drawn, then you've never
lived next door to speed dealers. Let me describe it for you: First
you hear the shuffling shoes of the sleep deprived and calcium
depleted, followed by the nervous whistle from the sidewalk, then the
murmured hand-off of cash and poison ("mumble-mumble-thanks, dude"),
and then a more hurried shuffle away from the scene of the crime.
From start to finish, it sounds like this:
shuffle-shuffle-whistle-mumble-mumble-"thanks, dude"-shuffle-shuffle.
Twenty-four hours a day. Seven days a week.

Sometimes I'll take my dog out for a late-night piddle on the front
lawn, and find I've stepped right into the middle of a drug score. A
dealer neighbor and his tweaker client look up startled, cash and
baggie disappear in a flurry into pockets, and then they mill about
looking at their shoes while my dog finishes his business so I can go
back inside. Once, I stepped out with the dog and found myself in the
middle of what appeared to be a skinhead reunion--six or seven
muscular shitheels with Iron Cross tattoos who didn't startle or
mill, but, instead, stared at me with dead eyes until I scooped up my
still-peeing dog and stepped back into the house.

It hasn't always been thus. When my wife first told me she suspected
something amiss next door, my reaction was disbelief. The street we
live on is--was--fairly tight-knit, with neighbors looking out for
one another's property and most of us fairly aware of one another's
business. We know, for example, that the old man across the street,
two doors down, is a contractor whose daughter died in a terrible car
accident 10 years back, and that the neighbor on our side of the
street, three doors to the right, is a former gang banger who
renounced his ways when his child was born and now lives the straight
life driving a tow truck--if driving a tow truck can be called a
straight existence. Someone would have had to be insane to deal on
this block, I reasoned. The neighbor across the street, two doors to
the left, was a Riverside cop who frequently parked her squad car in
her driveway, for Christ's sake.

More than that, the dealers next door were a part of this blue-collar
community; they've lived here longer than we have. The older kids
went to the same school as my stepson. We know them by name.

"You're paranoid," I told my wife. "They couldn't possibly be selling
drugs next door."

But, of course, they were.

As much as I wanted to hope for the best, that our neighbors were
just incredibly popular people whose friends happened to be jittery
insomniacs, it soon became impossible to deny the obvious. The
dealers next door were simply too blatant about it. I could ignore
the round-the-clock comings and goings and the neighbors'
increasingly odd behavior, such as washing their cars and mowing the
lawn at four in the morning. But I couldn't ignore the cash and the
baggies and the skinhead conventions and the 16-year-old girls passed
out on the lawn.

Finally, I did what any Riverside police or city official could have
done had they cared enough to bother: I walked outside, grabbed the
first medium-sized tweaker I saw, and asked him where I could score
some speed. He immediately pointed to my neighbor's front door.

"Don't tell anyone I told you, OK?"

Of course, I wouldn't, I told him. And the truth is, at the time, I
wasn't sure what I was going to do next. I hated the notion of
reporting my neighbors to the cops. It just went against my blood. I
come from a large family whose sons and daughters are geniuses at
getting in trouble. My uncle was a pallbearer at John Gotti's
funeral; my father spent two years on the run from the FBI for a
botched store robbery. When I was a kid, running to my mom when my
brother hit me meant getting punished for being a rat.

"I'm not a rat," I told my wife, who sighed and pointed out that I
was, in fact, a journalist, meaning that I ratted for a living.
Still, I advised caution.

"Just let it play itself out," I said. "We've got a cop living across
the street, and these idiots are dealing in the open. They'll get
busted without any help from us."

Three months and about a kilo's worth of drug deals later, I began to
see the flaw in my logic. With a cop living on our block, the
Riverside PD apparently feels we're already covered. No one-- no one
- --patrols our street. Sure, the dealers next door do their business
in the open. But so does the guy who goes up and down the block
selling corn out of a stolen shopping cart. No one busts him either.

This new awareness, that a cargo plane full of Afghan heroin could
land on our lawn and the cops wouldn't notice, came right at the same
time one of the dealers' regular tweaker clients was spotted marching
up and down our block with a butcher knife in his hand. It was time
to get serious. Back in the day, none of my people would have ever
dreamt of running to the police. But I had to accept that, back in
the day, my people would have simply thrown the dealers in the back
of a van and taken them for a long drive in the woods. I'm not the
woodsy type, so I dropped a dime instead.

The call was routed to what the police receptionist described as an
undisclosed location (where, presumably, Riverside's crack narcotics
unit discusses drug policy with Vice President Cheney), and answered
by a sergeant, who promised me he'd look into the matter. When a
month passed and nothing happened, my wife placed several calls to
Riverside Mayor Ron Loveridge, who returned none of them until she
left the following message: "Yeah, I'm calling again about the drug
dealers next door. You might also be getting a call from my husband,
who, by the way, is a journalist whose friends include reporters from
the L.A. Times and KFWB and a producer for Fox News."

That call was returned in five minutes, and resulted in Loveridge
sending one of his aides to meet with us. The aide, a diminutive
young fellow who wisecracked that he'd seen it all in Riverside but
whose baby fat caused us to doubt that sincerely, listened carefully
to our complaints and took notes and promised he'd look into the matter.

Days turned into weeks and weeks turned into months, and if the
narcotics sergeant and the mayor's aide were looking into the matter,
they weren't looking next door. We called several times to check on
the status of the case, and, depending on who we spoke with, were
told that police had raided the house and found nothing, that the
matter was still "being looked into," or to call back on Monday
because Riverside's crack narcotics unit didn't work weekends.

I work from home, and if the home next door had been raided, it was a
masterwork of stealth. To be fair, though, I suppose the raid could
have taken place while I was in the bathroom.

Months passed. The seasons came and went. Downtown, City Hall proudly
unveiled its (now) $1.3 billion Riverside Renaissance Initiative, in
which 30 years worth of public improvements would be built in five
years. Next door, the dealers put in a drive-through, clearing out
their garage so their customers could breezily pull in and out for
fast and friendly service. Instead of "shuffle-shuffle-whistle," we
now heard "vroom-vroom-honk-honk."

Here at home, I began pushing my wife for permission to buy a shotgun.

The city of Riverside is, as you read this, flinging itself headlong
into massive debt in a balls-out effort to transform itself into an
upscale shopping and high-end residential paradise. Meanwhile, the
mayor and the Riverside Police Department are flummoxed on what to do
about a single family committing class-E felonies on the sidewalk in
broad daylight. This doesn't inspire confidence in the city's ability
to get a job done.

In fact, my wife and I lost so much confidence that we've also
decided to move. We're looking around, and when we find a place that
cares enough to enforce the law, we're taking our dogs, our cats, and
our taxable income, and leaving.

Are we bitter about this? All I'll say is that when we sell, we're
giving the dealers next door first right of refusal.