UNIVERSITY UNDERGROUND

The Postgame Riots?

Kid Stuff.

Students here support a $364M criminal economy fueled by drugs and
sex.

Wendy began her Christmas break from school in Boston last year
knowing she would have to get a job to pay the rent. Like many
university and college students, she looked through the help-wanted
ads, came across an interesting sounding job, and went in for an
interview. A few days later, the School of the Museum of Fine Arts
junior who grew up, as she puts it, "waaaaay out in the woods" in
Vermont began work -- as a dominatrix for an escort service.

Wendy -- whose name has been changed in this story at her request --
rented a hotel room on the weekends and waited for the phone to ring.
She trafficked in sexual fetish, including light bondage and hand jobs.

She says nearly half the women she met in her line of work were
college students in the same boat: They needed money for expenses and
tuition.

Wendy made $150 for a session and says she had appointments lined up
one after another.

If business was slow, she'd do her homework.

Across town, Jack takes a jar out of the kitchen in the apartment he
shares with five fellow college students. The mushroom colonies he's
been storing in his refrigerator have bloomed again and, sure enough,
two powerful hallucinogenic mushrooms press against the glass. He
unscrews the lid, picks up the mushrooms gently at the base, and
weighs them in at 12 grams, which makes them worth about $30. Jack
debates whether or not to eat them right away but, remembering that he
owes his neighbor a favor, puts them in another jar, seals it with
tinfoil, and puts it back in the refrigerator. He takes a joint and
sits outside to list the drugs he's tried. "Marijuana, Ritalin,
mushrooms, 2-CI, OxyContin, acid, opium, hash," he recounts slowly,
counting them on his fingers. "I've been lucky that I'm not an
addictive personality."

Jack -- his name, too, has been changed in this story -- estimates
that he and his friends, who go to Boston University, Northeastern,
Berklee, and Bunker Hill Community College, spend $50 a month just on
weed. One in five college students smokes pot, a study shows. About
2.4 percent use cocaine.

One former coke dealer at Tufts says "eight balls" -- or eighths of an
ounce of coke -- are particularly popular with groups of friends there
who divide the $140 to $175 cost. The study shows that about 5 percent
of students take amphetamines and other stimulants, including Ritalin
and Adderall. Three percent take drugs like ecstasy. Dealers say they
get $5 to $7 for a dose of Ritalin -- especially in demand around
midterms and final exams -- and $25 to $30 a pop for ecstasy.

A Boston student's variation on the old Buddhist koan might go
something like this: If a beer bottle shatters on the sidewalk and no
one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?

Because in the deafening silence of campus libraries, behind the
cinderblock walls of dormitories, drowned out by the monotone lectures
in a thousand classrooms every day, the upper-class, suburban-bred
university and college students at Boston's most elite universities
are noiselessly contributing to a massive underground economy.

This economy expands every time Jack pays $60 for a quarter of an
ounce of marijuana, UMass Boston senior Ellen (her name has been
changed, too) gets $15 a page to write someone else's paper, and a
student from Wentworth Institute collects his $80 for a fake ID. It's
fueled by the $5 BU senior Mike charges underage students for
admission to a keg party and the $150 Wendy makes to spank submissive
men. There are 65 colleges in greater Boston, with a quarter of a
million students, who make up 7 percent of the area's total
population. But students contribute an estimated $364 million to
Boston's underground economy every year, most of it through illegal
sex, drugs, and alcohol -- about $150 million more than the entire
police department budget.

It's become so bad, city councilors have proposed making universities
turn over registries of where their students live.

The numbers are not scientific because they attempt to quantify things
people try their best to hide. But every once in a while, the
underground surfaces, and not just in the guise of fatal postgame
riots like the ones that followed the Patriots' victory in the Super
Bowl and the Red Sox win over the Yankees in the American League
Championship Series. It surfaces in the form of Jimmy Cassidy, the
Northeastern honor student shot in his apartment who was reportedly
running a drug ring. Or the Mount Ida students arrested and charged
with making counterfeit money. (Their trials are set to begin this
month.) Or Douglas Boudreau, the BC student who hacked into the
university's computer system and rang up about $2,000 in food and services.

Or Robert Schaffer, the Harvard undergrad charged with keeping
hallucinogenic mushrooms and marijuana in his room -- he has pleaded
innocent and his case is pending.

The sheer size of university enrollments in Boston suggests that these
students are the exceptions only because they got caught.

The law of averages, as the saying goes, is a bitch.

Walk down Brighton Avenue on a Saturday night, and the same scene
repeats itself block after raucous block. Groups of college-aged
friends walk together in packs down the sidewalks, hooting at students
in the balconies above, who, in turn, toss beer bottles that shatter
in the street.

An ambulance, its lights piercing the apartment windows, idles near a
curb on Price Road, and a young man sleeps in the flowerbeds on Linden
Street.

A couple of policemen break up a house party on one street, then walk
door-to-door down the block.

They disappear into one house, and a few minutes later, dozens of
college-aged men and women emerge.

By the time they reach the sidewalk, word has spread about where to go
next, where the other house parties are that night.

You don't need a registry to figure that out.

Boston Police Captain William Evans knows he's trying to stop a river
with a plastic cup. Evans heads up the police department's
Allston-Brighton district.

It's one of the toughest assignments in New England. More than 35,000
students live in Allston and Brighton, which combines with the smaller
district D4 to form Area D, incorporating BU, Northeastern, BC,
Suffolk, Emerson, and Berklee College of Music. Evans estimates that
135,000 students live in Area D, where an average of 800 crimes are
reported to police each month, far and away the most in the city.

Evans's lean, boyish figure contrasts with his hardened jaw and icy
blue eyes. His office is quiet and spotless, except for a desk piled
with paperwork he flips through absent-mindedly. He paints two
portraits of university students: One is a picture of a victim, taken
advantage of by landlords and bar owners and thieves looking to make a
buck. "They don't lock the doors. They don't take normal precautions,"
he says, as if chiding a wayward child. "They have nine people living
there -- they don't have nine keys." He gets as many as 15
breaking-and-entering calls a day.

But Evans also gets as many as 30 calls a night from neighbors who
complain about all-night keggers and random acts of vandalism
committed by the other type of students. "Nobody wants to see kids
locked up, fingerprinted, and photographed, but word spreads quickly
that certain behavior won't be tolerated," he says. "They're supposed
to be responsible young adults."

Many don't act it, though, says City Councilor Mike Ross, who has
proposed that universities provide addresses of their students'
off-campus housing. "We don't know where the students are living,"
Ross says. "We know general areas or general streets.

This out-of-sight mindset leads to out-of-sight behavior."

Students scoff at such attempts to regulate them, saying the court
system couldn't handle the load of cases it would face if every
underaged drinker were arrested. They're right.

On any given weekend, an estimated 147,000 underaged students in
Boston drink. Evans estimates that each one spends $50 a week on
alcohol, which means about $294 million a year in illegal liquor
sales. "There's so much money to be made off these kids," he says.

And plenty of people who profit from them. Like Chris, a junior
business management major at Bentley. In true American entrepreneurial
spirit, Chris made high-quality, scanner-proof, guaranteed fake IDs.
All it took was a photo, a template, a laminator, and Photoshop. Chris
estimates that he sold more than 100 fakes at $135 each. He says none
of his customers ever got caught.

Chris also did a robust business buying discount cigarettes online and
reselling them at about double the cost. "I had people coming to my
apartment all the time," he says. "I felt like a drug dealer." But
fake IDs have an even higher profit margin.

He gave discounts to people who got 12 or more friends to go in on
package deals and still made $1,200 every time for "doing nothing."
His friends bumped up the price so they could take a cut, as did
everyone else down the line. But the students didn't care. "There's no
price people won't pay for a fake ID," Chris says.

If Jack's approximation holds true -- that students like him also buy
$50 a month worth of pot -- that means the estimated 55,000
pot-smoking students in Boston buy some $27.5 million worth of
marijuana annually. Another 6,000 student users fuel an estimated $3.6
million cocaine industry.

And the 11,250 students who take amphetamines spend another estimated
$3.375 million. Students like Wendy who work as escorts account for
some $36.5 million a year in the underground economy, and that's based
on a proportion far more conservative than Wendy says they represent.

A college student's lifestyle boils down to lots of education and not
enough income, a recipe that feeds the underground economy.

Students have always chafed against laws that govern how they live
their lives. They complain about liquor laws that ban them from
drinking if they're under 21, but let them fight a war or vote or hold
a steady job at 18. They sense the hypocrisy of a failed war on drugs
that outlaws marijuana but prescribes chemicals to hyperactive
children and depressed adults. "People don't respect the law," says
Jack. "People have the mindset that they can do whatever they want
with their bodies." Before he started using it recreationally, he
says, he took Ritalin for years by prescription.

College is a heady time for experimenting. Wendy rationalizes her work
as a prostitute by imagining herself as more of a healthcare provider.
"[S]ex is not a disgusting sin to incriminate, but rather a critical
part of human experience to be accepted and understood," she says.
"America is naive, squeamish, and puritanical." She just wanted to
make money, Wendy says. "I'm more content to spend time doing
something interesting to pay my bills rather than be stuck with some
lame gig later because I'm in the hole."

But Catherine Bath, director of a watchdog group called Security on
Campus, says more is at work than experimentation. Media and
advertising play a huge role in students' perception that sex, drugs,
and alcohol are cool and hip. "On some level, they buy into this
bullshit," she says.

Or, as Evans puts it, "These colleges have some of the sharpest minds
in the country.

But if you go up to [one of them] on game day, you'd never know it."