ROACH MOTEL (1 of 2)

BROOKLYN, N.Y. -- Little wigga Justin, 17, stoned and first time in jail
but not scared at all, was entertaining the prisoners with stories of rich
girls. There was Diana from New Jersey. Diana had daddy's mansion and her
own pool; golden electronic fish swam in the water -- "Yeah, yo,
battery-powered fish, all gold and shit, Diana swims with 'em, nigga. Rich,
yo, rich bitch, I mean like this girl has diamonds from shoulder to
shoulder that say D-I-A-N-A like a big smile, and the trucks yo, the
Escalades, the ML430s, and the mansion -- Diana's room has electric sliding
doors; you clap, they open like magic. Diana!"

"Diana," murmured Syringe, junkie of name unknown, old soiled longhair,
nodding out and toothless and splayed -- "Diana," then he passed out.
Justin watched with interest. Syringe looked like Kentucky Appalachia, but
talked Brooklyn, old Italian Brooklyn, that is, no niggas or yo or bro, an
old junkie-hippie in jean jacket and dirty jeans with a blue bandanna
across his forehead; he carried a syringe -- no drugs, just a syringe.

"I wasn't doin' nothin', walkin' along, mindin' my business," he had told
us. "I'm not an asshole, I'm not breakin' anybody's balls, I'm walkin'
along, they fuckin' stop me --"

Typical. I heard it again and again: Rousted on a spurious charge --
misdemeanor possession -- and now the creep was off the streets of my
hometown neighborhood of Red Hook, in Brooklyn, lodged safely here in the
cinderblock ugliness that is the 76th Precinct of the NYPD, and toiled over
by cops and clerks and DAs who know, if they have a conscience, that
driving a man like chattel just because he carries a syringe doesn't make
sense.

So it was Syringe and Justin and me and four others in the 6-by-8 cell
stuffed at midnight, waiting to be judged. Aside from my own case --
disorderly conduct, too much booze -- everyone in that cell, and almost
every single prisoner I spoke with passing from pen to pen that long rotten
night of Aug. 21, was in on a drug charge so lite and ludicrous even the
jailers admitted "This is bullshit, guys, nothin'; you'll be out by 10 a.m."

The charge, with astonishing consistency, was not dope or coke but
marijuana "possession," or at least that's what the authorities term 10
leaf-flakes in the bottom of a pocket, or a roach in the car ashtray
rotting among cigarette butts, or a pipe that looks used; "bullshit"
indeed, yet prosecuted to the fullest and costliest extent in the paws of a
drug enforcement system that's lost all logic.

The cells fill up, spill over: Minor marijuana offenses now comprise 15
percent of all arrests in New York City. Justice here wasn't always like
this. Once upon a time, when I was growing up in Brooklyn in the '80s and
early '90s, a joint, a dime bag, even a "50 bag" -- basically anything
under an ounce -- meant a small fine, issued on the spot, or sometimes a
"desk appearance ticket," a DAT, which stipulated a date and time for
meeting the judge. You showed up, you waited in the pews until your name
was called, you stood with hung head until the judge dismissed the case or
fined you a few dozen dollars.

That was tiresome enough, but at the very least it was an attempt to
implement, at the street level and in the precincts, the general
decriminalization of minor marijuana possession that the New York state
Legislature had mandated through the Marijuana Reform Act of 1977. Even
then, lawmakers "were concerned over the large amount of criminal justice
resources and prison space being used for marijuana offenders," observed
the Partnership for Responsible Drug Information, a nonprofit in Manhattan
that has been critical of the drug war. The legislators, wrote the PRDI,
concluded that "criminal prosecution and incarceration were inappropriate
penalties for mere possession and use of marijuana."

Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who came into office in 1994, reversed all that. He
was the reform mayor, the hero mayor who, with a draconian sweep of his
arm, would clean up the crack-and-murder mess into which ghettos like Red
Hook had descended by the late '80s. In this regard, Giuliani was more
lucky than visionary, the unwitting beneficiary of a skyrocketing stock
market and crime rates that fell nationwide in the bubble boom -- rates
that had already begun a decline in New York as early as 1990. (By then the
crackheads were killing themselves off; the dealers were busy killing each
other.)

But Giuliani took credit -- it was "quality-of-life" policing, he would say
later, that solved the crime problem in New York. Quality-of-life, or
zero-tolerance enforcement, one of Giuliani's pet programs, was simple and
easy and sometimes cruel: Nuisance was crushed in all its most trivial
forms -- the graffiti taggers on subways, the squeegee bums on roadways,
the confused, muttering homeless on benches, and of course the relatively
benign bottom-tier of the marijuana trade, the smoker.

In 1992, New York City had 742 marijuana possession arrests; by 2000, after
six years of Giuliani, that number had risen a mind-boggling 7,000 percent,
to more than 52,000, according to FBI statistics. The numbers aren't
changing under Mayor Michael Bloomberg, elected last year. New York City's
five counties now rank among the top 10 U.S. counties of 250,000 people or
more for marijuana arrests -- one city, New York, that cosmopolite center
of all things progressive, now accounts for 8 percent of all marijuana
possession arrests nationwide.

Enforcement comes down primarily on people of color. According to a 1996
report from the New York state Division of Criminal Justice Services, 71
percent of state residents arrested on misdemeanor marijuana charges were
nonwhite; in Red Hook, that's usually a black or Hispanic from a low-income
housing project.

"About six years ago, they just stopped giving the DATs for weed," says
Santiago Lugo, 24, a Puerto Rican in my cell. "Now they cuff your ass, they
take you in, they get your fingerprints, they get your photograph, they
work your ass through the system."

"It isn't right," says Lugo. Which is fairly obvious from afar, but not
nearly as obvious as when you go through the system yourself, as a
defendant, and watch the monumental frittering of law enforcement energies,
the Kafkaesque merry-go-round where more often than not the whole dirty,
inept, stultifying process ends in the case being dismissed -- as if it
never happened.

So I'm in the system: Shoelaces and belt stripped, I slump on the wooden
bench with "Jose" and "Fuck this" carved in the wood; we are seven bodies
rubbing and despising the closeness. After a short while, I say goodbye to
Syringe and Justin; cops call my name, I step out, I'm recuffed, I am to be
"processed" and then "lodged" in a precinct somewhere across Brooklyn where
a body can slump more easily, in a less congested cell. In the peculiarly
ill-starred circumstances of the night of Aug. 21, the "process" was farce.

I was put up against a wall for head shots, photos front and side, and then
I was to be fingerprinted, but the computer was broken. "Identix," say the
big letters above the screen. The Identix looks old and doomed,
cannibalized from a '70s mainframe, but in fact it's the cutting edge of
crime-fighting technology. The Identix TouchPrint 600 Live Scan
Workstation, "the greatest invention since the two-way radio" (according to
the literature), is a digital fingerprint scanner that with the speed of a
fart fires off your prints to the Automated Fingerprint Identification
System at the FBI, a "system that can race through fingerprints at a rate
of 600 per second," and relays your data, the unmistakable soul of your
palms, to a central database, uncovering who you really are, if you really
are. Gone are those messy inkblot prints on index cards that expert eyes
with magnifying glasses required two weeks to sort.

Advanced technology being what it is, tonight the Identix machines are
dropping dead all across Brooklyn, going off-line, sending out "ERROR"
messages, spontaneously rebooting as the cops sputter and curse and scratch
their heads.

Orders come down: Find an Identix that works. Officers Moukazis and Pena,
young cops, cuff me and walk me out of the 76th Precinct in my sloppy
laceless boots, the beltless hanging pants. Moukazis resembled Radar from
"M*A*S*H," quiet and stoop-shouldered with big, gentle, liquid eyes; a
two-year rookie. Pena was Hispanic with a black mustache, squat and
unspeaking but friendly when spoken to. They dropped me into the hard
plastic backseats of the squad car, then sat down and ate pizza.

Thus began a four-hour odyssey, shuttling from precinct to precinct looking
for that one Identix that would actually do its job. At the 78th Precinct,
there was a drunk Russian in the cell next to mine. He told the officers:
"My cock!" No one listened. The officers gathered like a tribe round the
Identix, pushing buttons. "Suck my cock!" said the Russian, and the
officers said, "This fuckin' machine!"

"I show you my cock, OK?" said the Russian.

The cops pecked dutifully and rebooted, and "You are beautiful -- for my
cock!" echoed down the halls. When the Identix at the Seven-Eight decided
permanently to shut down for the night and the cops started telling the
screen "You fuh! You son-of-a-fuck!" officers Moukazis and Pena walked me
out down the line of cells: I saw that the Russian had stripped naked;
fat-roll folds hung over his crotch, obscuring his penis. Cops aren't paid
enough for all the crap they put up with.

From the Seven-Eight to the streets, looking for that fabled Identix,
Moukazis and Pena get lost. They really should know these streets; they
are, after all, Brooklyn cops. "We, uh, only really know our precinct,"
Moukazis says, and you can't blame him; he lives in the suburbs.

"Hey," I finally speak up, "you guys want New York Ave. and Empire
Boulevard, right? Turn around, this is wrong, you're going to Flatbush.
About 10 blocks back you'll hit Empire ..." Then it's left here, right
there, turn around, big dead-end sign, they ignore it; turn around once
more, confusion, there's the precinct, wait make the right, MAKE THE RIGHT,
Moukazis bottoms out the cruiser parking it on the sidewalk, we get out,
again the long, slow slog with the laceless boots; the cop holds me firmly
by the tricep.

Here the Identix was working (for the moment), but a bigger problem loomed:
No one seemed to know how to use the machine. Officers gathered like
clouds, stood around, sat in chairs, my fingers were grabbed, placed on a
glass sheet that glowed red, the prints were scanned, all 10 fingers. But
the prints could not be read; the Identix rejected the file.

"Christ," said Moukazis, who moved aside as others played with my fingers
on the glass screen and others yawned. "Gettin' late," someone said. "Off
in 27 minutes, and you guys can go fuck yourselves." It wasn't long until
the Identix at the 71st -- it too sensing dawn -- went to sleep.

I was at long last fingerprinted and lodged in a cell that had a toilet, a
sink, a bench. Wet sleep on the bench, the night hot; took off my shirt and
folded it to make a pillow; slept in twitches, a dreamless dead sleep; woke
20 minutes later. Then time began its long, slow, unbelievably long
miniaturization, sitting in the shapes of flecked paint and riding around
on cockroaches. Hours passed. There are kicks on the wall in the cell next
door.

"Fuckin' let me out! Man, I fuckin' wasn't doin nothin' ... "

"Hey, asshole, I'm sleeping," another voice cries out. It's Syringe. I hear
someone rapping Biggie Smalls -- Justin, the unbreakable wigga; no sleep
till Jersey. So we all made it to the same hole. And the guy kicking the
wall, I recognized his voice too: It was the Irish Guido. Back at the 76th,
the Guido, a tall, good-looking construction foreman in his 20s, kept
cornering himself in the 6-by-8 cell, unbuttoning his jeans and looking
down his pants. "Jesus, aw God," he would whisper, dumping his hand into
the pants to scratch like a cat.

The Guido had told us his story. "I was in my car, fuckin' just smokin' a
joint and these two DTs [detectives] rolled up on me ... and they bring me
in for this shit. It's not the blue and whites [squad cars a la Moukazis
and Pena] -- them I don't mind, they don't bother you. It's narcotics, the
undercovers, that's the problem. Narcotics just wanna make their quotas,
make that overtime."

Overtime. In December 2000, the New York Daily News investigated the NYPD's
quality-of-life crusade, singling out what by then had become something of
a key zero-tolerance program, the much ballyhooed Operation Condor. Condor
funds overtime for detectives pursuing small-time drug buy-and-busts and
quality-of-life offenders like evil types who pee on trees.

The NYPD spent a record $247 million on overtime during fiscal year 2000 --
some $39 million of which went to Condor, according to the News. Not all
the officers in narcotics, the News also noted, were happy about the program.

"Cops are flooding the system with minor stuff just for the overtime," a
high-ranking narcotics officer told the paper. "But we are ignoring the big
investigations for the little fish at the bottom.

"That's all Condor-detail cops are catching," the officer added. "The
little fish."

The Condor program made the papers in a big way earlier that year, in March
2000, after two Condor undercovers looking to make a marijuana bust shot
and killed 22-year-old Patrick Dorismond, an off-duty security guard. The
detectives had asked Dorismond, who was standing outside a cocktail lounge
in Manhattan, where they could find some dope. Dorismond, in what were
later hotly debated circumstances, essentially told them to step off. A
scuffle ensued, and shots were fired.

(Calls to the NYPD central public relations office regarding the Condor
program were not returned.)

At 9:45 a.m., we get an egg sandwich, soggy in grease paper; the jailers
yell, "Moving to the court soon. Wake up." Hot orange juice; voices in the
cell: "Yo, they microwave this juice?" Echoes of plastic bottles on floors.
We are led, feeling tall and happy; we're moving, we're out, we're out of here.

We go by van, chained three together, to a court in Red Hook, the Red Hook
Community Justice Center. We're divided up, Syringe disappears, still
nameless -- I never found out what happened to him -- and then new faces
and old: Santiago Lugo; a scowling 16-year-old; a midget with wine-stain
knife scars on his cheeks; Justin; the Guido. We land in a 20-by-20
windowless basement pen; payphone in one corner, toilet. The elation of
air, movement, progress, process now very gone. Now we wait to see the
judge, and who knows if he'll get to all the cases by 5 p.m. If he doesn't,
then it's night court and Central Booking.

"I don't wanna even consider that shit," says Eric, in for a joint, 27,
dark-faced and lid-eyed and wary; a caricaturist would make him a panther.
Eric grew up in the Red Hook projects, the son of Puerto Rican immigrants;
he's done the process many times. "Drug charges, mostly," he told me.
"Assault, once."

He stretched on the floor and closed his eyes and tried to sleep but
couldn't. "Yo, this shit is sticky." He shifted two empty, plastic pint
water bottles under his neck. "Not near as sticky as Central Booking, I'll
tell you that," he answers himself. "That's 300 niggas, 50 to a room, and
those rooms no bigger than this one. Central Booking! Cockroaches big as
fingers, that's a dungeon, yo. We go to booking, we start all over, right
at the bottom."

"Start over?" someone said.

"You got three levels in Central Booking," Eric went on. "It's like a
fucked-up cake. You got night court up top, but you waitin' 20 hours to get
there. They bring you in that first room, the sub-basement, you wait six
hours. Then you go up one floor, little cages, rats over your head rattling
the metal, you think they gonna drop right down on you. Six more hours.
Then you got the cells on the third floor, even smaller, you all tight in
there, elbows and no layin' down. Night court means what it says: You
stayin' the night. This judge here, I say he'll do five cases an hour. And
we got 15 in this room, about 20 in the other room, more coming in
throughout the day. What time is it?"

"Eleven fifteen."

"Yo, 11:15. That's not good. That means we got 35 niggas who need to be
processed by 5 p.m. Five an hour, we need six hours, a little bit more, and
we not gonna have six hours, not by a long shot. That judge goes to lunch
at 1 for an hour and a half, court doesn't reopen till 2:30. So from now
until 5, that makes four hours of court time. Now it's all how the cards
come out; now you just wait for your name, and you hope."

There were groans throughout the room; slouches, spit, socks being smelled.
Minutes later, as if out of cruel contradiction, a name was called: The
Irish Guido stood up -- bounded up -- and went to the bars, where a man in
a suit said, "They're giving you an ACD."

"I'll take it, I'll fuckin' take it, yes," and with that the door was
unlatched; the Guido was gone.

"ACD!" said Eric, sitting up.

"ACD, yo," said Santiago.

"What's an ACD?" said Justin.

"That"s Adjournment in Contemplation of Dismissal," Eric said. He
enunciated, slowly and contemptuously. "That shit means your case be
dismissed 'cause it was bullshit in the first place."

"ACD," said Santiago. "That's what we all looking for here."

So there were mutters of ACD all around, people said, "We movin' now," and
indeed, soon we were moved out of the cell and down a hall to be
photographed again -- for what reason I couldn't figure out -- standing in
line with our arms behind our backs, flash-bulbed front and side.

Then they brought us back to the cell. And for hours, there was no movement.

Eric watched Justin bounce around the room cracking jokes, rapping: the
white boy who talked street. Turned out that Justin, true to wigga style,
was a more or less well-to-do kid from Jersey; had parked his SUV near the
commuter train terminal across the Hudson River to come first to Manhattan
in search of bongs and pipes, and then to Brooklyn for weed, all of which
he would then resell, in parts or as a package, to his hometown "bitches"
and "losers" too timid to buy these items themselves. There would, of
course, be a stiff markup -- the budding entrepreneur. But his plans were
cut short when the cops caught him smoking a bowl on the corner.

Justin pulled out his Dr. Scholl's inner soles from his tennis shoes. "I'm
makin' a phat pillow," he said, laying the soles neatly down, side by side
like Eric with his bottles; Justin crumpled a T-shirt over the soles and
said "Yeah, baby."

Eric laughed and shot a glance at Santiago. "Yo, you think this fun and
games," Santiago told Justin softly. Santiago was big, with tattooed arms
and a belly. "You havin' a good time. This your first time in, no doubt.
You go through this 10 times, then it's no fun and games. Then you be
feelin' aggro over this shit; you just feelin' this cage."

Justin was unimpressed, didn't miss a beat, kept jiving and rapping and
riding out jail, and this in turn impressed Santiago and Eric, who
gradually warmed up to the kid. They started talking weed, shot back and
forth in a brogue of the latest names and highs; I not being a smoker
anymore, the deep and hallowed significance of Silver Haze and Orange
Chronic and Sticky Hicky and White Widow went over my head.

The jailer, a fat, unhappy woman, brought us bologna sandwiches in
vacuum-sealed bags -- more groans throughout the pen, hunger and fear for
the meat; rustling of wrapping; the judgment: "This bologna be alien" and
indeed it's two unfresh slices of darkened something on white bread. Thing
can also be used, if the vacuum-seal remains unbroken, as a comfy little
pillow to catch a nap on the floor; some of the prisoners make use.

"Yo, no water?" Santiago yells out the bars.

Jailer raises her eyebrows. "You got all the water you can drink right
there!" She points to a faucet and basin in the corner, next to a toilet
shielded by a short stall, over which you can watch your fellows shit. The
faucet dispenses a hot, foggy, rotten-smelling liquid; the inmates psych
themselves to drink by letting the water run a long, long time.

A serious case came in: boy of 20 looking 40, drug-sick; long, thick keloid
scars, the track marks, the collapsed veins. He spoke to his mother on the
phone. "Mami," he said. He was whimpering. "Mami." The cage stopped eating,
sleeping. He said something in Spanish, there was silence, his mom talking,
he started to cry, choked it back.

"Mami, I don't know what to do, Mami. I didn't --" and then he burst, he
wept hysterically, curled into himself, throwing his arm over his head like
an ape, ashamed of the room; the men and boys watched. The jailers came for
him, opening the door, they stood, three of them in white shirts, "Time to
go," they said; they'd let him in for that one call, the judge had already
seen him and now he was going to prison. He screeched, "I'm fucking talking
with my mother!" and they saw how desperate he was and turned away and out
of respect closed the door. He put the wet phone to his mouth and tolled
his head on the wall. "Four years, Mami ..." He wept and no one in the cell
moved or spoke.

"No ACD for him," said Justin after Mami was taken away. There was snickering.

People paced, walking in circles and then in lines, back and forth, chewing
the meat in silence. Eric stood up, wiped his mouth with a flick, and
looked up and down his clothes, the Timberland boots, the gray Tommy Hil
sweats, appraised them. "Gonna be burning these clothes when I'm outta
here. The whole shit goes."

"Bad luck clothes now," said Santiago. "Once burned my Timberlands, a
hundred and twenty dollars."

Justin was aghast. "You guys really burn your clothes? I ain't burning my
clothes."

"You be burnin' them," said Eric. "You be burnin' them eventually."

[continued in part 2 at http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v02/n1952/a03.html]