ROACH MOTEL (2 of 2)

The fates smile at 3:45 p.m. Eric is called out, and Justin, and the cell
empties as the names widen, and I am not called; this produces a sinking
feeling, a wanting to kick someone; Santiago isn't called either, and we're
left alone. "You and me," I croak. Santiago says nothing.

At 4, Lord have mercy -- my brain, supine in the system, now equates the
call of my name with all meaning, all reason: so I am called, and
perversely I feel almost like I've bested Santiago, last in the cell. Moral
sense is being warped.

Estajo Koslow, who works for the Legal Aid Society, is one of the two
attorneys who will defend you in court at the Red Hook Community Justice
Center. She's a large woman, 47, freckled and pale and strangely cheerful;
she's spent 14 years with Legal Aid in Brooklyn, 12 in family court working
with delinquents and abused children, the last two at the Red Hook Justice
Center, which was opened in 2000 to take some of the burden off Central
Booking. Red Hook, she will tell you, is "a Taj Mahal" compared to Central
Booking, where the bugs used to skitter on her papers during arraignments.

I meet her in a tiny interview room, across a sealed glass-and-wood
partition that has a chair and a table, really a ledge, to lean your
elbows; on my side, the room is full of voices, people packed together,
waiting to tell their story, milling like trapped pigeons, and I can't hear
a word Ms. Koslow is saying.

"You are charged with [inaudible]," she begins, reading from the complaint.
I stick my nose up against the glass, still sitting but bent forward with
the ledge poking my gut. She goes on:
"TheSpoliSsayingSyouSnightSAugStwenty-fir-"

"Miss, I can't hear, I ca--" I say; I turn to the barking prisoners: "Would
you guys shut the fuck up?" Finally I climb up on the chair, get a
finger-hold on the wall, place a foot on the ledge, and perch my face up
above the glass, where there are 3-inch-wide slits in the frame of the
partition.

You want to make your case, this is the moment you need to make your case,
and it's sad, you up against the wall like a broken Spider-Man, this is the
only moment you'll have to say what really happened, what you think
happened, before the judge looks you down -- but it's not working, there's
no communication, the system is failing. Ms. Koslow leans forward herself,
staring up at you, and red-faced starts to yell: "YOU'RE CHARGED WITH
DISORDERLY CONDUCT --"

I tell her my side of the story (essentially guilty as charged: had a beer
too many, no fists or bloodshed, but I baited some cops) and move into the
corner and listen as the other prisoners come. Koslow will see 40 to 50 on
a busy day. Aug. 22 would end up slow: Twenty-six arraignments by 5 p.m.,
nine for minor marijuana offenses -- a really slow day. On average,
marijuana arrests are the court's No. 1 load, making up almost a quarter of
all cases.

A wild-eyed guy named Camillo Negron shouts to Koslow, then takes me aside.
Camillo claims he was driving through Red Hook in his souped-up Mazda when
the cops popped their lights and sounded the siren. He says he committed no
violation. "Cops see a Puerto Rican in a phat Mazda, they pull you over,"
he tells me. "Simple as that."

According to Camillo, the police told him he matched the description of a
wanted criminal. They poked their flashlights into the car; they noticed
Camillo had a roach of marijuana in the ashtray of the Mazda. Camillo, 34,
was arrested on the spot and booked. He was never dropped into a lineup --
though this would have been standard procedure in a wanted case.

"I'll make you a bet Mr. Negron didn't even resemble the guy they were
looking for," attorney Koslow later tells me. She sounds pissed. "I'll even
make you a bet there was no 'guy' they were looking for.

"Let me tell you, for the record," she says. "Community policing in places
like Red Hook consists of little more than rousting the residents on a
day-in, day-out basis. How come they're not busting people with glasses of
Chablis in the park after the Philharmonic? Open containers! Why stick with
the 40s in the projects?"

In came Santiago, who had told us his story in the cell, twice, because I
asked him to: It was a story that seemed so infernally unjust you wondered
if he wasn't, at the very least, embellishing his account. And yet his tale
is common in Red Hook. As Koslow put it: "The police would like me to
believe that 100 percent of my clients are lying. I cannot believe that
when so many of my clients are saying the same thing over and over."

Santiago, who is a janitor at a medical clinic, says he was picked up
around 8 p.m. on Aug. 21. "I was waiting for a cab on the corner, with six
others. Narcotics roll up, random -- I'm just waiting for my cab -- they
roll up in two cars, a black van and a Ford Explorer, four-door, green,
tinted windows. They jumped out, they start yelling at us. I stood there in
shock.

"The first thing they said to me was 'Get against the car.' I got against
the car. They asked me, 'Do you have any drugs on you?' I told them I had a
half-ounce of weed in my pocket. I told them it was personal use, yo, I'm a
smoker, I smoke marijuana."

I was skeptical. "There's no reason they stopped you? No probable cause?"

"No probable cause," he said. "I was standing on the corner and they just
came up."

Koslow tells me this is routine, which should be news to no one. The NYPD's
stop-and-frisk policies have long been a source of furious complaint in the
ghetto. "There's a good chance the story he's telling you is exactly the
way it played out. Mr. Lugo is a large Hispanic male. That he was stopped
on a corner for doing nothing does not surprise me."

The officers cuffed Santiago, placed him in the back of the Explorer. "The
driver was alright, he was cool," Santiago told me. "But the cop who cuffed
me, he was in the passenger seat, this guy was so thirsty he was out to get
whatever he could that night. He was calling to girls on the street,
blowing kisses to little girls, calling them over to the car, 'Are you
working?' The girls looked at him like he was stupid. 'She's a hooker,' he
kept saying. 'She's definitely a hooker.'

"I was in the back of that car for two hours. They started asking me
questions if I know of anybody with drugs or with guns, then they'll let me
go. They telling me if I rat on somebody, gang shit, they'll let me walk
out of the car scot-free. I told 'em I don't know nothing. I told 'em I got
locked up in 1997, for attempted assault, I got wrote down outside the
gangs, wrote down as 'neutral.' I was in prison for two and a half weeks,
and then I copped out to five years probation. I been going to my
probation, I work, I been doing everything the legit way."

This is true: I looked up Santiago Lugo's record. Attempted assault, '97,
nothing on record since. "Most I been in for since is drinking beer on the
street or smoking weed. This zero-tolerance shit they fuckin' enforcing.

"Listen to me, the narcotics who locked me up that night, these
motherfuckers told me straight out, 'We gotta drive around for awhile. This
is our overtime right now. We got two hours to kill. We don't want to bring
you to the precinct yet.'"

They said that openly?

"They said this openly and proud."

When Santiago finally arrived at the precinct, he was strip-searched. He
took off his laces and his belt and handed them to the officers, who
surrounded him along the line of cells where the prisoners watched. Then he
took off his shoes and stripped his pants, emptying the pockets to the
floor. Coins clattered and his wallet thumped; the wallet had $180. The
police checked the pants again, each pocket, as Santiago stood in his
underwear; the cops then told him to drop his boxers to his ankles and
squat. An officer peered up into his asshole and around his balls and told
him to cough. Santiago described this for me in a quick, embarrassed voice.

In 1986, a federal appeals court declared it unconstitutional to undercover
walks up to them, and tells them to pick up that empty nickel bag there on
the ground. My client picks it up, because they're afraid, and then the
undercover arrests them for possession. I have clients routinely stopped
and arrested for 'trespass' simply because they 'might' have been buying
drugs or selling drugs, walking from the bodega to their apartments or
crossing the green.

"Isn't anybody embarrassed -- isn't anybody really embarrassed by this? I
mean, what is the point?"

NORML's Stroup believes he has an answer to that question. "When you think
about the thousands of law officers assigned to drug enforcement and you
think about those billions of dollars to be had, when you think about all
those drug treatment specialists and counselors and psychologists and
psychiatrists and drug court judges and drug court attorneys -- my God!
There is a drug abuse industrial complex that's been built up in this
country and created so many jobs and become such a large industry that it
has warped, if not monopolized, public decision-making."

Whether the United States is continuing its war on marijuana for mercantile
or moral reasons, one thing is undeniable: The campaign has blighted
millions of lives.

In New York City, it also has a tendency to tear up the stomach. You get
your ACD, walk out alone from the jail, and you see the light of the street
- -- what a sense of giant order and happiness. You want to run down the
block, you feel sick, you need a bathroom -- the bologna.

Santiago went to get cigarettes and Justin went to buy more weed. I bought
a beer and walked home and thought about the jailers, the judges, the
bailiffs, prosecutors, and cops across America blowing their hard thankless
effort down the toilet. Chances are they are not very fond of their jobs in
the drug war economy. For them, however, it's a living. For the rest of us,
it's a bad joke.

[SIDEBAR]

About the writer: Christopher Ketcham is a freelance writer in New York City.