Commentary

DRUGS TO BLAME? NOT ON YOUR LIFE

This was almost exactly a year ago, back when a triple-murder was
considered a jarring crime. "Carnegie Massacre" was still in the headlines.
This was the pre-terror New York.

Jennifer Stahl and two of her friends had been shot to death in her locked
apartment above the world's most famous delicatessen. The crime was an
especially senseless one. There was no reason these people had to die. The
victims' hands and feet were bound with duct tape. They were finished off
with bullets to the head.

The police were trying desperately to find the killers. They were not
having much luck.

Bernard Kerik, who was then the police commissioner and is not remembered
as an especially impressive one, saw all this as a marvelous opportunity to
pander on the always-ripe issue of drugs. Dead people? Pot in the
apartment? How perfect! Jennifer Stahl, whose acting and music careers
weren't exactly thriving, had started selling small bags of marijuana to
some of her musician friends. The business had grown.

So Kerik cleared his throat, swallowed hard and did what police officials
have been trying to do for decades.

He blamed the pot for everything.

"People who view marijuana peddling as victimless have not seen the carnage
left in the apartment above the Carnegie Deli," the headline-grabbing PC
harrumphed.

As if Jennifer Stahl had died from an overdose of Chronic.

As if her friends had choked on bong water gone bad.

As if the two murderous thugs who spent a total of six minutes inside the
apartment that night weren't motivated by the same twisted, manic drives
that have turned robberies into murders since the beginning of time: panic,
greed, fear of identification and the utter absence of conscience.

It was as true of Jesse James as it was of Al Capone. The victims had
something the robbers wanted - bank notes, diamonds, drugs, whatever. The
killing was almost an afterthought.

Pot didn't kill Jennifer Stahl and her friends. Two crazed and greedy
killers did.

The government's war on marijuana kills a whole lot more people than
marijuana ever did. If you blame the pot for the bodies above the deli, you
might as well blame the hamburgers for the Wendy's massacre.

Change the laws against marijuana. Sell the stuff to adults in pharmacies
or in bars. The pot business will be just as boring as a flat keg of beer.

All of this became ever more plain yesterday at 100 Centre St., where Sean
Salley and Andre Smith are on trial for three counts of second-degree
murder and various lesser charges.

The prosecutor, Assistant District Attorney Steven Nuzzi, played a riveting
911 tape from the night of the murders.

On the tape, a frantic Anthony Veader, one of two others in the apartment
who were shot but survived, says he's been shot in the head. He begs the
dispatcher to send help.

"A bunch of us have been shot," he says.

His panic hung in the cavernous courtroom yesterday afternoon. It drove all
the nonsense out of the air. In a moment like that, with life an open
question, even the simplest facts get easily confused.

At first, Veader couldn't get the address straight.

Was the apartment on Broadway?

Was it Seventh Avenue?

The dispatcher kept asking him, "East Side or West Side?"

He said "Apartment 9," the dispatcher understood "ninth floor."

Finally, the police arrived. Thankfully, Veader survived. Now he will be
one of the prosecution's key witnesses in the case.

Amid all the confusion on the tape, some clarity was momentarily achieved
yesterday for those who knew Jennifer Stahl best.

"She was a kind, enthusiastic, extremely generous person, who was always
meticulous about her business, except for letting Sean Salley inside that
night," said Michelle Cramer, an office manager at a record company who was
one of Jennifer's closest friends.

She was at court yesterday. She spoke outside the building. She wasn't
falling for the blame-the-drugs talk.

"These weren't two people who wanted to get high," she said of the two men
on trial. "These were two psychopaths who were out on the street, who did
something totally unnecessary. Jennifer and the others were practically
hog-tied. But they still had to shoot them. What sense did that make?"

Michelle had met Sean Salley one night at Jennifer's apartment, she said.
"I didn't like his vibe. I said, 'Nice to meet you.' He said, 'Ugghhh.'"

Jennifer had been welcoming to him. She, like him, had worked around the
music business. "He was supposedly a roadie for George Clinton," Michelle
said. "So to Jen, he was part of the industry. She trusted him. He was like
family."

And then he turned on her, she said.

"If Mr. Salley had needed something from Jen, he could have asked and she
probably would have given it to him."

No one could explain how that figured into the war on drugs.