The Wire - Brooklyn Edition
Michael Brick of the New York Times reports on an intricate Brooklyn drug trade...
It was a big show of force: 60 people under arrest, 5 gangs vanquished, more than 200 criminal charges, a $1.5 million narcotics enterprise shattered and an urban village of 3,500 liberated.
His choice of words signaled an aggressive change in prosecution tactics. Prosecutors planned to file felony conspiracy charges. That approach, long used against Mafia suspects, could produce sentences unheard of among the housing project’s pushers, lookouts and addicts: life in prison.
Again and again in the years to come, similar raids concentrated on housing projects in Coney Island, Fort Greene and East New York. The numbers peaked with the arrest of more than 140 people at the Red Hook Houses in 2006. Nearly all the defendants were charged with first-degree conspiracy, their bail set at $100,000, sometimes $1 million. Tenant associations and community boards lavished praise on the district attorney.
But soon, the strategy stumbled at the courthouse steps.
Judges rebuked the prosecution tactics. Juries rejected the conspiracy charges.
And after six years, eight major operations and more than 500 arrests, no one has been convicted of first-degree conspiracy. Instead, many defendants have spent a year or more on Rikers Island, awaiting trials that in the end never come. Typically, they plead guilty to lesser crimes, are sentenced to time served and then are released.
rosecutors say that the mere threat of their novel conspiracy charge has resulted in longer prison terms, some through plea bargains, keeping accused dealers off the streets as the system moves along.
But defense lawyers have routinely advised their clients to stall, waiting for the favorable plea deals that eventually come. And they call the whole program a miscarriage of justice, an upside-down world where sentences end up being handed out after time has been served. The lawyers argue that prosecutors have abused the use of the conspiracy charges — using the more significant counts to withhold evidence from defendants, and to exact jail terms they might never have won otherwise.
A portrait of the Cypress Hills case, drawn from hearings, interviews, court records, police reports and secret grand jury testimony transcripts provided to The New York Times, offers insights into the goals of prosecutors and the police. And it indicates an outcome that allows both sides to offer competing claims of just what has been achieved.
A Shifting Battleground
By the numbers, Cypress Hills is 1,430 families, 261 of them with a man in the house, living on an average of about $19,000 a year. In the surrounding community, 31 of every 1,000 men have been in jail, among the highest rates in the borough, according to the independent Justice Mapping Center.
By other measures, Cypress Hills is the roar of the jetliners soaring over 15 blunt seven-story rectangles of weathered red brick, the windows barred even on the top floor, the small satellite dishes and ragged foreign flags poking through the slats like letters in a neglected mailbox.
For decades, the project’s gangs have grown in sophistication. A generation ago, the police pursued housing project drug dealers with the buy-and-bust method: An undercover officer buys some drugs, then other officers arrest the seller.
By the late 1980s, the authorities acknowledged they were losing ground to violent crack cocaine gangs. A supervisor, Sgt. Donald Flynn, told a grand jury what was happening: Dealers had begun retreating from the courtyards into the buildings, farther from the reach of surveillance.
“They become, as I like to call it, unholy alliances between some of these groups and agreements as far as who would control what side,” Sergeant Flynn testified. With graffiti on the walls and color-coded caps to mark vials of drugs, the groups staked their territory, the EU organization, the Front Boys, the Ruffryders and the A Team dividing up the 29 acres of Cypress Hills.
Buy-and-bust operations became more difficult to perform, Sergeant Flynn explained. At Cypress Hills, “a lot of people have grown up together, go to school, junior high or elementary, and an undercover not being from the development would be known pretty much right away, as would, of course, any surveillance vehicles.”
Courtesy: New York Times
