Source: Associated Press 
Pubdate: Thur, August 13, 1998
Author: Tim Whitmire, Associated Press

BLOCK-TO-BLOCK FIGHTING IN THE WAR ON DRUGS

EDITOR'S NOTE The war on drugs is usually discussed in broad initiatives
and huge raids. It also goes on one apartment at a time. Here is a look at
a New York City agency waging a block-by-block battle.

NEW YORK (AP) The entrance of the five-story Bronx apartment building is an
illustration of urban decay: Front-door glass is shattered, the jagged
shards poking out. ``Kill or be killed,'' says a snatch of graffiti.

Tim Vance sees the scene differently. ``Believe it or not,'' he says,
``this is a good thing.''

Or at least it's progress. Vance explains: The city-owned building is one
of several on this block occupied by drug dealers, who are responsible for
most of the vandalism. Last year, the agency which owns the building, and
which employs Vance, tried to put locks on the doors as a way of keeping
drug buyers out. The dealers promptly took the doors off their hinges.

But lately, the doors have been staying, the graffiti is limited, and some
of the spray-painted slogans express an unfocused frustration all signs
that Vance's Narcotics Contol Unit is making headway in pushing the dealers
out.

In his job, Vance explains, ``You don't just rush in and do everything at
once. It's about steps and timing.''

Step by step, block by block. That's how this unit fights its war against
drugs, stubbornly retaking neighborhoods and squeezing the problem out.
It's not as dramatic as raids illuminated by trailing TV cameras, but folks
on these blocks say it works.

Take a look at East Third Street, on Manhattan's Lower East Side.

There, a decade ago, Susana De la Cruz's 3-year-old daughter, Zoila,
received a bag of crack cocaine while trick-or-treating. Summertime gunfire
regularly claimed lives.

Now, Susana's husband, Jose, and their 8-year-old son, Michael, throw a
baseball on a street alive with signs of business and residential life a
grocery, a cleaner, a meat market, a community garden. Their building, No.
317, is being renovated.

``We've got a different place now,'' says Jose, who immigrated from the
Dominican Republic in 1991 and works as a service manager at a credit
union. ``But it's a never-ending war. You have to be organized all the time.''

Working with tenants like the De la Cruzes, Vance and his 16 staff members
from the city's Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD)
have driven drug dealers out of more than 2,000 city-owned buildings over
the last 10 years. That's 10,900 apartments.

Though they are not law-enforcement officers and they have no arrest
powers, Vance and his colleagues have initiated 7,700 narcotics
investigations that have been turned over to police since January 1989.
They have taken 6,400 eviction cases to city Housing Court.

``What Tim did ... is to recognize that it's not just a drug problem or a
criminal problem. It's a housing problem and a community development
problem,'' says Frank Braconi, executive director of the non-profit
Citizens Housing and Planning Council. ``He's emphasizing preventive
measures.''

Vance has been consulted on efforts to get rid of drug enterprises in
Washington, D.C., and Cleveland.

``He helped them shut down a real bad drug house in Cleveland,'' said Lisa
Belsky, director of Local Initiative Support Corp., the nation's largest
non-profit financer of affordable housing and community development
projects, with which Vance has worked.

Vance, who declines to give his age, is a fortyish New York native. A
lawyer, he specialized in housing and constitutional law, and then joined
the NYPD. He spent 15 months as a uniformed officer before transferring to
the Legal Bureau at headquarters, where he worked for several years on
narcotics, prostitution and gambling cases.

In 1988, he was named to head HPD's newly created Narcotics Control Unit.
It has a three-point approach to getting drug dealers out of city housing:

1. Manage properties so that it's hard for drug dealers to set up shop;

2. Teach tenants how to give police information to build cases against
dealers;

3. Pursue evictions in Housing Court.

Massive anti-drug sweeps by the federal government and city police in the
early 1990s drove dealers off the streets, but that actually worsened
conditions for tenants like the De la Cruz family, says Donna Ellaby, head
of a community development group.

``The drugs were not really abated 97 they simply went inside,'' she says.
``That's when we'd get the calls: `The dealer on the corner is in my
hallway now.'''

Once they've established a toehold in a building, dealers take over. One
building can become the base for a blocklong operation.

Even within a building, there's often a distinctive dealers' architecture.
They break through walls and ceilings to connect vacant apartments, hiding
the extent of their operations or keeping segments of their business
separate. Raw cocaine might be stored in one room, processed into crack in
another and sold in a third, while a fourth room may be used to charge
buyers a fee to consume their purchase on the premises.

Dealers engineer escape hatches and even tunnels for themselves, and booby
traps and barricades for police. Vance keeps one seized barricade, a plate
steel door weighing more than 300 pounds, in his office.

In the early 1990s, No. 317 East Third Street housed a wholesale crack
cocaine operation, with retail sales there and in No. 311, another
HPD-owned building, according to Vance. A vacant lot housed squatters as
well as serving drug dealers and prostitutes, residents say.

Whenever police were called, Susana De la Cruz says, they came equipped
``like the army.''

They weren't the only well-armed ones. In 1994, when marshals arrived at
the apartment of a dealer known as ``Luis the Soldier,'' they found a
bazooka in a guitar case.

Dealers determined whether Susana could pass through her own hallway on her
way to the grocery store. Her children picked up dealers' lingo phrases
like ``ugly car,'' yelled whenever a police car appeared.

On the first floor, dealers ran ``the hospital,'' a room where addicts
could pay a dollar or two to consume drugs. A woman stood at the door
collecting money.

``They used to tell us, `Today, don't go to the window. Something's going
to happen. We don't want you to see it,''' Susana recalls. ``A couple hours
later, somebody's dead.''

One step at a time, Vance and his staff worked with tenants, police,
community groups and HPD lawyers to drive the dealers out of the Lower East
Side buildings.

Across the city, they are using the same techniques on the drug-ridden
Bronx block.

Vance pointed to his unit's achievements in one building: Workers had used
cinderblocks to eliminate a place for drug sales under the stairway on the
first floor. HPD had sealed 10 apartments after evicting tenants for
involvement in drug dealing: A1; A4; B2; B4; C4; D2; D3; D4; E3; E4.

E3 was a ``recreation room,'' similar to the ``hospital'' at 317 East Third
Street. When other drug apartments in the building were shut down, its
tenants became uncomfortable, Vance said. They finally left, but then E3
was taken over by street dealers.

Then what? Vance gives a surprising answer: He and his staff talked them
into leaving.

``It's a matter of posture, it's a matter of delivery, it's a matter of
eye-to-eye contact,'' Vance says. ``It's not intimidating, it's not
threatening. It's a matter of being frank.''

A deadbolt lock now secures E3.

Fromthe roof, Vance points to other low-rise buildings in the neighborhood
to which the dealers might move their operations.

``You have to look at a block in all its different parts,'' he says. ``We
can't afford to look at one building and say, `We're done here, let's go
across the street.' ... It's serious game theory. I don't think they're
going to just walk away without trying something.''

Vance is sensitive to criticism that some evictions penalize innocent
relatives of drug dealers. He says his unit tries to target only dealers
themselves.

He cites the case of an apartment where the tenants were law-abiding, but a
daughter and son were selling drugs. Rather than have the entire family
evicted, Vance's unit sought a court order excluding the dealer-children
from the apartment.

Vance's unit also teaches law-abiding tenants how to talk with police, how
to observe, what to report.

That's necessary, Ellaby explains, partly because dealers exploit the
suspicions of many tenants that the police are corrupt, but also because
they have become accustomed to looking the other way, out of fear or denial.

``It's hard to train people to be more receptive and not risk their
lives,'' Ellaby says.

Tenants should not take risks, Vance emphasizes. ``Stay safe. Too many
heroes or heroines have been injured or killed in this business,'' he
writes in a booklet on the program. ``Don't get in the faces of drug
dealers. Don't confront them individually. Work as a group, whenever
possible.''

Susana De la Cruz recalls the dealers demanding, ``Who called the
police?''' And she remembers their threats.

Lisette Mendez, an organizer for Ellaby's group, was followed by dealers
when she helped organize tenants on East Third Street. ``I was really
scared,'' she recalls. ``I was dying inside.''

Getting drug dealers out opens the way for community rebirth, Vance says.

Once buildings are cleared of dealers it becomes worthwhile for the city to
spend money renovating and, under the Tenant Interim Lease program, letting
tenants buy the property. On East Third Street, No. 311 has been renovated
and bought by its tenants, and No. 317 is going through the process.

Similar success can be seen at West 140th Street between Seventh and Eighth
avenues, a block the Daily News dubbed ``Death Valley, N.Y.C.'' in 1994.
Since then, Vance's unit and police have cleared the way for $39 million in
city-financed renovation, with HPD selling off the rehabbed buildings
cheaply to community development corporations, and private banks kicking in
financing.

A recent visit to the block -- where 22 of 25 HPD buildings were caught up
in trafficking when Vance's unit arrived -- showed renovated buildings
along a tree-lined street where children played and parents chatted. A
vacant lot had been turned into a small park. 

Copyright 1998 The Associated Press
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Checked-by: Richard Lake