Getting Straight On Delancey Street

Pacific Heights is San Francisco's most exclusive section--and it looks it. Pretty young socialites walk their Afghan hounds along well-kept streets. Well-heeled business executives ride by in chauffeured Rolls-Royces. Baronial mansions overlook the rest of the city. The tenants of one of these mansions do not quite fit the neighborhood picture of opulent elegance: they are 170 former drug addicts and ex-convicts who have done time for crimes ranging from petty theft to armed robbery.

Calling themselves the Delancey Street Family, these unlikely tenants have formed a new "therapeutic community" that is partly modeled after the well-publicized Synanon program, yet is crucially different from it. Both organizations seek to rehabilitate addicts. Synanon members usually expect to live out their lives in one of the organization's residences. (Says Synanon Founder Charles Dederich, "I know damn well if they go out of Synanon, they are dead.") The new group, however, believes that its members can look forward to a future as nonaddicts. Consequently, the Delancey Street Family asks its members to stay only two years. During that time they learn vocational and business skills designed to sustain them in the outside world.

The family was established in 1971 by John Maher, then 30, and three other ex-addicts. All four had served prison terms, and three were disillusioned dropouts from Synanon. The name they chose for themselves was inspired by Maher's boyhood on Manhattan's Lower East Side, where, in the 19th century, Delancey Street came to symbolize the self-reliant spirit of Old World immigrants working their way into the mainstream of American life.

The new "immigrants" from the drug world are demonstrating a similar spirit. Last year the group took in $267,000, including $82,000 earned by residents holding outside jobs, $95,000 from family-run enterprises, and $90,000 in donations. This year they hope to raise their take to a million dollars.

Part of it will come from a restaurant that the family has bought in downtown San Francisco. In preparation for opening day later this month, members are honing their skills in the mansion's huge kitchen and candlelit dining room, where an ex-addict maitre d'hotel conducts family members and their guests to small tables, and waitresses serve them elegantly.

Two major enterprises are already flourishing. One is a moving company headed by Pete Diaz, 29, who grew up in Manhattan's Spanish Harlem and began mainlining heroin at eleven. He learned to drive a tractor-trailer rig when he was twelve, and served five years for armed robbery before he turned 21. At first, Diaz says, "four of us rented trucks from Hertz and moved our friends. Now we've built up to twelve people, the family owns a van, and we cover any job within 100 miles." An equally succcessful member is Andy Nikolatos, 23, who comes from the Bay Area of San Francisco, committed armed robbery two years ago to feed his drug habit, and, now on probation, runs a $45,000-a-year flower business.

Other profitmaking undertakings are auto repair and construction businesses. The family also runs shorthand classes and sends younger members to public trade schools. One student goes to the San Francisco Art Institute; others attend Drew School, a prep school that exchanges scholarships for the labor of Delancey residents. "We know public high school campuses are flooded with narcotics, and we want to protect our kids from that," says Indian-born Mon Sandhu, 27. "That's why we send them to private school."

Rough. Although Delancey Street's orientation toward the future sets it apart from Synanon, the new organization is carrying on one old Synanon tradition: subjecting members to rituals of a kind that Sociologist Erving Goffman calls "degradation ceremonies." New male residents are required to shave their heads; women are compelled to go without makeup for as long as six months. All residents must take part in "the circus," Delancey Street's version of the Synanon "game." Under the leadership of a "ringmaster," members indulge in three-hour bouts of name-calling and mutual criticism. Admits Family Member George Lopez: "We put people together by first taking them apart; it can be rough, really rough."

Some specialists consider such tactics destructive. In an American Psychiatric Association study of Synanon and other therapeutic communities, five drug experts observed that if addiction is partly the result of low selfesteem, "one can wonder whether the most appropriate corrective experience is to persuade the person of his worthless-ness." Members of Delancey Street, however, defend their rules on the grounds that they provide an opportunity to let off steam, teach humility and prepare the way for a kind of rebirth by erasing an addict's old image of himself.

It is too soon to know which side is right. So far, twelve ex-addicts have "graduated" from the family and are said to be drug-free after two to six months in the outside world. Another 13, having held regular full-time jobs for six months, will graduate soon. No family member has been arrested while living on Pacific Heights, and crime in the area has not increased, though hostile neighbors are trying to evict the group on the grounds that they are not really a family and thus are violating zoning regulations.

Prisons in the Bay Area regularly admit Delancey Street residents to screen recruits, and courts sometimes put addict-criminals on probation if they join the family. Says San Francisco County Sheriff Richard Hongisto: "Delancey Street doesn't cost the taxpayers money and it's not bureaucratic. It is reasonably humane--it doesn't keep people locked up. And it has had a reasonable degree of success. Few rehabilitation programs do as well."

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