"Get Your 'Lucky Seven' Here

By James Wilde

The Captain steers his sleek black '83 Cadillac into the neighborhood known as Alphabet Town on Manhattan's Lower East Side. This menacing tangle of burned-out buildings, clammy tenements and garbage-strewn vacant lots is one of the country's most notorious drug marketplaces. Dealers crowd the blighted 15-by four-block "town" 24 hours a day, dispensing cocaine, heroin, amphetamines, angel dust and an array of other drugs. The Captain, in his 40s, is a white, affluent tradesman from Brooklyn. He got his nickname because he once owned a yacht. He and his girlfriend, a pink-sugar blond he calls Snowdrop, come into this mostly Hispanic neighborhood every Sunday to buy cocaine ("Big C") and heroin ("Big D," for dope). They like to shoot up with a mixture of the two, a sometimes deadly combination known as speedball.

The Captain parks and, leaving Snowdrop in the car, heads toward the dealers on Second and Avenue D. Although he never carries a gun on his shopping expeditions, the Captain has a tough demeanor that commands respect--gritty gray eyes, a diamond glittering in his right ear, and a clean-shaven head looming over a stocky, pig-iron body. He prefers to "score" drugs on Sunday in order to avoid the novice buyers, known in the trade as johns and marks, who are preyed on by "beat artists," pushers who sell low-quality merchandise at premium prices. "The white high school kids from New Jersey and Long Island and all those other white middle-class jerks come here Friday and Saturday nights when the heroin is cut and the cocaine drowned with baby laxative," says the Captain in a voice as sharp as a razor blade. Three police cars scream past, their flashing lights turning the rain puddles red. A block ahead, the police swarm into a building. The Captain watches: "It's safer to score when the cops are all around. They usually let you go after they bust you and being busted is better than being dead." Last year the Captain was shot five times in the chest by a man who wanted the small bag of heroin that he had just bought. The Captain spent two weeks in the hospital, but soon came back to Alphabet Town. He's still looking for the "crazy dude" who shot him.

Police say there were 40 drug-related murders in the area in 1982, and there are stabbings and shootings almost daily. Appalled and scared by the rampant drug trade, the law-abiding citizens of Alphabet Town three weeks ago marched in protest to Mayor Ed Koch's apartment in nearby Greenwich Village. Police officials grumble that only an air strike could clean it up. Because of budget cuts, the complement of 300 officers in the Ninth Precinct, which patrols the area, has shrunk to 120.

Although the marketplace may seem chaotic to an untrained eye, it is run as efficiently as IBM. It is laid out like a Viet Cong tunnel system. The empty buildings are warrens filled with dealing and supply points, escape routes and booby traps for police. Apartments are fortified: door ways are bricked up with cinder blocks, leaving only a small opening for the passing of drugs and money, or blocked by bunkers of diamond-plate steel. Some dealers sell by lowering buckets from apartment landings; the stairs leading to the landings have been removed. The big-time dealers organize "clubs" that change locations every few hours and employ as many as 40 people as lookouts, runners and baggers. There are even bouncers who check the needle marks on customers' arms as though they were membership cards. Some of Alphabet Town's 15 or so clubs have their own house brands of drugs, like "Lucky Seven" cocaine or such standard heroin varieties as "Poison" and "Colt .45." Employees work strict business hours: there are three eight-hour shifts a day. Each club can gross upwards of $100,000 daily; many offer good employee benefits. In January, one club closed for two weeks to take its entire staff of 30 on a paid vacation to Hawaii.

Fourth and Avenue D is constantly crowded with people waiting to score: blacks, Hispanics and middle-class whites. Clean-cut young men in tweed jackets and attractive young women in designer jeans listen intently to the dealers' pitches. "Get your Lucky Seven here--best dope in town." "Colt .45 is Jesus bread." "Poison is mellow today."

The Captain watches with amusement as some preppie-looking young men buy from a dealer standing three yards away from police. "The police don't want no hassle--just score and split and they won't bother you," he says. He is waiting for his "tout," Chino, who helps the Captain and others buy the purest drugs. Chino arrives, walking sideways like a drunken crab. He wears a green, cowled sweatshirt and a smelly blue coat. "What's good, Chino?" the Captain asks. Chino blinks and stabs the air with a sticky claw of a hand.

He is high on cocaine, pills and a dash of angel dust, but knows his business. "Seven-Up best today, man. They starting to pass it out on Fourth and D." They walk over and join the waiting crowd as pistol-packing guards begin to herd groups often into an abandoned building. For two hours, the line moves slowly up three flights of broken stairs. There is the stench of urine. Flickering candles light the way. The guards order the buyers to face the wall so that they cannot see the delivery. "Have your money ready!" one yells. "No ones. Only fives, tens and 20s. No talkin' or we'll bust your honky heads." Finally the Captain is at the head of the line facing a battered red steel door. He puts $150 on a piece of cardboard protruding from under the door. It disappears. "What'll it be?"

"A bundle of C and a bundle of D," the Captain rasps. Ten foil packets of cocaine appear and ten glassine bags of heroin.

The Captain pays Chino with one bag of each drug and watches him skitter off into the gloom. Then he picks up Snowdrop and, eager to speedball, heads for Peewee's shooting gallery a few blocks away. The Captain warns of dangers immediately after any buy. "Guys could be all over you in seconds ... They use ice picks and slip them into your heart like butter."

Peewee's is a dark, spare apartment with peeling paint and an aroma like a freshly emptied garbage can. Four white women sit around a table with needles hanging from their thin, gooseflesh-covered arms. Three are attractive professionals in their early 20s: a magazine photographer, a Wall Street secretary and a junior executive at an advertising agency. The fourth is an older woman in a designer suit. Peewee, a gentle black, is injecting heroin into his arm, each time drawing a little blood back into the syringe. This pumping technique, known as booting, prolongs the rush. Afterward, Peewee empties the blood in the syringe into a brimming bucket.

His wife Laurie, an emaciated woman known as Walking Dead, is "cooking" a mixture of heroin and cocaine in a soda-bottle cap for her guests. She squirts in water, then heats the cap with a match. She reaches into an empty Quaker Oats box where she stores the "works"--hypodermic needle and syringe--and sucks up the liquid into the hypo. It costs $2 to shoot up, plus $3 for a new needle or $1 for a used one.

The Captain shoots up Snowdrop, tenderly sticking a new needle into her creamy forearm. He "boots" her until she glows. Laurie, wearing a faded peignoir, picks up scattered pieces of bloody pink toilet paper and puts a fresh roll on the table.

In a little while, the Captain and Snowdrop head home. "I'm quitting next week," the Captain says as he pauses on Fourth Street to look at a mural on a tenement wall, an eagle clutching a hypo above the legend in red letters: COME FLY WITH ME FOOL! Just before crossing the Williamsburg Bridge, the Captain spots a young white couple crouching together in the front seat of a Mercedes. The man throws a bloody rag out the window. "They just couldn't wait to get home before shooting up," he tells Snowdrop. She smiles back, still glowing in her speedball womb. --By James Wilde This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.