Crack Train Controller 7 Gold
Anatomy of a crack The longer answer to how these relatively stronger passwords were revealed requires comparing and contrasting the approaches of the three crackers. Because their equipment and the amount of time they devoted to the exercise differed, readers shouldn't assume one cracker's technique was superior to those of the others. That said, all three cracks resembled video games where each successive level is considerably harder than the last. The first stage of each attack typically cracked in excess of 50 percent of the hashes, with each stage that came later cracking smaller and smaller percentages. By the time they got to the latest rounds, they considered themselves lucky to get more than a few hundred plains. True to that pattern, Gosney's first stage cracked 10,233 hashes, or 62 percent of the leaked list, in just 16 minutes. It started with a brute-force crack for all passwords containing one to six characters, meaning his computer tried every possible combination starting with 'a' and ending with '//////.'
Because guesses have a maximum length of six and are comprised of 95 characters—that's 26 lower-case letters, 26 upper-case letters, 10 digits, and 33 symbols—there are a manageable number of total guesses. This is calculated by adding the sum of 95 6 + 95 5 + 95 4 + 95 3 + 95 2 + 95. It took him just two minutes and 32 seconds to complete the round, and it yielded the first 1,316 plains of the exercise. Beyond a length of six, however, Gosney was highly selective about the types of brute-force attacks he tried.
That's because of the exponentially increasing number of guesses each additional character creates. While it took only hours to brute-force all passwords from one to six characters, it would have taken Gosney days, weeks, or even years to brute-force longer passwords. Robert Graham, the CEO of Errata Security who has calculated the requirements, refers to this limitation as the 'exponential wall of brute-force cracking.' Recognizing these limits, Gosney next brute-force cracked all passwords of length seven or eight that contained only lower letters.
That significantly reduced the time required and still cracked 1,618 hashes. He tried all passwords of length seven or eight that contained only upper letters to reveal another 708 plains. Because their 'keyspace' was the sum of 26 8 + 26 7, each of these steps was completed in 41 seconds. Next, he brute-forced all passwords made up solely of numbers from one to 12 digits long.
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It cracked 312 passcodes and took him three minutes and 21 seconds. It was only then that Gosney turned to his word lists, which he has spent years fine tuning. Augmenting the lists with the 'best64' rule set built into Hashcat, he was able to crack 6,228 hashes in just nine minutes and four seconds. To complete stage one, he ran all the plains he had just captured in the previous rounds through a different rule set known as 'd3ad0ne' (named after its who is a recognized password expert).
It took one second to complete and revealed 51 more plains. 'Normally I start by brute-forcing all characters from length one to length six because even on a single GPU, this attack completes nearly instantly with fast hashes,' Gosney explained in an e-mail. He continued: And because I can brute-force this really quickly, I have all of my wordlists filtered to only include words that are at least six chars long. This helps to save disk space and also speeds up wordlist-based attacks. Same thing with digits. I can just brute-force numerical passwords very quickly, so there are no digits in any of my wordlists.
Then I go straight to my wordlists + best64.rule since those are the most probable patterns, and larger rule sets take much longer to run. Our goal is to find the most plains in the least amount of time, so we want to find as much low-hanging fruit as possible first. Cracking the weakest passwords first is especially helpful when hashes contain cryptographic salt. Originally devised to thwart rainbow tables and other types of precomputed techniques, salting appends random characters to each password before it is hashed. Besides defeating rainbow tables, salting slows down brute-force and dictionary attacks because hashes must be cracked one at a time rather than all of them at once. But the thing about salting is this: it slows down cracking only by a multiple of the number of unique salts in a given list. That means the benefit of salting diminishes with each cracked hash.
By cracking the weakest passwords as quickly as possible first (an optimization offered by Hashcat) crackers can greatly diminish the minimal amount of protection salting might provide against cracking. Of course, none of this applies in this exercise since the leaked MD5 wasn't salted. With 10,233 hashes cracked in stage one, it was time for stage two, which consisted of a series of. True to the video game analogy mentioned earlier, this second stage of attacks took considerably longer than the first one and recovered considerably fewer plains—to be exact, five hours and 12 minutes produced 2,702 passwords.
As the name implies, a hybrid attack marries a dictionary attack with a brute-force attack, a combination that greatly expands the reach of a well-honed word list while keeping the keyspace to a manageable length. The first round of this stage appended all possible two-characters strings containing digits or symbols to the end of each word in his dictionary. It recovered 585 plains and took 11 minutes and 25 seconds to run. Round two appended all possible three-character strings containing digits or symbols.
It cracked 527 hashes and required 58 minutes to complete. The third round, which appended all four-digit number strings, took 25 minutes and recovered 435 plains. Round four appended all possible strings containing three lower-case letters and digits and acquired 451 more passwords. As fruitful as these attacks were, Gosney said they were handicapped by his use of a single graphics card for this exercise. 'For example, you'll notice that when I was doing hybrid attacks, I appended 2-3 digits/special but then only did digits with length 4,' he explained. 'This is because doing digits/special for length 4 would have taken a really long time with just one GPU, so I skipped it. Same with when I started appending lower alpha/digits, I only did length 3 because length 4 would have taken too long with just one GPU.'
No doubt, Gosney could have attacked much larger keyspaces had he used the. Because the graphics cards in the five-server system scale almost linearly, it's able to harness almost all of their combined power. As a result, it can achieve 350 billion guesses per second when cracking password hashes generated by Microsoft's NTLM algorithm. And it could generate similar results when going up against MD5 and other fast hash functions. The remaining hybrid attacks in stage two continued in the same vein. By the time it was completed, he had cracked a total of 12,935 hashes, or 78.6 percent of the list, and had spent a total of just 5 hours and 28 minutes doing it.
One of the things Gosney and other crackers have found is that passwords for a particular site are remarkably similar, despite being generated by users who have never met each other. After cracking such a large percentage of hashes from this unknown site, the next step was to analyze the plains and mimic the patterns when attempting to guess the remaining passwords. The result is a series of statistically generated brute-force attacks based on a mathematical system known as. Hashcat makes it simple to implement this method.
By looking at the list of passwords that already have been cracked, it performs probabilistically ordered, per-position brute-force attacks. Gosney thinks of it as an 'intelligent brute-force' that uses statistics to drastically limit the keyspace. Where a classic brute-force tries 'aaa,' 'aab,' 'aac,' and so on, a Markov attack makes highly educated guesses. It analyzes plains to determine where certain types of characters are likely to appear in a password. A Markov attack with a length of seven and a threshold of 65 tries all possible seven-character passwords with the 65 most likely characters for each position. It drops the keyspace of a classic brute-force from 95 7 to 65 7, a benefit that saves an attacker about four hours.
And since passwords show surprising uniformity when it comes to the types of characters used in each position—in general, capital letters come at the beginning, lower-case letters come in the middle, and symbols and numbers come at the end—Markov attacks are able crack almost as many passwords as a straight brute-force. 'This is where your attack plan deviates from the standard and becomes unique, because now you're doing site-specific attacks,' Gosney said.
'From there, if you start hitting upon any interesting patterns, you just start chasing those patterns down the rabbit hole. Once you've fully exploited one pattern you move on to the next.'
In all, it took Gosney 14 hours and 59 minutes to complete this third stage, which besides Markov attacks included several other custom wordlists combined with rules. Providing further evidence of the law of diminishing returns that dictates password cracking, it yielded 1,699 more passwords. It's interesting to note that the increasing difficulty is experienced even within this last step itself. It took about three hours to cover the first 962 plains in this stage and 12 hours to get the remaining 737.
The other two password experts who cracked this list used many of the same techniques and methods, although not in the same sequence and with vastly different tools. The only wordlist used by radix, for example, came directly from the.
Because the SQL-injection hack exposed more than 14 million unique passwords in plaintext, the list represents the largest corpus of real-world passwords ever to be made public. Radix has a much bigger custom-compiled dictionary, but like a magician who doesn't want to reveal the secret behind a trick, he kept it under wraps during this exercise.
AS BROADWAY CUTS UP through the Upper West Side of Manhattan and into Washington Heights, it gradually turns into a giant Caribbean bazaar. The avenue abounds with bodegas, farmacias, unisex beauty salons, bargain clothing outlets, restaurants serving pollo and platanos, and travel agencies offering bargains to the Dominican Republic.
Women squeeze mangoes, children lick flavored ices, men play hard at dominoes, all to the accompaniment of a hundred different radios blaring salsa music. Long a magnet for immigrants, Washington Heights today is home to large colonies of Irish, Jews and, most numerous of all, Dominicans. As the ever-present crowds make their way up and down the street, the Heights seems a living embodiment of the American Dream - a vibrant, energetic urban melting pot. Wander off Broadway, though, and the neighborhood quickly seems like an American nightmare. On side streets in the 150's and 160's, clusters of tough teen-agers wearing beepers, four-finger gold rings and $95 Nikes offer $3 vials of crack, the high-octane, smokable derivative of cocaine. On every block there are four or five different 'crews,' or gangs, each touting its own brand of the drug, known to aficionados as 'Scotty' (as in 'Beam me up'). Some blocks are 'hotter' than others, depending on the availability of the crack.
On the hottest blocks Scotty is available '24/7' - 24 hours a day, seven days a week. So much business is transacted on these streets that Washington Heights has gained a reputation as the crack capital of America. The experience of the Heights has been repeated in large cities throughout the country. And now, in smaller communities, too, crack is striking with swift fury, From rural woodlands to shady suburbs, prairie townships to Southern hamlets, no community seems immune. The roster of the infected reads like a roll-call of Middle America itself: Roanoke, Va.; Seaford, Del.; Sioux Falls, S.D.; Cheyenne, Wyo.; Sacramento, Calif.; Portland, Ore.
Fort Wayne, Ind., once known as the City of Churches, is now home to an estimated 70 crack houses, causing law-enforcement personnel to christen it 'the crack capital of Indiana.' ' How did it happen? How did a drug once confined to a handful of large-city neighborhoods make its way to Main Street in just a few short years? Much of the answer can be found in data generated by the Federal Government's unprecedented intelligence-gathering operation against crack. In 13 cities across the country, crack teams created over the last three years by the Justice Department are methodically tracking the importation, distribution and consumption of the drug. In New York, the United States Drug Enforcement Administration (D.E.A.) operates a special Unified Intelligence Division staffed by experts from a dozen agencies, including the F.B.I., the I.R.S., Customs, Immigration and the local police department.
Twenty-four hours a day, the information pours in - from wiretaps and surveillance teams, witnesses and informants, police raids and drug busts. Ps2 classic mini. By combining this data with testimony from D.E.A. Agents, police captains, sociologists, undercover agents, community leaders, criminologists, prosecutors, addicts and treatment experts, it is possible to trace crack's destructive sprint across America.
WASHINGTON HEIGHTS HAS COME NATU-rally by its status as the nation's crack capital. It would be difficult to design a better location for marketing a new drug.
First, the area is highly accessible. To the west, the George Washington Bridge brings in potential customers from New Jersey; to the north the Henry Hudson Parkway pulls them in from Westchester County. For residents of Passaic or Peekskill who want a quick high, the Heights offers easy-in, easy-out convenience. By all accounts, Washington Heights transacts more out-of-town drug deals than any other neighborhood in New York City. The neighborhood itself provides a substantial pool of users. For every newcomer who has made it as a shopkeeper on Broadway, there are others who have dropped out of school, had a child out of marriage, become permanently unemployed -likely candidates for drug use. Here, as throughout the country, crack does best where Americans -especially minorities - do worst.
Finally, Washington Heights is home to New York's most enterprising drug dealers. No, they are not Colombians. Although most people associate Colombians with cocaine and crack - especially now that open warfare has broken out between the drug lords and the Government in Bogota - Colombians are not generally involved in the retailing of crack in the United States.
They just produce cocaine in South America and smuggle it into the United States. The Colombians living in New York are too few in number and too insular to have the array of contacts necessary to move drugs on the street. The Dominicans, New York's fastest-growing immigrant group, do have such contacts. They also have the marketing talent. Crack dealing, like more legitimate lines of work, requires the ability to exercise quality control, hire a dependable workforce and develop a steady clientele.
At all of this, the Dominicans (only a small percentage of whom are involved in the drug trade) have had a lot of experience. In the Caribbean, they are known as merchants and tradesmen. In New York, they have applied their savvy to become highly successful shopkeepers - and the city's top crack traffickers. ALTHOUGH CRACK'S ORIGINS RE-main obscure - no one really knows who invented it - the Dominicans are generally credited with having first developed it for a mass market. The breakthrough seems to have come about by accident, an improvised response to shifting consumer tastes. Until 1983, cocaine was used almost exclusively in powder form (known as cocaine hydrochloride). Extremely expensive, the drug was often consumed at parties and discos, where it was sprinkled on mirrors and snorted - usually through a high-denomination bill.
Gradually, though, many snorters, seeking a more intense high, turned to freebasing. This involved treating cocaine powder with ether and reducing it to a crystalline base, which, when smoked, produced a sharp, pleasurable rush. Unfortunately, freebasing was complicated and messy, the subject of instruction booklets running on for many pages. It was dangerous, too, risking explosions like the one that hospitalized the comedian Richard Pryor. To avoid the hassle, customers began demanding that their dealers convert the powder to freebase in advance.
This presented dealers with a dilemma. For, when cocaine is converted to freebase, it loses much of its weight. If they wanted to sell ready-made freebase at popular prices, dealers would have to absorb the loss - unless they could find an undetectable filler. The search was on. One researcher who observed it was Terry Williams, a sociologist at the City University of New York who in 1982 began hanging out with a teen-age cocaine gang in Washington Heights. Williams, who recounts his experiences in a recently published book, 'The Cocaine Kids,' recalls that the local Dominican gangs 'came up with something called 'comeback,' ' a chemical adulterant akin to lidocaine, a prescription anesthetic. 'When comeback is blended with cocaine powder and cooked, all of it remains in the mix,' Williams explains.
'This became the first chemical that you could cut freebase with.' ' The result was the prototype for crack. Eventually dealers found other, less expensive substances that worked in conjunction with comeback. The cheapest and most effective was common baking soda. Formulas varied, but the typical instructions were as simple as a recipe out of 'The 60-Minute Gourmet': Take two ounces cocaine hydrochloride. Mix with two ounces comeback and one ounce Arm & Hammer. Bring to a boil.
Let cool into a solid mass. Break into small pieces. Intense rush should follow instantly. Serves 2,000.
Before long, Dominican dealers were out on the streets of Washington Heights peddling the new substance in pellet form at a few dollars a pop. (The name came from the crackling sound the drug made when smoked.) The 'champagne' of drugs, once limited to the elite, was now available - somewhat diluted - to drifters and dropouts, welfare mothers and unemployed youths. Dealers set up shop across the street from schools, enticing teen-agers with free samples. They also offered two-for-one deals and 'Mother's Day' specials timed to coincide with the arrival of welfare checks. Soon, customers were seeking out dealers rather than the other way around, helping establish Washington Heights as America's first major crack market. The Dominicans then began fanning southward into Harlem and eastward into the South Bronx. They also began supplying cocaine to other ethnic groups.
In Harlem, in South Jamaica, Queens, in the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Bushwick and Brownsville, poor young blacks - jobless, uneducated and desperate - hungered for a piece of the 'crazy money' crack offered. To get started, it took as little as an ounce of cocaine, an investment of perhaps $1,000.
Obtaining it was not much of a problem. By the mid-1980's, cocaine was arriving in New York by the ton. Importation was controlled by the Cali Cartel, Colombia's second-largest syndicate, after the Medellin Cartel. Desperate to unload their supplies, the Colombians found dependable customers in the Dominicans of Washington Heights. The two groups got along well, joined not only by a common language but also by similar entrepreneurial values. The Dominicans became New York's chief middlemen.
As sales boomed to aspiring young dealers outside Washington Heights, the city was eventually carved up along ethnic lines, with Dominican-supplied blacks controlling Harlem, Queens and Brooklyn, and the Dominicans dominant in upper Manhattan and the South Bronx. FROM THE START, CRACK'S DISTRI-bution system distinguished it from all other drugs. Heroin, for instance, was highly centralized. From poppy cultivation to street sales, the trade was dominated by a single organization - the Mafia, which, though ruthless, imposed a certain order on the trade. Gang wars were rare, and police officers were never fired upon.
Because distribution was so tightly controlled, it was possible, with diligent police work, to put an entire network out of business, as occurred in the French Connection case. With crack, there could be no French Connection. In effect, it took the(Continued on Page 58) 'organized' out of organized crime. 'The unique thing about crack is that for a relatively small investment you can buy some cocaine, convert it to crack in the kitchen, and begin distributing almost immediately,' says John Featherly, staff coordinator of the D.E.A.' S cocaine section in Washington.
'This makes for a lot of entrepreneurs.' ' If heroin was the Fortune 500, crack was Mom and Pop. A typical crack organization would have no more than seven or eight people - a street seller or two, a steerer to direct customers, a guard to protect the merchandise, a police lookout, a weigher (known as a 'scale boy'), a manager and a 'Mr. Big' to count the profits. Competition was intense. In busy areas like Washington Heights, one block might host four or five crews, all contending for the same consumer dollar.
With no overall hierarchy or command structure to impose order, turf wars broke out over the most lucrative spots. Dealers regularly ripped off customers and stole from one another, leading to frequent shootouts, stabbings and executions. Crack created a new breed of urban guerrilla, members of a fierce, proliferating army that left the police badly outnumbered and outgunned. By late 1985, when crack first came to the attention of the national press, it was deeply entrenched in New York's poor neighborhoods. In the rest of the country, only two cities - Los Angeles and Miami - had comparable crack problems. All three cities were major distribution points for cocaine, so it was natural that crack would engulf them first. Soon, however, the drug began to move out from these gateway cities and into the heartland.
It would travel via a fearsome new set of traffickers - illegal immigrants from Jamaica - who would quickly and radically transform the way crack was distributed around the country. DELROY EDWARDS GREW up poor in the tough, stifling shantytowns of Kingston, Jamaica. In 1980, at the age of 20, he went to work as a street enforcer for the Jamaica Labor Party of Edward Seaga.
Seaga was locked in a bitter election duel with the People's National Party, headed by Michael Manley, and each side was forming armed gangs to intimidate the other. The gangs did their job only too well, killing 800 people by election day.
After his victory, Seaga launched a crackdown, and many gang members, feeling the heat, headed for the United States. Among them was Delroy Edwards. Slipping into Brooklyn on a tourist visa, he eventually made his way into the marijuana business, selling nickel bags out of a neighborhood storefront.
At the beginning of 1985, Edwards learned to make crack. Soon he was selling little else. He worked out of two 'flagship' spots in Brooklyn - one, a two-story house, the other, an abandoned brownstone near a housing project. Enough poor blacks coughed up enough $5 bills to enable Edwards to buy a $150,000 home on Long Island - and to pay for it in cash. That wasn't enough for Edwards, who began looking to expand his business. Unfortunately, New York was already crowded with crack dealers; outside the city, however, lay plenty of virgin territory.
In Washington, Baltimore and Philadelphia, for instance, crack was just beginning to catch on. Enterprising local dealers would travel to New York, buy a few ounces of cocaine, return home, convert it into crack, and sell the product for three or four times the New York street price. In the fall of 1986, Edwards traveled to Washington and set up shop; by the following spring his lieutenants had established thriving businesses in Philadelphia and Baltimore as well. At its peak, Edwards's organization, known as the Rankers, employed 50 workers and made up to $100,000 a day. The glory days did not last. Edwards - nicknamed 'Uzi' for his taste in weapons -was pathologically violent. People who crossed him were pistol-whipped, beaten with baseball bats, shot in the legs.
One 16-year-old worker, suspected of cheating, was beaten unconscious with bats, scalded with boiling water, and suspended by a chain from the ceiling until he died. Eventually, the police caught up with Edwards, and in July a Brooklyn jury convicted him on 42 counts of murder, assault, kidnapping and drug dealing.
Crack Train Controller 7 Gold V.8.0d
Edwards is now awaiting sentencing. The Rankers have disintegrated. But there are 40 other groups just like the Rankers, running crack out of New York and Miami to points across the country.
Posses, they're called, after their members' affection for American westerns (and the guns used in them). Most, like the Rankers, took shape as gangs during the 1980 Jamaican election, then fled to the United States and regrouped.
Here, their 10,000 to 20,000 members, organized in posses with as few as 25 members and as many as several hundred, keep incessantly on the move, slipping in and out of the many Jamaican communities scattered across the country. To maintain loyalty, each posse generally restricts membership to the residents of a particular neighborhood in Kingston.
Posse members travel with fake IDs, making it tough for policemen to identify them. Sometimes, as a cover, they attach themselves to reggae groups touring the country.
Today, Jamaicans are believed to control 35 percent to 40 percent of the nation's crack network. 'They're very good businessmen,' says John A. O'Brien, an agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (B.A.T.F.), the Federal agency that most closely monitors the posses. 'They follow the law of supply and demand. When they see that a vial of crack selling for $5 in New York will get $15 in Kansas City, they'll move in.' ' New York is their 'training school,' O'Brien says, 'like going to Wharton. They'll take a guy doing a good job in Harlem and send him to open an office in the Midwest.'
' On his arrival in the new area, the posse sales rep will rent a motel room and conduct a market survey of sorts to determine the most lucrative spot in town. Then he'll rent an apartment or, better yet, get a single female to lend him one in return for crack.
When asked how the posses move the drug from city to city, Bill McMullan, the assistant special agent in charge of the D.E.A.' S Washington office, jokingly cites the title of a recent movie: 'Planes, Trains and Automobiles.' ' Amtrak, Greyhound, commercial airlines, Federal Express, U.P.S. the posses use them all, regularly.
To carry cocaine on commercial flights, the Jamaicans tend to recruit overweight women able to conceal one- or two-pound packages on their person. Also popular are rental cars, preferably Volvos, sent over the nation's highways, preferably Interstates. 'When I see some of the places the posses are operating, I can't find any other explanation than the presence of a nearby Interstate,' says Stephen Higgins, the B.A.T.F.'
S director in Washington. In deciding where to strike, the Jamaicans generally follow the path of least resistance. Cities with well-organized criminal groups, such as Newark, St. Louis and Chicago, tend to get bypassed. At first glance, Chicago would seem to be an ideal posse target. It is a major transportation hub, has a vast inner-city population and offers block upon block of public housing projects, a favorite crack target. But Chicago also has plenty of established homegrown gangs doing a brisk business in cocaine and heroin.
Intent on protecting their trade, they have worked determinedly to keep outside traffickers from entering. 'When crack first appeared, some groups did try to come here and stake out some territory, but they quickly left,' ' says Vincent Lang, chairman of the Chicago Housing Authority. 'They wanted to remain alive.'
' Today Chicago is awash in powder cocaine, but crack is very hard to find. Perhaps wary of the anarchic market forces crack has unleashed elsewhere, local dealers have opted out of selling it themselves. In other cities, dealers tend to be too weak and disorganized to stand up to the posses and their tactics. The Jamaicans are fanatics for weapons. Taking advantage of lax gun laws in Texas, Florida and Virginia, they have stockpiled Uzis and AR-13 assault rifles.
When breaking into a new area, the Jamaicans come in with all barrels blazing. 'One cause of the violence we're seeing in many cities is Jamaican traffickers pushing out American blacks,' says Jonny Frank, a prosecutor in the Delroy Edwards case.
According to the B.A.T.F., the posses have been responsible for approximately 1,000 murders since 1985. Washington, Philadelphia, Dallas, Houston, Kansas City, Denver - all have suffered Jamaican invasions. In New York, the posses have succeeded in taking over much of Brooklyn and Harlem, establishing themselves as the city's second largest traffickers, after the Dominicans. Many smaller cities have been hit, too.
New York-based posses have set up a thriving operation in Hartford, shipping their merchandise there via bus and train. In New York State, the Jamaicans are moving crack up Interstate 87, hitting such tiny Hudson Valley towns as Newburgh, Kingston and Saratoga Springs. In West Virginia, the posses have established crack houses in Martinsburg (population 13,000) and Charles Town (3,000). From there they have moved out along Interstate 81, shipping crack as far north as Chambersburg, Pa., and as far south as Roanoke, Va. It would be hard to imagine a more unlikely setting for crack.
A town of only 90,000, Roanoke is nestled in the heart of Virginia's dairy and orchard country, several hours' drive from the nearest city. Yet members of the Shower posse, the largest in the country, have managed to find their way there from New York. On closer examination, though, the presence of crack in Roanoke is really not so surprising. Even towns with Norman Rockwell-like reputations have pockets of alienation and despair, open sores in which crack can take hold and fester.
Roanoke has its own modest ghetto, beset by the same social ills afflicting larger cities. 'We have a sizable minority community, and that's where the Jamaicans set up,' observes Tom Bondurant, an assistant United States attorney in Roanoke. Demand was obviously high: crack was selling for $25 to $30 a vial - more than enough to catch the attention of big-city traffickers. Roanoke's case is typical.
Across the country, crack has displayed remarkable consistency, taking root in those sectors of society least able to resist it. In places like Charles Town, Newburgh, and even Fort Wayne, Ind., crack has found a foothold among poor blacks and - to a far lesser degree - Hispanics. Will it stay that way? Or will crack break out like some threatening contagion into the middle-class population, white and black? In some places, it already has.
In Washington - the city with the nation's highest rate of drug-related violence -crack has leaped across the city lines into the middle-class suburbs of Maryland and Virginia. Until June 1988, for instance, crack was virtually unknown in Howard County, a tranquil, middle-class area midway between Washington and Baltimore; today the drug is being distributed in 20 locations, including some attractive town houses. Gold, the director of research at Fair Oaks Hospital in New Jersey and the founder of the national '800-COCAINE Helpline,' detects a subtle shift in the profile of America's crack users. Until recently, he says, virtually all of those calling in to seek help with crack were young inner-city residents, poor and unemployed. Today, they remain the most common users, but, Gold says, 'crack appears to be making some inroads into suburban and rural America. I now get many calls from the Sunbelt, whereas before I didn't.'
Crack Train Controller 7 Gold 8
' Gold, a member of William Bennett's kitchen cabinet, says that the nation has reached a 'turning point. Whether crack expands and changes the typical crack user or not, only time will tell.' ' TodAY'S REALITY, meanwhile, is most visible in Kansas City, Mo. A year ago, the city was declaring victory in the war on crack. A Federal organized-crime task force had succeeded in dismantling a thriving crack operation run by the Waterhouse posse. Working out of a fortresslike house in the heart of the inner city, the Jamaicans had employed an estimated 1,000 people at one point. Demand was so great that the posse had had to import Jamaicans from New York and Miami.
This proved to be its undoing. The new workers felt little loyalty to the group, and, when arrested, tended to talk, providing the task force with invaluable information. In late 1986, the Feds struck, raiding ghetto crack houses and rounding up dealers. Eventually, 178 traffickers were prosecuted and 25 more deported. By the start of 1987, no more than 75 posse members remained in town. Across the nation, Kansas City was hailed as a stunning success story.
The sense of triumph was short-lived, however. 'A year ago, we were really feeling good about the successes we had had,' says the first assistant United States attorney Rob Larsen, who directed the task force from 1983 to 1987.
'Then the L.A. Gangs began arriving.' ' Los Angeles's black street gangs are the fastest-growing set of crack traffickers in the country. Already they have established a national network second only to that of the posses. They are grouped into confederations known as the Bloods and the Crips, each with its own color (blue for Crips, red for Bloods), slang and hand signals. Fiercely territorial, the gangs have traditionally concentrated on fighting one another over impoverished patches of south-central Los Angeles. Crack has changed that.
Sensing the enormous profit potential in the drug, the Bloods and the Crips are now paying less attention to one another and more to transporting crack. Today, more than 10,000 gang members are at work in some 50 cities from Seattle to Baltimore.
Generally, they emulate the tactics of the posses, infiltrating black communities by working through local contacts. So far, the gangs and the posses have avoided fighting one another. In fact, they seem to be dividing up the country between them -the gangs working eastward from California, the posses westward from New York. The two national networks are gradually crisscrossing - with devastating consequences for towns caught in the middle.
Thus, in Kansas City, when the crackdown on the posses created a vacuum, the Bloods and Crips quickly filled it. Today, crack is just as plentiful in the city as it had been before the Waterhouse roundup. Meanwhile, the Waterhouse posse, routed from Kansas City, is beginning to resurface in Des Moines and Omaha -even across the river in Kansas City, Kan. 'It was a startling experience' says Larsen. 'Nobody feels like we're making any substantial progress at all.' ' Crack, he adds ruefully, 'is a very difficult thing for law enforcement to deal with.' ' Indeed, even if the posses and L.A.
Gangs were somehow tamed - an extremely unlikely prospect - there are plenty of other groups ready to take their place. Both Cubans and Guyanese have established fledgling interstate operations, while Haitian traffickers based in Fort Pierce, Fla., are transporting crack along the East Coast, via migrant farm workers. In Miami, Detroit and countless smaller cities across the country, local black rings are at work, looking intently for opportunities to expand. Not everyone has lost hope.
Stutman, special agent in charge of the D.E.A.' S field office in New York, points to a natural selection process taking place in the crack trade, with smaller organizations gradually being absorbed by larger ones. 'The crack business is becoming more highly organized, more like heroin,' says Stutman. In New York, he observes, 'crack is now controlled by a finite number of groups. That was not true two years ago.' ' The effect, he says, is to provide law-enforcement officials with a 'more discernible target.'
' Stutman cites a Dominican organization in Washington Heights that, in three short years, went from being street-corner peddlers to becoming a multitier conglomerate selling more than 10,000 vials of crack a day. The group was so well organized that it marketed its crack under a brand name ('Based Balls'). Such practices eventually attracted the attention of the D.E.A., which, after an intensive investigation, put the group out of business. Unfortunately, the D.E.A.' S efforts had little effect on the supply of crack in New York - the usual outcome of law-enforcement action aimed at the drug. No matter how determined the effort to root it out, crack seems always to thrive.
That has been the experience in Kansas City. In Brooklyn, crack continues to sell for $3 a vial despite the prosecution of Delroy Edwards. In Washington, the police recently seized Rayful Edmond 3d, allegedly the city's largest dealer, but crack remains available in 120 locations throughout town. 'Right after we locked up Edmond, the homicide rate slowed down for a while,' says Collin Younger, commander of the narcotics branch of the D.C. 'Now it's beginning to pick up again as other dealers fight over his territory.' ' Crack is getting so plentiful in the District of Columbia that Younger expects the price to drop any day now.
As if crack weren't enough to contend with, a new drug has recently appeared on the horizon. Called ice, it is a smokable version of methamphetamine, or speed. It creates a high that lasts for up to 24 hours, compared with crack's 20-minute high, followed by a 'crash' so severe that it can resemble paranoid schizophrenia. President Bush's anti-drug strategy, unveiled on Sept. 5, calls for a heavy reliance on police and prosecutors. Fully 70 percent of its projected $7.9 billion spending will go for law enforcement, including $1.6 billion for new prisons and $3.1 billion for state and local police. The remaining 30 percent will go toward treatment, prevention and education.
Judging from the record of the police to date, though, the Bush plan seems unlikely to make any real dent in the amount of crack on the streets. A sense of resignation is settling over America's drug agents. More and more of them are beginning to sound like Francis Hall. For four years, until his retirement in March, Hall served as commanding officer of the New York Police Department's narcotics division, making him, in effect, New York's top narc.
Hall helped design the Tactical Narcotics Teams (T.N.T.) -the special police units that carry out sweeps through drug-infested neighborhoods - that today are the city's principal weapon in the fight against drugs. Looking back over his four years on the front lines, Hall compares the war on crack to another conflict.
'Drug enforcement,' he says, 'is like the Vietnam War. In Vietnam, we underestimated the number of Vietcong and their will to fight. We appear to be doing the same thing with street-level drug traffickers.' ' Noting that the staff of the narcotics division has increased from 525 in 1985 to 2,000 today, Hall observes, 'It's like Westmoreland asking Washington for two more divisions.
We lost the Vietnam War with a half-million men. We're doing the same thing with drugs.'
' The Vietnam analogy might be taken a step further. The Vietcong grew largely because of the social, political and economic breakdown engulfing Vietnam. No matter how much firepower the United States expended, the guerrillas always managed to regroup, nurtured by the poverty and injustice around them. Much the same is true of crack in America. No matter how many sweeps, raids and busts our police departments mount against crack traffickers, they always manage to resurface. Only when we address the conditions that have given rise to crack - the desperation of our inner cities - will we begin to see the light at the end of the tunnel.
Two photos show a dealer selling Crack near the Florida A&M University in Tallahassee, Florida. (MARK WALHEISER/TALLAHASSEE DEMOCRAT)(pg.38); A woman on New York's Upper West Side smoking crack.
(MERRY ALPERN)(PG.39); Crack use in Anchorage, Alaska. (AL GRILLO/PICTURE GROUP), An addict displays rocks of Crack valued in Talahassee, Florida at $10 (left) and $20. 1988 (MARK LHEISER/TALAHASSEE DEMOCRAT)(pg. 40); Kansas City, Missouri police make arrests at a suspected 'crack house'in the Swope Park area where the police saw as many as 52 cars stop in an hour.
October 1988.(JOHN SLEEZER/KANSAS CITY TIMES)(pg.