Heroin in our midst

NEWTON — Like any other business, the heroin trade has strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.

Tom Reed, head of Sussex County’s Drugs and Narcotics Task Force, represents a threat.

“Do not think of this in terms of selling drugs. This is a matter of selling a product, like you’re selling refrigerators, carpets, widgets,” Reed said in a recent interview. “There’s a market. Someone comes along and fills it.”

During an investigation launched in August 2011, the task force began purchasing heroin from four people: Aimee Goritski of Newton, brothers Robert and Marquis Jackson, formerly of Newton, and Roel Keith of Prospect Park in Bergen County.

None of them is an addict.
At the first purchase, undercover officers bought 99 bags of heroin at the basketball courts at Newton High School followed by deals for 250 bags, 352 bags, 652 bags, and 500 bags at a time.

Typically the price of a single bag ranged between $6 and $10.

After building their case, the police moved.

“Bobby (Robert Jackson) delivers 793 bags in the kitchen of a house on Hamilton Street (Newton) and when he walks out, the police go to arrest him.” Reed said. “He runs on them, and they find he tosses another 118 bags of heroin as he’s running away from the cops.”

The arrests of dealers like Goritski, Keith and the Jackson brothers prevent any one person from dominating the heroin trade, Reed said. But, it doesn’t remove the opportunity.

The replacement
“Nature abhors a vacuum,” Reed said. “By April 2012 we’ve got a whole new actor in town … a guy by the name of Angel Cruz.”

Police first arrested New York resident Angel Cruz after they pulled him over along Route 80 in Byram Township and found cocaine in the car.

Vehicle stops have become a key area of enforcement in Sussex County, where police routinely stop drivers for code violations, however minor. The stops are often an opportunity for officers to question and sometimes search motorists.

“Tom Reed has developed telephonic search warrants,” said Sgt. John Paul Beebe of the Sparta Police. “We call up Tom. He calls the judge. He tells him what (evidence) we have, and we can get a search warrant in five minutes.”

After his first bust, Cruz was sent to Sussex County Jail and went on to serve time in state prison.

But despite his previous arrest in the county, Cruz returned.

This time he had a plan: He stayed away from buyers. He insulated himself with minor workers who would handle and transport drugs for him and he disguised his movements around Newton.

“The only thing he knows about Sussex County is what he learned hanging out in the county jail,” Reed said. “That’s his only connection to Sussex County. He found out from being in the county jail there is a good market for drugs here.”

Experienced dealers, especially transplants from urban areas, are often more skilled at evading the police and present a greater threat to the county, Reed said. After a similar series of undercover buys, police arrested Cruz on April 26 of last year.

User-friendly heroin
Efforts by police go a long way to exploit weaknesses in the heroin trade, but there are other areas where they can do nothing.

Since its arrival 15 years ago, the supply of heroin has stayed constant. The supply has enabled economies of scale to develop in the New York tri-state area, where heroin wholesalers routinely deal in bulk with regional distributors called heroin mills.

Heroin mills stretch the pure drug with cutting agent, like powdered milk and sugar, and then they distribute to mid-level dealers who make retail sales to individual users.

“We have seen more heroin mills in surrounding suburbs,” said Erin Mulvey, spokeswoman for the Drug Enforcement Administration’s New York Office. "It’s not just up there. It’s pretty much all over New York and Long Island, too.”

The DEA attributes the rise in heroin mills, not to a lack of policing, but to the low price and high purity of retail heroin, as well as to a recent pattern of users moving from expensive prescription painkillers to heroin, Mulvey said.

High purity allows the drug to be inhaled in the beginning stages and injected as users become more dependent.

The increased purity has made the drug more "user-friendly," a strength that the heroin trade has improved dispite the threats posed by law enforcement, said Reed.

“These guys should be teaching at Harvard at the business school,” Reed said of the Colombian cartels that supply the Northeast region. “They saw a market and they filled that market with high-quality, cheap heroin. And as a result of that, we have lots of people becoming profoundly addicted.”

Editor’s note:
This series marks a collaborative effort between Straus News and its sources, particularly reforming addicts.

The execution of this series depended greatly on the testimony of those in recovery and, particularly, the willingness of one former heroin user.

Straus News includes this note to give due credit to those whose worth as sources and collaborators cannot be acknowledged by name. Thank you.