Prying One Small Corner From Crack’s Greedy Grip : Drug war: A determined man fights to rescue a run-down apartment building from the pushers.

THE SOUTH BRONX, NEW YORK — Damn them, anyway! Weren’t they supposed to be his friends? He had moved the three of them into the building to be his eyes and ears and muscle against the drug boys--and to set an example for the tenants.

Instead, they were sucking up the crack themselves and getting it on with those cheap get-high girls who’ll do anything for a few puffs on the pipe. Carlton Collier was angry, at his pals and at his own bad judgment.

He worked for Banana Kelly, a community improvement group here in the South Bronx. In December, 1990, it had bought the apartment building at 850 Longwood Ave., mostly with low-interest city loans. Improvement was definitely needed.

“850” was a hothouse of addiction, a spot to buy and to sell and to smoke. Roaming the hallways of its six stories were every kind of dopehead, the frenzied and the spent, the weight of urban defeat on them like plaster.

Collier’s awesome job was to root out these people and oversee a complete rehab of the building. He was a street-savvy guy and a good talker, but this was his first big project--his massive headache and his terrific chance.

The two young guys who ran 850’s crack trade were the boss man, Pablito Rodriguez, and his sergeant-at arms, Joselito Blanco. They wore a few gold chains but were otherwise as low-rent as the whole battered neighborhood.

Collier had rapped with them a few times, always trying to be firm yet friendly. The city was putting up $2 million for repairs, and they’d have to move their business elsewhere, he told them. He was careful to add a joke: “Maybe you can hold a 2-for-1 sale.”

All that casual talk was fine, but Collier would also need someone to watch his back. That is when he brought in his buddies--Mike, Dennis and Jay--to stay in the building. (Their last names have been withheld in return for their candor.)

From the start, these three preferred a finesse game with the drug boys, go along-get along, win them over. This was the safer way. And after all, they had to live at 850; Collier got to go home to his wife and kids in Brooklyn.

Mike--nominally hired as the building’s superintendent--was no one to mess with, a man with the burly body of a young James Earl Jones. He wanted to get off on the right foot with Pablito and Joselito, put them at ease. He offered them three empty flats upstairs, places for their crackhead clientele to go and chill.

“OK, we give you money,” Joselito responded matter-of-factly.

“No, I don’t want money,” Mike said. “Something else.”

Appearances were going to be important. He asked them to keep all their scuzzy people--dealers and customers both--off the first two floors, especially when Carlton Collier was around.

OK, they agreed. And as fast as that, a peace was made--and their several futures were entwined. Collier’s friends only realized the seriousness of it a few months later, last June.

Some witless druggie was hanging around the second floor. Joselito told him to get the hell out, but after an hour, the guy was still there. That seemed to set off some inner switch, turning Joselito icy-eyed and cruel.

Joselito said he does not recall the incident, but many in the building remember it well. “It made me feel kind of guilty,” Jay said. “Joselito shot the guy in the leg, right in front of our door.”

The drug trade in the Bronx is pretty well divvied up, with a location every few blocks. It is not the free-lance scramble of Harlem, where there are eight crack spots on 140th Street alone, between Seventh and Eighth avenues.

A drug operation in a building is much like a leaky pipe. If the problem isn’t fixed right away, it usually gets worse. Pretty soon, the place is bad territory, with scary faces on the stairs and noises that shake the night. Good, rent-paying tenants move out. The landlord abandons the property.

In just that way, crack is killing off scarce low-income housing across the nation. After a review of arrest records, one research group reported that more than 700 buildings in the Bronx alone are at risk because of drug dealing on the premises.

“And who is there to clean them up?” asked David Muchnick, who heads that group, Bronx 2000. “It’s dirty, messy, life-threatening work without a lot of construction contracts to give out and ribbons to cut.”

To fight the drug trade, there are several useful strategies: arrests, evictions, security systems, tenant patrols. Langley Keyes, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has studied them. He finds that success often hinges on the dedication of one or two exceptional people--he calls them “saints.”

“Saint Carlton” would have seemed a reasonable title to the handful of tenants left in 850’s 36 units. Until he showed up, the building was a brick corpse that had gone to rot. Water had to be carried in from a fire hydrant. The only reliable source of heat was one winter coat on top of another.

Collier began to get things fixed. He was 38, and there was something knowing and dependable about him. He had grown up poor in the projects--and had moved up a bit without forgetting the riffs and struggles of the street.

Yet if he was a saint, were those buddies of his supposed to be angels? A lot of the tenants didn’t think so, though they kept their mouths shut. What kind of supers could they be, smoking that poison?

Collier surely knew they had flaws. Mike, 39, had been booted out of the Marines and sniffed cocaine off and on. But he also worked a good-paying job and was someone Carlton had leaned on since the second grade.

Dennis, 38, was strong of body and heart, though he and the truth were not always on speaking terms. He slipped on each of life’s banana peels, relying on an endless medley of excuses and regrets, and emptying the patience of employers and wives.

Jay, 39, had once served 20 months for robbing a supermarket. He had done every drug concoction except glue sniffing, which he somehow considered repulsive. He had steady work but needed a place to stay.

Collier knew these men well and felt brotherly toward each. They would stop a bullet rather than see him get hurt. The trouble was, they also had certain tendencies toward the skids, especially Dennis and Jay.

Collier lectured them from Day 1 at 850. He was enough of a square to preach the usual verities but somehow hip enough to pull it off: “Let’s talk about responsibility. This building is an important thing. If you need to do something stupid, don’t compromise your position by doing it in the building.

“If you do, everything we accomplish will be lost. You’re my friends. This can be a new beginning for us, a way to organize our lives. If you fall, you’ll get up. If you fail, you’ll just try harder.”

And, always, they agreed.

They were first-rate drug-busters for a while. After that shooting in the hall, they were emboldened to chase off an occasional crackhead. Jay would get a golf club and start swinging. Dennis stuck his fist in a paper bag so it looked as if he was hiding a gun.

Their lives settled into a domestic routine, the Odd Couple plus one. Mike cooked and was Mr. Fix-it. Jay played chess and stared into the TV. Dennis swept around the stairwell and hauled out the trash.

Collier felt good about things. When he did his “walk-throughs,” the building looked relatively clean. The drug trade was not so manic.

But things were eluding him, the temptations of 850 and the vulnerabilities of his friends--and the way the one would inevitably battle the other.

The building was so infested with crack that it seemed to list, with those least able to hang on tumbling to the bottom. The tenants could have told Collier plenty about this unbalancing and the people they had lost to it.

Collier underestimated the dangers. Maybe he wore blinders. He believed in live-and-let-live. His own life had been tamed by a good family life and a rewarding job, but he knew that tameness came with an accompanying itch.

“I’d hold court all the time about responsibility, but even I was jealous of those guys sometimes,” he said. “They were coming and going as they pleased, no family relying on them, always ready to take off.”

Dennis and Jay began smoking first. It was something exciting to do, a way to make themselves feel alive and to tell the whole silly world to drop dead. They tried to keep a low profile with it, but got sloppy anyway.

Collier found some of the crack paraphernalia one day in July. He blamed Jay and beat hard on his conscience. “It’s not like I’m jeopardizing anything,” Jay lamely replied. “This is just about me getting high.”

For weeks, Mike ignored what was happening. “Just don’t smoke around me,” he told the other two. Then the scene began to lure him too. There were these ladies coming over, Lisa and Angie and Gloria, doing anything that was asked.

Mike hadn’t touched any cocaine in three years, but now seemed a good time to go back. This crack was an icebreaker with women. First, he traded it for sex, then he combined the two, then finally the sex was unimportant.

By late summer, things were wild. Mike was buying 40 hits at a time, enough for volume discounts, putting $300 a month into the pipe instead of the bank.

“Even that wasn’t enough,” he said. “I asked (the dealers) for five (vials) on credit, and when I went to pay them, they said to forget it.

“Then I asked for five more, and they still didn’t want to be paid. Then five more after that. That was the reality of it. I was like on the take, in the quicksand and getting in pretty deep.”

So the three strangers were no problem to Pablito and Joselito. They were crackheads, and the secret to crackheads was crack. But what were they to make of Carlton Collier? A lot of the drug business is pure animal instinct: Can I eat it or will it eat me. How much of a threat was Collier?

One time, he offhandedly told Pablito about the cost of heating the building. The drug dealer pulled out a wad of cash. “Here, I give you,” he said. And Collier never knew whether he had turned down a bribe or a donation.

Actually, the drug dealers liked Carlton. “The whole building respected him,” Joselito said. “He wanted to make things better for the people.”

In their own convoluted way, the two dealers considered themselves virtuous men in an evil city. They approved of the rehab. They seemed apologetic, even protective, about the building’s innocent tenants.

“We save people from criminals, from the crackheads,” Pablito said with no irony, adding a routine denial. “I used to sell drugs, but no more.”

But even if Carlton seemed a good guy, there were some things they could not be sure of. He was always saying “the city wants this” and “the city wants that,” as if he represented higher powers and not just the community group.

The drug boys tried to stay on his good side, which is what Collier had hoped for. He was playing his own finesse game, trying to edge them and their drugs out of the building while at the time seeming their pal and well-wisher.

When the police Tactical Narcotics Team was working the precinct--something the dealers certainly knew anyway--Collier pretended to alert them.

And when the marshals were scheduled to evict a tenant, Collier warned the dealers in advance, in case they had a stash in the flat. He would always use that same tired joke: “Maybe it’s time to have for a 2-for-1 sale.”

These evictions were a central part of Collier’s plan. He insisted that tenants show proof of a legitimate source of income, whether a welfare check or a payroll stub. “The city demands it,” he said, excusing himself.

Only 14 of the 36 units had occupants who qualified. One at a time, the others were put out, including the girlfriends of Pablito and Joselito. Always, Collier was there, acting regretful. Then he’d seal off the units.

Not every druggie could be easily evicted, of course. The crack was too ingrained for that. Even many of the 14 “legitimate” apartments had a small-time dealer sleeping there--a son or daughter, a lover, a friend.

This was a quandary. Should Collier evict a mother for the sins of her daughter--or only insist that the younger woman go? If the latter, could the daughter come back to spend an occasional night or eat a holiday supper?

These were people, hard-on-their-luck, beaten-down, caught-in-a-whirlwind people. How does one make such decisions? What’s fair?

And the saint anguished, day after day.

Collier gathered his own intelligence, dropping in on tenants and staying to put his feet up. Lula Nimmons, 63, lived in 2F and her grown daughters dealt crack for Pablito in the hallways. They’ve got to stop, he warned her.

“They don’t sell anything in the apartment,” she said.

“Yeah, but they operate from here,” Collier answered.

“Just how am I supposed to make them quit?”

“Mrs. Nimmons, your family can’t be selling drugs in the building. Either they stop, or I’ll have to put you out.”

The two of them went around and around about it. Then, finally, in late summer, there seemed a solution, at least for one of the daughters.

Sandra Nimmons, 30, ran off with the money from two bundles of crack, about $200. Somebody spotted her not far away, at the park on Intervale Avenue.

Several guys jumped in a car. They drove up before she saw them. She dashed off but didn’t get far. Two young boys held her arms, twisting hard, taunting her. Joselito punished her with his fists. Then, Sandra said, he shot her.

Joselito denies it. “She’s a damn liar,” he insisted. “I was punching her in the face, but it was a friend of mine who used the gun. I didn’t think it was right, shooting her over two (lousy) bundles.”

Sandra lost a kidney. She came home from the hospital chastened. “Ain’t you had enough?” her mother asked her.

“I’m through with them,” she answered regretfully.

She had made up her mind. She would deal for someone else.

In late August, construction began on the rehab, and one of Collier’s worst fears came true. The crews of workers were bumping into the gaggles of crackheads, each of them on their appointed rounds up and down the stairs.

It was an awakening for Collier. He ought to be paying more attention to those friends of his. When he finally looked, he really saw. Mike--strong, trustworthy Mike, always there when he needed him--was heavy into crack.

This was a heartache, and Collier came at him with a full-throttle sermon. “You’re better than this,” he said. “You’re the main person I’ve been counting on. How can you disappoint me like this? You can do better.”

Later, there was a formal part to the rebuke, a written reprimand. The two lifelong friends sat across a desk, the one in charge speaking in clipped phrases, concise enough for a telegram.

“Crack does strange things to you,” Mike admitted. But he thought he had it under control. He promised to straighten things out at the building.

He had an idea, actually, though not one that Collier would have liked. He asked Pablito and Joselito to keep 850 clear of their dealers on weekdays, while construction went on. Nights and weekends were the best times for selling anyway.

Mike continued to fire up the pipe. By now, it was the routine. He and Jay would sit in one spot, submerged in themselves. They didn’t like having Dennis around anymore. He was too nervous a high, walking laps room to room.

Over time, typical doper troubles began to develop between the three. They argued over money. Mike would send Dennis off to buy something and then think his change came back too thin. He kicked him out.

The effect on 850 was immediate. Dennis had been the guy doing the janitor chores. To compensate, Mike handed a few vials to the crackheads so they would sweep up, but it wasn’t the same. The building was a mess.

By October, Collier realized he needed a new super. He had always thought his friends would share his dreams for the building. But something had jumped the track. He had been a good friend only to be a bad administrator.

He gave Mike three choices: get help, quit or be fired. The moment grew taut. The two men looked at each other, across the room and across the years.

Mike had a rush of feelings: forgive me, save me, understand me, shelter me and the one he selected was the one that amounted to get out of my face.

Mike said, “I quit.”

The construction went on, with this delay and that, but generally smoothly. New wood was laid across the floors. White paint, bright as cottage cheese, coated the walls. Fixtures, outlets and appliances were set in place.

More than a rehab, it seemed a rebirth. With each bit of work in the apartments there was less drug traffic in the halls. The transformation was slow but also steady, like water working its way through a clogged drain.

After all the awful years, the tenants were outlasting the havoc. “Mamita” Rios, the 85-year-old woman, no longer had to sidestep the addicts on the way to her cancer treatments. Isabel Valentin posted signs by her front door: “No Drugs Sold Here” and “Don’t Knock Here for Crack.”

There was a sense of deliverance. Momentum had changed. Even the worst days seemed to possess some good. There was, for instance, the stabbing.

Two aggressive cops sometimes kept an eye on 850. Their names were Edwin Garcia and Henry Pelayo, though they liked to call themselves Tom and Jerry, like the cat and mouse in the cartoon.

One Saturday night, they chased a suspect into the building. Usually, this was no big threat to the dealers inside. Lookouts were always posted at the front entrance. “Going down!” was the favored warning.

Tom and Jerry made the bust easily enough. But then another thing happened. Fitzroy Whitehead, a 21-year-old doper, was found lying on the sidewalk. He had been the lookout--and he was bleeding to death.

“He told us we’d rolled up on the building too fast for him,” Pelayo recalled. “He said the Spanish guy stabbed him because he didn’t do his job, you know, shout out the warning. It was an ugly thing, man. He was holding his liver right in his hands.”

The story around the street was that a furious Joselito had cursed him, cut him, spit on him, then gone off to dance the merengue.

A few weeks later, Joselito was arrested. And he has not been back since.

Early this month, the tenants were moved into the building’s renovated apartments. The scheme is called “checkerboarding.” People live temporarily in the completed flats while work is being done on their own.

Most of the drug trade is now on the sidewalk across the street, though a few dopehead dealers still work 850. Collier shoos them away, but they come back seconds later, pesky as mosquitoes.

Carlton, the street-smart tenant organizer, has learned that he never really understood the power of crack. It has its own voice, more commanding than any of his lectures. Even friendship was no match for it.

He and Mike are buddies again, though only after Mike completed a residential treatment program. Little by little, Collier finds out about what had gone on at the building, ugly as it is to hear it, all those doings behind his back.

No one was really immune. The crack reached everywhere. Mamita’s great-granddaughter was romanced by a guy named Pedro, a low-level dealer. He is in jail now, but he left the girl with a baby and no child support.

Collier recently obtained a court order to keep Lula Nimmons’ daughters out of the building. In the case of Sandra, enforcement is easy. She is locked up at Riker’s Island after selling a few vials to an undercover cop.

Isabel Valentin still posts her no-drugs-here signs, though people find them a mockery. The woman has money troubles, and she seems to allow the dealers the use of her place. A few weeks ago, Collier saw a transaction there. “I told her I’ll be having to put her out,” he said.

By midsummer, the rehab is expected to be completed. The building will have 36 roomy apartments and seven storefronts. As with its other projects, Banana Kelly will try to screen out any troublemakers who want to move in.

Collier is hopeful about this, but realistic too. Is 850 ever going to be drug-free, with nothing smoked or swallowed or sold? “C’mon, with 36 units,” he said sarcastically. “Where in America is anything drug-free?”

But at least something has been reclaimed here. This corner of the Bronx will again be a sanctuary, a livable place with steam in the radiators, water in the taps and tenants safe to come and go through their own hallways.

Joselito may never witness it. He is in jail, awaiting trial for murder. But Pablito is still around. He rarely goes inside 850 now, though Collier runs into him on the street. The two of them talk.

Pablito has watched the workers’ progress. The windows look good. The parquet floors have a sheen. There is something nice behind every doorway.

“That used to be my building,” he said with a nod. Then he pointed at Carlton, who was nearby. “This man took it from me.”