A LIFE IN THE DRUG TRADE

In summer 2004, a dramatic murder trial took place in New York City that aptly illustrates how lower-class cultural concerns—the code of the streets—clash with the rules and values of American culture and how deviant cultures can exist side by side with middle-class culture. Two Bronx men, Alan Quiñones and Diego Rodriguez, were accused of heroin traffi cking and killing a police informant. The trial hinged on the testimony of one of their confederates—Hector Vega, a key government witness who had previously pleaded guilty to taking part in the murder. He described in vivid detail how he watched the defendants beat the victim, Edwin Santiago, as he lay handcuffed on the fl oor of a Bronx apartment. He told the jury how the defendants Quiñones and Rodriguez spit in Santiago’s face to show what they thought of police informants. Santiago’s body was found mutilated and burned beyond recognition on June 28, 1999. During the trial, Vega gave the jury a detailed lesson in retail drug operations. In the Bronx, beatings, slashings, and shootings are routinely used to enforce what he called “the drug law”: “If people deserved it, I beat them up.” He showed them a tattoo on his upper right arm that meant “Money, Power, Respect.” Vega, 31, also told the jury that he headed a group of heroin vendors who did business from his “spot,” his sales area, between Daly and Honeywell Avenues in the Bronx. He said he had learned the trade from a stepfather, a building superintendent who he said had a second job as a narcotics entrepreneur: “I always knew about the drug business. I was raised around it.” As a mid-level drug dealer, Vega received heroin on consignment from big-time drug wholesalers and turned it over in $100 packages to people he called his “managers,” who in turn found “runners” to sell it on the street. His job was to “make sure everybody is working, and I will make sure everything is running correctly.” Vega received a “commission” of about 35 percent of all sales in his organization; he estimated that he made a total of at least $500,000 in the fi ve years before his arrest. Vega told how he used strict rules to run his organization. He did not sell between 1 and 3 P.M. because of “school hours.” He did not allow anyone to sell at his spot without his approval, or steal drugs from him, or pass him a counterfeit bill, or taint the quality of drugs sold under his name. If that happened, he said, “I’d be looking like a fool. The drug spot will go down.” When Manny, one of his workers, stole one package of heroin, Vega slashed his face with a box cutter. When the wound did not immediately bleed, “I didn’t see nothing cut, I didn’t see anything I did, so I did it a second time,” he said, until he saw blood. Angered by a counterfeit bill he received from a crack addict, “I punched him in the face, I kicked him, I threw him on the fl oor and kicked him again.” He disciplined one stranger who cheated him by hitting the man in the back of the head with a three-foot tree branch. Police informants were given special treatment. “In the drug world, in the drug law, we say that snitches get stitches,” he said. “In jail you cut their face. In the street, you beat them. You kill them.” Vega testifi ed that the defendants Quiñones and Rodriguez were heroin wholesalers and that he began buying drugs from them a few months before Santiago’s death. After he learned that Quiñones suspected Santiago of working undercover for the police, he helped him lure Santiago to the apartment of a girlfriend where the beatings and murder took place. For his cooperation, Vega faced a 15-year sentence rather than the death penalty.


Source: Julia Preston, “Witness Gives Details of Life as Drug Dealer,” New York Times, 12 July 2004.