Floating City (12 page)

Doing what? Selling drugs?

Michael wouldn't say. “We told him to get the hell out of town, or at least go hide.”

But how would Manjun live? How would his family live? They had, I admitted, some issues with their papers.

“He'll be okay. Just give it time. I'm sure you'll hear from him.”

But I had a sense I never would, and I never did. It was hard for me to accept, even harder because of the way Officer Michael seemed to be shrugging it off as just another ordinary event in the life of the neighborhood.

The only thing I could do was stay true to the pursuit that had brought us together. I had to keep moving out across the city, following threads and crossing boundaries to see where the underground could take me.

MOVING ON UP

T
wo years after Al Qaeda's attack on the World Trade Center, immigrants to New York continued to experience heightened scrutiny even if they were legal residents of the country. The Patriot Act and related legislation gave enhanced surveillance and investigative powers to law enforcement and imposed new restrictions on the freedom of immigrants to travel into and out of the United States. Deportations had risen by 30 percent. The undocumented moved from neighborhood to neighborhood and borough to borough, seeking off-the-books work while keeping a low profile. Some ran into visa troubles, lost their jobs, and had to return home.

When I heard from Santosh or my other friends from Midtown, the stories tended to be of either the on-a-treadmill or the crashed-and-burned variety. They stood in sharp contrast to the conventional stories that depicted South Asians in the United States largely as professionals who experienced great economic stability for themselves and their children. Most didn't even manage the mini-mart life of Apu on
The
Simpsons
. Santosh tried to expand his restaurant and catering services, but hard times had sent him back to his lucrative but illegal sideline as part of the “underground railroad” for undocumented immigrants. I could tell how things were going by the look on his face. If he greeted me with a smile and introduced me all around, he was having a legal period, but if he became stern and fatherly and told me to keep working hard and focus on the important things, then I knew he was into something
murky. The same pattern held with Rajesh and the others, who all dipped back into the illegal economy whenever they lost jobs or ran into other trouble. Off the books, they drove cabs, washed dishes, cleaned offices, even repaired office computers. Some took seasonal work in upstate hotels run by other South Asians. With wages so low and travel restrictions so harsh, many were using video chat to watch their kids grow up in their home country.

But all of them held on to the dream. Maybe that was another reason I kept turning to Shine and Angela. They were actually doing it. In very different ways, they were systematically making a climb up the economic ladder. Not with complete success, of course. Angela's various attempts to recruit clients from Midtown had been a disaster, and she had been unable to find a stable of white corporate clients for private dates. In fact, she was now back licking her wounds on the Lower East Side. But she was still looking for new ways to get ahead. “Maybe I join one of those agencies,” she joked one day. “Someone out there has to like dark meat, no?” She would soon focus on an ambitious plan to organize a group of street prostitutes to rent an apartment and run their own bordello.

For Shine, the climb meant a new drug.

I discovered his scheme one afternoon in a bar on Lenox Avenue. The spring of 2003 was coming, with joggers hitting the streets, merchants repainting their storefronts, the annual renewal finally under way. We were sitting at a bar and I was telling Shine about a project I was doing with the economist Steven Levitt, author of
Freakonomics.
Inspired by research on how wealthy Internet entrepreneurs had learned to reinvent their careers after the collapse of the dot-com bubble, we wanted to find young black men who had joined gangs about a decade earlier. How would they reinvent themselves when their criminal careers played out? “Basically,” I said, “we're trying to answer a simple question nobody ever
thought to ask before. What happens to gang members as they grow old?”

“Hell, you ought to study me,” Shine said.

The thought had occurred to me, of course. But Shine had kept me at a distance, never letting me past his guard far enough to find out the things that mattered to a sociologist. To start with, was he really such a big underground success or was he exaggerating his achievements to come off like a big shot? After all this time, I couldn't say for sure. I knew that he drove a fancy German car and helped to support a large family, that he kept many thousands in a bank account and hid more in various nooks and stash points around Harlem until he could spend or launder it into reportable income. He certainly seemed conversant with the crack trade, so I had no real doubts where he was getting his money. Beyond that, I had no hard numbers. But I did know that the crack market was slowing down, and that he'd been trying all kinds of new things: a chop shop in the Bronx, a small pushcart business with two street vendors selling fried chicken and rice, a five-thousand-dollar investment in his uncle's small hatmaking business (black women still wore glorious hats to church, as you could see any Sunday morning all over Harlem). Now he warmed to this theme, but it all sounded fairly small time. He had another small investment in a shop where one of his aunts told fortunes with tarot cards. He was helping three neighbors start an underground business refurbishing old television sets. He even spent one colorful three-month stint trying to make it as a pimp.

“A
pimp
?
Did you get a furry hat and everything?”

Shine didn't find my teasing amusing. Apparently, failure as a pimp had bruised his male ego. “I'm too easygoing. They took advantage of me. I'm too
nice
to be a pimp.”

“I guess crack brings out a much friendlier crowd,” I said.

He laughed. “They are when they want that smoke. Friendliest motherfuckers you ever saw.”

But all his efforts had come to nothing, or at least nothing in terms of his previous income. Now Shine had a new idea, which he confessed a bit sheepishly. “I'm selling powder.”

“Powder?”

“Powdered cocaine. The kind white people use.”

Alas, the powdered cocaine market was proving difficult to crack, so to speak. He was having a hell of a time finding customers. This was because much of the market base for powdered cocaine is white and fairly well-off. He certainly couldn't use his usual set of street dealers, who would look and feel like Martians at a Wall Street bar. “They're too young and too stupid,” he grumbled.

I couldn't believe it. “You can't possibly be telling me that you don't know anyone who buys powdered cocaine in the city of New York?”

“I know plenty of people, but coke is a weird thing. With crack, people keep coming back 'cause it doesn't last that long. They come back every
hour.
People who get the blow, they get enough for a night or maybe a weekend.”

“So find one of them and sell him some,” I said.

“But they've already got their own steady. I'm not a steady to nobody, and I don't want to be poaching somebody else's customers and get shot in an alley. I gotta find
new
customers. It's a tricky thing.”

He had done a good deal of consumer behavior research, he said. Specifically, he'd called all the powdered cocaine dealers he knew, hung out at parties with his middle-class friends, even tried to purchase coke himself at a few bars. Shine believed that blow was mostly sold at parties and clubs or delivered directly to customers at their homes, but he didn't like phone delivery businesses and didn't seem to be attending the right kind of parties.

What he really needed was a cousin with connections in the art market—or better yet, some idiot who could introduce him to a troubled young heiress with a taste for cocaine, of course. But neither of us knew that then—Evalina was still looking for herself in California, and the night Shine and Analise would meet at the art gallery was still more than a year away. This left him with what looked like a single option: finding new customers in public spaces—upscale bars, luxury hotels, strip clubs, even parks. He had been canvassing a few of these spots with Cohan, another trafficker in his neighborhood who was losing business, but they attracted too much attention from security. Once at a hotel bar, they'd actually been thrown out.

“What did you wear?” I asked.

“Same shit I have on now,” he said.

I looked him over. Two hundred and fifteen pounds of solid black man in a bright green tracksuit, a baseball hat with the Yankees logo, and a diamond-studded necklace. The Adidas on his feet were white enough for a hospital operating room.

“How did you approach people?”

He told a series of amusing stories. Thinking that white men would be drawn to black women, he said, he took a small group of sexy young women to a Wall Street bar. The mission was to flirt and sell cocaine. But the girls were nervous and got so loud and drunk, they embarrassed him. Next he brought along a pair of Dominican gun brokers who said they dealt with rich white people all the time, but Shine's coke made them paranoid and they threatened to shoot the hotel manager. Veering 180 degrees, he asked a famous black preacher to meet him at a Soho lounge on the theory that people who saw them together would trust him a little bit more and he could approach them later. But the preacher was disgusted at the ten-dollar martinis and criticized him for spending his money in the wrong neighborhood, leaving in a huff that soured Shine's whole night. Finally, he tried sending the
girls back down just to pick up guys and
tell
them about this great coke dealer they knew—the ultimate low-pressure sale—but they came back and said they just flat-out hated hanging out with the rich white people. There was nothing to talk about. They felt ignored.

As he talked, I realized I had misunderstood Shine. Though he lived very close to the geographical center of Manhattan and appeared to have no hesitation about traveling to any part of the city to see friends or to shop, he was not as confident as he appeared. “I'm an entrepreneur,” he liked to say, always with pride in his voice. He had no doubts about his mastery of the rules of commerce. But his courage had definite geographical boundaries. When it came to his business, he always spoke about the city as a series of distinct sectors, and Midtown was as distant as Beijing as far as cocaine sales were concerned. The phrases he used to describe it were “down there” or “out there” or even “where
they
are.”

Thinking back, I realized that whenever we traveled south, he became self-conscious about his appearance. He also modified his gait, toning down the rhythmic swagger that came naturally to him up in Harlem. I knew that he had some white friends and some wealthy friends too, but that didn't seem to make a difference. Accepting white people's money also meant accepting their power to judge him.

Suddenly it hit me. For Shine, the rich white world wasn't just a new business market. It was a testing ground. It was a mountain to climb. It was as much a psychological challenge as it was an economic need.

I could relate.

“Maybe you should consider changing your look a little bit,” I said.

He pretended to be struck by my genius. “Get some horn-rims and a button-down shirt? Oh, yeah! Or maybe some plaid. Yeah, I'd look pretty good in plaid!”

As I would soon discover, he'd been studying back copies of
Esquire
and
GQ
. He was way ahead of me. That wasn't the problem.

“The problem is, I'm just not comfortable hanging out in those places by myself,” he said.

The next shoe didn't take long to fall.

“Why don't
you
go with me?” he said.

Shine's invitation was not exactly the kind of entrée I wanted into the upper reaches of the black market, but with few other doors opening, I couldn't really pass up the opportunity. Still, it raised all sorts of conundrums for me. One in particular, painfully familiar from my experiences with Chicago gangs: how much of an accessory was I when I merely
observed
a crime? I learned that there was no legal obligation to report someone who was looking for new drug spots. Only capital crimes like murder or child abduction required a citizen to make a report or face charges herself. I knew I was heading down a road that would make me very uncomfortable at the least.

The exact nature of our relationship was another puzzle. We weren't exactly friends, but we were definitely friendly. How should that affect my decision? Was I too close or not close enough?

Despite all this, I was dying to watch him in action, If everything he told me was true, my quest would feel much more solid—and vice versa.

•   •   •

A
round this time another door opened, leading me into the upper reaches of New York society. I was on the board of a Lower East Side nonprofit organization, La Bodega de la Familia, that helped ex-offenders make a productive return to society after time spent in jail or prison. Through Angela, I had also become well acquainted with the Latino community that was being gentrified by white hipsters and artists. She frequently invited me
to her apartment in a local housing project, which gave me the feeling of warmth I had missed since leaving Chicago's public housing families (and the promise of additional interviews with Angela's sex worker friends down the road). The Bodega board position also introduced me to some fascinating people on the opposite side of the social spectrum, specifically wealthy young New Yorkers who had begun to take an interest in their family's social causes. On travels to Cuba, Peru, Nigeria, Bangladesh, and other developing countries, they had seen lending, construction, small business, and farming all take place outside government strictures, often on the basis of little more than verbal agreements. They became fascinated by the different ways poor people around the world used informal off-the-books means to make ends meet, and wanted to encourage the same entrepreneurial spirit in U.S. ghettos. I began telling them about my adventures on the Lower East Side, hoping I might be able to nudge some of their family largesse in the direction of La Bodega.

To my surprise, during a lull in the conversation, they began talking about the black market activities in their own circle of wealthy young philanthropists. Some bought and sold fancy sports cars or raced them around the world, others financed independent films, still others gambled or invested in businesses, all of it carefully hidden from the taxman as well as from parents. Getting away with it was kind of a sport.