The
flood of heroin coming into and going out of New York City has surged
to the highest levels in more than two decades, alarming law enforcement
officials who say that bigger players are now entering the market to
sell the drug here and to feed a growing appetite along the East Coast.
The
amount of heroin seized in investigations involving the city’s special
narcotics prosecutor has already surpassed last year’s totals, and is
higher than any year going back to 1991.
The
drug makes its way here in trucks rumbling north from Mexico; as they
get closer to New York, they park at truck stops or warehouses to
transfer loads of heroin to cars bound for mills in the Bronx or Upper
Manhattan and, eventually, to users along the Eastern Seaboard at prices
ranging from $6 to $10 per glassine envelope.
The rise in heroin use nationwide has been well documented, as the drug has created addicts and caused the deaths of well-known figures, like the actor Philip Seymour Hoffman, and young people in middle-class families from Staten Island to Vermont.
What the authorities are seeing now is the outgrowth of all that drug abuse,
said Bridget G. Brennan, the special narcotics prosecutor whose office
deals primarily with large-scale operations: far-flung drug
organizations accelerating to meet heroin demand by setting up New York
operations that are growing in sophistication and output.
“We’re
kind of the head of the Hydra,” said Ms. Brennan, who is scheduled to
testify about heroin trends during a City Council budget hearing on
Tuesday. “This is highly organized, high volume, and it’s being moved
much more efficiently and effectively to reach out to a broader user
base.”
Her
office recorded more than 288 pounds of heroin seized in the first four
months of 2014, a figure that does not account for the everyday,
street-level drug deals in the city. On Staten Island, where dealers are
often users themselves and the rate of overdose is the city’s highest, the office has no heroin cases because there are few big-time players there, authorities said.
Nonetheless,
in arrests of users and dealers, Staten Island narcotics detectives
have recorded a steep increase in the amount of heroin taken off the
street there so far this year — up 61 percent compared with 2013.
Detectives are also beginning to find organized networks of dealers
there, in what had long been a haven of low crime rates and unlocked
doors.
“It’s
cheap, it’s potent and there’s a user demand here right now and they’re
flooding the market,” said James J. Hunt, who heads the Drug
Enforcement Administration’s New York office. “In my time, we’ve never
seen the amount of large heroin seizures like this.”
Roughly
35 percent of heroin seized by the Drug Enforcement Administration
nationwide since October was confiscated by agents in New York State. In
years past, the state has accounted for about one-fifth of heroin
seizures nationwide.
Mr.
Hunt said that distributors of drugs favor locating hubs in New York
City for the same reason that business have flocked here for centuries: a
big local market and easy access to other East Coast areas.
Nearly
all of the heroin feeding the city passes through the Bronx and Upper
Manhattan, where it is divided up into glassine bags in so-called heroin
mills, stamped with a brand and bundled for distribution and sale. One
recent raid, in March, turned up a piece of paper listing possible brand
names, as well as those already used, and stamped bags with an image of
Heisenberg, a character from the TV show “Breaking Bad.”
The
latest example came Monday, as the authorities announced the arrest of
two suspected high-level traffickers in one Bronx-based drug
organization, and seizure of 53 pounds of heroin along with assault
rifles, $85,000 in cash and about 20 pounds of cocaine. Federal agents
and officers tracked the two suspects’ drug-laden cars across state
lines to a low-rise apartment building in Hartford, officials said,
rushing in before the drugs could be poured down the sink.
For
users in the city, that proximity to the distribution points means
lower prices than in other areas of the country. Mr. Hunt said a
kilogram of heroin could go for as little as $40,000 in New York City
but as much as $80,000 in Springfield, Mass. “Every pair of hands it
goes through, you’re taking on money,” he said.
Ms.
Brennan said that in many of her cases, the Sinaloa cartel, Mexico’s
largest, is exporting the heroin using familiar cocaine trafficking
routes and arranging to have the drug transported in otherwise
legitimate tractor-trailer trucks. The ability of the cartel — known for
distributing cocaine and marijuana — to capitalize on a lucrative
market for heroin does not appear to have been dampened
by the February arrest of its leader, Joaquín Guzmán Loera, known as El
Chapo. Other organizations have also joined in, Mr. Hunt said.
Across
New York City, the Police Department logged seizures of 786 pounds of
heroin in 2013, the highest such number in at least five years. So far
this year, officers have seized 217 pounds of heroin, versus 139 pounds
last year at this time, according to department statistics.
The
arrest of the two suspected Bronx-based traffickers announced on Monday
provided a small glimpse into a typical heroin distribution center.
The
suspects, Guillermo Esteban Margarin, 33, and Edualin Tapia, 28,
carried the drug from a seventh-floor Bronx apartment near Interstate 87
in suitcases and a white box, the authorities said. The men drove the
drugs up to a Hartford safe house, one in a Jeep Cherokee and the other
in an Acura sedan, the authorities said. They were arrested there on
Friday.
A
search the next day of a storage unit off Interstate 95 in the Bronx
turned up a pair of assault rifles, a handgun and kilogram presses,
which are used to create packages of drugs that mimic the look of uncut
heroin just delivered from across the border, Ms. Brennan said.
Both men were charged with felony drug possession and conspiracy; they are awaiting extradition from Hartford to New York.
