4

Prince of Prosperity, Prince of Death

Like so many public buildings of the late twentieth century, the U.S. Federal Court of the Eastern District of New York reeks of diminished expectations. There are no granite pediments or fluted Doric columns, no marble steps or bronze statues, just a bland, concrete box, and across the street, a shabby, empty park. The only intrusions on the courthouse’s anonymity are the concrete planters fronting its entrance—arranged to foil any drive-through car-bombing—and those ubiquitous symptoms of modern social dysfunction: guards, metal detectors, and X-ray machines.

My objective was just beyond the security phalanx: the ground-floor office of the Clerk of Court where paperwork went to die. I was looking for the federal indictment against Chang Chi-fu, alias Khun Sa. It took a few false starts on the office computer database. The search term “Sa” brought no hits; “Chang” resulted in forty irrelevant cases. “Khun” was a dead-center strike: one case. The lone line glowed in green, throbbing letters on the dark monitor, like a poisonous krait waiting to strike: 1:89cr00911 USA v. Chi-fu (072 dft).

In a few minutes, a pleasant court clerk retrieved a corresponding, curry-yellow legal folder. Inside were the contents of United States of America v. Chang Chi-fu, a.k.a. Khun Sa. Eighteen dog-eared pages represented the United States government’s attempt to put Chang, the alleged sovereign of the Southeast Asian heroin trade, permanently out of business. His better known alias, Khun Sa, was a Shan honorific meaning “Prince of Prosperity.” The ten-count federal indictment, written in unemotional legalese that muted the astounding scope of the purported crimes, concluded with this charge:

In or about February 1988, within the Eastern District of New York and elsewhere, the defendant CHANG CHI-FU, a/k/a/ “Khun Sa,” and others did knowingly and intentionally attempt to import into the United States from a place outside thereof an amount in excess of one (1) kilogram of heroin, to wit, approximately one thousand and eighty-six (1,086) kilograms of heroin, a Schedule I narcotic drug controlled substance.

One thousand and eighty-six kilograms. Over one ton of heroin. A load to dwarf the giant, bottom-feeding plaa buk catfish. A bounty to feed millions of junkie dreams.

For all the notoriety of the accused and his federally designated “kingpin” status, however, this legal-sized folder seemed meager. Other sleeves bulged as thick as accordions from the reams of records generated by flurries of hearings, trials, and appeals but USA v. Chi-fu was less than one-quarter of an inch thick. The file had not grown since March 15, 1990, when then–U.S. Attorney General Richard Thornburgh announced the warlord’s federal indictment and his new, less-than-honorable Drug Enforcement Administration moniker. “As the largest dope pusher in the Golden Triangle, the title ‘Prince of Death’… might be more apt,” Thornburgh remarked.

Four years later, the dark prince was still powerful and prosperous, with a drug kingdom spanning thousands of square miles over the nebulous borders of eastern Burma, western Laos, and northern Thailand. And file 89cr00911, the handiwork of U.S. Assistant District Attorney Catherine E. Palmer, gathered dust in a federal court house in Brooklyn.

The diminutive Palmer, described by one defense attorney as an awesome, “seventy pounds dripping wet” force after she had won a conviction and twenty-seven-year sentence against his heroin-dealing client, was the legal weight behind Group 41, one of the government’s most successful counter-narcotics units. Organized in 1986 and operating out of the DEA’s Chelsea offices, Group 41 targeted the secretive world of Southeast Asian heroin traffickers who controlled 60 percent of the junk used by New York City’s estimated three to five hundred thousand addicts.

Along the cubicle partitions of its office, color photographs of Group 41 seizures were displayed in the proud yet casual manner of bowling- or softball-league trophies. Bags of heroin placed inside picture frames. Bags of heroin stuffed inside the hollowed braces of a crate packed with porcelain vases. Bags of heroin even tucked inside mah-jong tiles. And one pelt Palmer clearly wanted to hang alongside the seizure photos belonged to Khun Sa. She termed her nemesis “probably the most significant” single heroin trafficker in Southeast Asia. Through longevity, ruthlessness, and iron-clad control of his private armed force, the Mong Tai Army, Khun Sa commanded at least one-half of Burma’s huge opium crop, which had annually topped two thousand metric tons since 1989. As Burma dominated the global market, producing 70 percent of the world’s illicit opium, according to annual reports by the State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics Matters (BINM), the at-large warlord was, by the DEA’s estimation, ultimately responsible for at least one-third of the world’s heroin. Even the hard-core junkies on the streets of America knew his name.

“He’s God, man,” fifty-year-old Tom “The Sailor” Williams had told me when I met him at a Boston drop-in program for junkie veterans. “He’s so powerful. When I used to live in San Francisco, the people in Chinatown would not say anything against him. They say something against him, they’re dead, automatically dead. He reaches everywhere. I think he’s one of the Illuminati who run the world. There’s a group of people who run the world. I think he’s part of that group.”

The object of The Sailor’s desire, the bane of Catherine Palmer’s efforts, was “China White,” the popular appellation for No. 4 heroin. The numerical term refers to the four-stage refining process of the opiate that arrives in New York and other American cities clean as new-fallen snow. The lowest purity of Southeast Asian heroin that Palmer said she had ever seen in New York was 85 percent. Most of the loads were 95 percent pure, she said, or higher. Ingeniously smuggled into America, as Group 41’s photo gallery attested, and barely “stepped on” with diluents such as lactose and mannitol to increase its bulk, the heroin was then distributed through a network of criminal organizations.

No monolithic group, however, controlled the local heroin market, said Palmer. Group 41 tracked the ancient, ethnic Chinese Triads, such as the 14 K Society, the Wo Shing Wo, and the Sun Yee On, which were all based in Hong Kong. Sun Yee On, which was centered in Kowloon’s Walled City, reportedly had links to Khun Sa. The society was founded by natives of China’s coastal Swatow region, the seafaring Chiu Chao, who had established ethnic enclaves throughout Southeast Asia from which they displayed a remarkable acumen for legitimate trading and for contraband smuggling. These Triads, with criminal cores directed by lung tao—“dragon heads”—raked in millions of dollars through narcotics, prostitution, gambling, loan sharking, smuggling, and extortion. Unlike the Colombian cartels or the Italian Mafia, the Asian criminals did not operate in clean, hierarchical structures. They functioned without central administrations, communicated via elaborate codes, spoke in obscure dialects. In America, said Palmer, these Asian traffickers favored joint ventures and marriages of convenience, with different organizations fulfilling compartmentalized functions.

“That makes this a much more amorphous and difficult target to deal with effectively,” Palmer explained. “It’s not a vertically integrated, top-to-bottom distribution network. You have a lot of different people coming in at various levels: financial backing, initial importation, distribution. The heroin will go through several levels here in New York City before it ultimately gets to the street.”

The damning charges against Khun Sa illustrated the complexity of the smuggling schemes. In three cases where the Shan druglord was alleged to have been “the ultimate source of supply,” seven-hundred-gram bricks of heroin—a smuggling standard unit of measure known as a jin—were hidden in bales of rubber and shipped to a Thai-controlled warehouse in Queens, New York. According to Palmer, a total of 486 kilos were sent to this warehouse in March and June 1987. The heroin, accompanied by a Thai, had been shipped from Klong Toey, the bustling port of Bangkok, to Hong Kong. There, Palmer charged, control was turned over to a Taiwanese, and the load was then transshipped to New York and to another level of Chinese distributors. The first two multimillion-dollar shipments had been successfully delivered, but the massive third load had been discovered and seized on the docks of Klong Toey. Heavy rains delayed loading operations at the port, Southeast Asia’s third busiest, and rainwater soaked through two hundred bales of rubber strips waiting for loading aboard a container ship. Workers saw white sap oozing from the bundles and alerted the Royal Thai Police. Ripping through the bales with chainsaws, they uncovered the 1,086-kilo shipment that now represented count ten of USA v. Chang Chi-fu.

*   *   *

Palmer, raised in the small, working-class town of Leicester, Massachusetts—less than an hour’s drive north of New Bedford, Barry Flynn’s hometown—was the first in her Irish-Catholic family to attend college. After graduating from the Jesuit-affiliated Boston College and from Catholic University Law School, she took a job with the high-powered New York corporate-law firm of Mudge Rose Guthrie Alexander & Ferdon. But after five years, she took a 50-percent pay cut, became a prosecutor, and immersed herself in the narcotics netherworld. Not unlike Sullivan, she had been compelled by service and sacrifice, selfless lessons inculcated by her parents. “I worked in a great law firm with good people,” said Palmer, who served as the inspiration for the character of Shannon O’Shea, the female FBI agent in China White, Peter Maas’ 1994 novel about heroin trafficking. “But at the end of the day there was just something missing … the ability to feel like you could do something that makes a difference.”

In her work with Group 41, Palmer soon caught the attention of Asian smugglers, who gave her a street name: The Dragon Lady. The appellation was one of grudging respect, for the sky dragon, or lung, was one of the most important symbols in Chinese culture. The dragon, the strongest animal of the Chinese zodiac, was never the malevolent beast of Western mythology. The dragon did have the capacity to terrify, but it also represented good fortune, vigor, and beneficence. In Chinese cosmology, it occupied the eastern sky, the domain of sunrise, rain, and fertility. The Dragon Lady, therefore, was a powerful woman, not be trifled with or intimidated. In early 1990, Palmer received a parcel at work. Inside was a briefcase, which Palmer had been expecting as a present from her mother and father. Before she could open the case, two wary DEA agents intervened. They found a .22-caliber pistol rigged to fire when the top of the briefcase was opened. The message was clear: Palmer and Group 41 had made damaging progress.

“We’ve targeted and prosecuted some very significant heroin traffickers,” she said. “We’ve closed off their world to a certain degree because we’ve made it more difficult for them to operate in various spheres. We’ve made an initial difference. As a result of the efforts DEA has undertaken, people are starting to pay more attention to the real problems that heroin poses.”

She also hoped that some day, some way, the sphere of operations surrounding Chang Chi-fu would shrink to the size of a Brooklyn federal courtroom. And who was more qualified to vanquish the prosperous Prince of Death than a self-described “eternal optimist”? Who better than a diehard fan of the star-crossed Boston Red Sox, a woman who kept a framed picture of outfielder Carl Yastrzemski in her office? By almost the sheer force of his will, the steady, reliable Yaz had carried the Sox to the World Series in 1967, the year of the Impossible Dream. If Yaz could achieve a near-miracle, it would never be beyond the realm of possibility that the dogged, methodical prosecutor would not get her chance to fatten file 89cr00911.

“I certainly don’t think [the indictment] was a waste of time,” said Palmer. “Someone has to hold him accountable.”

*   *   *

Last night it had been Bomber. Next week it could be Hard to Kill, Mambo, or Top Gun. Who knew? The Sailor didn’t worry. The fix was in. Boston’s bountiful heroin market was as glutted as a car dealership’s lot on President’s Day. Pushers loitered near the Veterans Administration outpatient clinic, just a few hundred yards from Boston Garden, confident that a few addicts would want to splurge and run a touch of scag on top of their prescribed methadone. They cruised the financial district, supplying the yuppies grown jaded or burned-out by the high-wire life of cocaine. They waited in the tenements of Mission Hill, where hard-core junkies like The Sailor went to score.

“Years ago, if you had a good connection you were lucky,” said Jon Stuen-Parker, a former addict who now directs the National AIDS Brigade, a nonprofit group that operates needle-exchange programs in Boston, New York, and Bangkok. Years ago, the teen-aged Stuen-Parker and his junk partners mustered every morning at Leo’s Pool Room in East Boston’s Maverick Square to see who had a good thing going. Today, there’s no need to network. “Now,” said Stuen-Parker, “there are good things everywhere.”

This was the Golden Age of heroin addiction. The fixes were plentiful, potent, and, best of all, cheap. Addicts who paid from twenty to twenty-five dollars per bag for heroin in 1992 could, just two years later, buy killer doses for as little as seven dollars, about the price of a six-pack of imported beer. Stuen-Parker articulated what The Sailor, what pushers, what law-enforcement officials knew all too well: “It is a drug addict’s dream come true that there can be that much availability at that cheap a price with quality that high.”

This downpour of despair formed half a world away, in the hills of northeastern Burma. Beyond the long reach of the United States, beyond even the thuggish grip of SLORC, the thunderhead of another immense opium crop gathered, barely acknowledged by the West. For despite its critical importance to the global drug trade, Burma had managed to remain an obscure, eccentric tyranny until 1988, the year that Daw Aung San Suu Kyi came home.

The daughter of the late Aung San, the revered founder of independent Burma, she had returned to Rangoon from Oxford, England, to care for her invalid mother. Daw Suu Kyi found her homeland in turmoil. In the wake of Ne Win’s crazed demonetization scheme, his docile, Buddhist subjects had finally soured on the old general and taken to the streets in protest. When Ne Win finally resigned in July, the autocrat tapped Sein Lwin, an old army crony, as his successor. The move backfired. The public loathed Lwin, whom they called “The Butcher of Rangoon,” for his long history of savage suppression. Planets and auspicious numbers determine every undertaking in Burma, so a general strike began at exactly 8:08 a.m. on August 8, 1988, when Rangoon dockworkers walked off the job. Tatmadaw soldiers responded by machine-gunning hundreds of protestors in the streets. Daw Suu Kyi could not stomach the sorry state of the nation her father, assassinated in 1947 by a political rival, had fought so hard to establish. In an emotional August 26 speech to several hundred thousand people crowded at the base of Shwedagon Pagoda, Burma’s most venerated site, Daw Suu Kyi emerged as the leader of the prodemocracy opposition. The dutiful daughter had become The Lady.

“The present crisis is the concern of the entire nation,” she told the multitude. “I could not, as my father’s daughter, remain indifferent to all that was going on. This national crisis could, in fact, be called the second struggle for independence.”

Emboldened, citizens throughout Burma began daily mass demonstrations. The Tatmadaw interceded on September 18, shooting thousands of protestors. Nearly ten thousand students and prodemocracy activists fled the violent crackdown, heading for Thailand. The army’s chief of staff, General Saw Maung, announced the formation of SLORC, the abolition of the 1974 constitution, and the abandonment of “The Burmese Way to Socialism” in favor of a limited free-market economy. The Tatmadaw would govern until sufficient order allowed for general elections.

Suddenly, The Lady appeared everywhere—Shan State and Kachin State, Mandalay and Mergui—carrying the banner of the National League for Democracy (NLD) and pointedly criticizing the disastrous policies of Ne Win. Supported by peasants and professionals, Burmans and minorities alike, The Lady became the greatest unifying force in Burmese politics since her late father. In a panic, SLORC arrested her on July 20, 1989—the day after Martyrs’ Day, the anniversary of Aung San’s death—and confined Daw Suu Kyi to house arrest in the family home near Rangoon University.

The Lady’s detention did not deter voters when elections were held the following May. In a stunning showing, NLD candidates captured 392 of 485 seats in the Assembly. But SLORC, whose National Unity Party won a paltry ten seats, simply ignored the mandate. NLD candidates were disqualified, pressured to resign, detained, or imprisoned. The junta packed a 1993 convention to draft a new constitution; hundreds of handpicked delegates then produced a document that guaranteed the military a “leading role” in government, granted the army sweeping “emergency” powers, and banned anyone married to a foreigner—i.e., Daw Suu Kyi, who had married an Englishman, Michael Aris—from holding elected office.

Nothing could shame SLORC, not the fact that The Lady was the daughter of Burma’s greatest national hero, not the moral prestige of her 1991 Nobel Peace Prize, not even condemnation by diplomats and nongovernmental organizations such as Human Rights Watch, which labeled Burma a “human-rights pariah.” The U.S. State Department’s Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 1993 criticized Burma’s “pervasive security apparatus” and its unchecked military dictatorship that ruled “with an unyielding grip.” The last American ambassador to Burma, Burton Levin, called SLORC a collection of “thugs and dopes.” No matter. The Lady remained behind the green metal gates of 54 University Avenue, uncharged with any crime.

The bloody subjugation of unarmed protestors, the trumped-up detention of Daw Suu Kyi, and the subsequent nullification of legitimate elections briefly caught the attention of the international media. The United States downgraded diplomatic relations in 1990 and eliminated all direct aid to Burma, including funding of counter-narcotics efforts. American antidrug assistance was already being questioned in the wake of Shan allegations that the Burmese had indiscriminately sprayed a toxic, U.S.-supplied herbicide, 2,4-D, on hundreds of fields and villages near Lashio and Keng Tung between November 1986 and January 1987.

The crackdown on prodemocracy activists slowed international aid to a trickle. Undeterred, SLORC ignored drug eradication and counter-narcotics measures and moved to consolidate internal control. Since the junta’s ascension in 1988, opium production in Burma had more than doubled. The country was “far and away” the world’s leading producer of illicit opium, according to a 1994 BINM report, which determined that SLORC had “not undertaken serious or sustained narcotics control efforts” since taking power. Burma dominated the global heroin market, growing two-thirds of the world’s supply of the illegal poppy and producing an equal share of its illicit opium. An estimated 60 percent of America’s heroin flowed from Burma. The junkie’s dream had become a national nightmare, used by more people than at any time since the end of the Vietnam War.

A generation before, tens of thousands of G.I. junkies had returned from Vietnam, strung out on dope allegedly grown by Hmong tribesman, the mercenary force employed by the CIA in neighboring Laos. Then, however, when Lou Reed or William S. Burroughs described the junkie life, it still held the aura of doomed, artistic romanticism. Even trafficking could seem a rogueish, existential enterprise, particularly the pure Saigon scag hustled by Nietzche-reading Marine vets in Robert Stone’s 1973 novel, Dog Soldiers.

Stuen-Parker had seen his share of these lost characters on the street, had tracked the soldiers who passed through his Boston drop-in center, Veterans with AIDS. But hollow, haunted men like The Sailor, who had shot dope for forty years, were not the only abusers. As the 1994 BINM report noted ominously: “The drug, which cocaine displaced in the 1980s, is making a comeback everywhere.” According to the report, heroin ran “a close second” to cocaine as the top choice of American drug users. The sinister comeback was a natural, if chilling, consequence of America’s decade-long, abusive affair with cocaine. A stimulant such as cocaine will usually burn out users within a few years, the BINM report noted, while a depressant like heroin “can hold its prey for decades.” Seeking addict diversification, the savvy South American cocaine cartels “appear to be looking to heroin as the drug of the ’90s,” observed BINM. The narcotraffickers had planted thousands of acres of poppies in the mountains of Colombia to guarantee opium market share. In a span of just a few years, Colombia had come from nowhere to rank third globally in illicit poppy cultivation, behind only Burma and Afghanistan. By the fall of 1993, DEA agents noted that the Cali cartel had devised an aggressive sales campaign for the American drug market: free samples of heroin No. 4 to its crack and cocaine customers.

If the State Department was correct, Burma—and especially the region of Shan State—had attained the notoriety of the Huallaga Valley of Peru, cocaine’s mythic wellspring. The opium-poppy plant, Papaver somniferum, grew best in a relatively dry, mild climate at altitudes between three and seven thousand feet—making Shan State, with its temperate weather and mountain ranges, the perfect poppy hothouse. The State Department produced a map of major opium-producing nations, with cultivation densities indicated by color shadings of tan (low density), orange (medium), and red (high). Shan State was almost completely overlaid in tan, with huge splotches of orange and red sprouting like chancres the length and breadth of the region.

For decades, Shan State’s coming of age in the international drug trade had gone virtually unnoticed among Western law-enforcement officials. During the 1970s, the FBI and the DEA targeted the so-called French Connection—the Istanbul-Marseilles–New York corridor—and Sicilian criminal organizations. The drug syndicates soon looked elsewhere, to Mexico and the Far East, for sources. Reagan-era counter-narcotics efforts were consumed with South American cocaine, particularly the purified, virulent form known as crack. Meanwhile, Triad members had left Hong Kong and settled overseas, extending the tentacles of their insular crime families. Local and federal lawmen, with few Chinese officers to penetrate the walls of culture, dialect, and ethnicity, found themselves overmatched and outmaneuvered by the dragon heads. Soon, the volume of heroin the Triads moved dwarfed the loads of the French Connection. The largest American bust on the old Marseilles route had been one hundred kilos. That was less than 10 percent of the 1,086-kilo heroin shipment seized in Bangkok and allegedly traced to Khun Sa. A smuggler couldn’t hide a load like that in the floorboards of a car; the load was the size of a car.

University of Wisconsin professor Alfred W. McCoy, the author of the seminal book, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, labeled Shan State a “natural outlaw zone.” Not unlike the Huallaga Valley, noted McCoy, it was an area that lay at the intersection of national boundaries and ethnic frontiers, of trade and terrain. Shan State had chafed against Burmese rule for centuries. Armed insurgents now trafficked in the fruit of the poppy with a piercing logic: in these mountains, only opium had the buying power to deliver the weapons they desired.

The men who nurtured the misery that now grew so colorfully in Shan State were not bad men. Like their fathers and their fathers’ fathers, they were simple, practical farmers who measured out their lives in late-summer monsoons. In the fall, after the rains, they broadcast poppy seeds across small plots, usually no more than an acre or two, cut in the weak laterite soil of the mountains. The farmers had little recourse but to grow poppies. Shanland’s vast distances and few roads meant that price-weight ratio was critical for any product, and no cash crop was as compact, portable, or nonperishable as opium. Every spring in their beautiful, abject land, they sold their opium for a pittance to roving Chinese merchants. Brought to malarial trading towns in the valleys, the bulky opium cargoes were frequently converted to morphine, a relatively simple refining process that reduced drug weight by 90 percent and required only water, lime fertilizer, and ammonia.

The morphine bricks were then transported under armed guard by mule caravans to clandestine jungle refineries along the Thai border, where black-market “chemists” used a complicated, four-step method to transform morphine into heroin. The chemists first boiled morphine and acetic anhydride to bond as diacetylmorphine. In the second stage, water and chloroform were added to precipitate impurities; the introduction of sodium carbonate then formed heroin particles. In the third step, these clumps were filtered from the liquid, added to a solution of alcohol and activated charcoal, then heated until the alcohol evaporated. The result: brownish, smokable heroin No. 3. In the ultimate step, the heroin was again dissolved in alcohol; the addition of ether and hydrochloric acid caused white flakes of nearly pure heroin to crystalize. After final filtration and drying, only heroin No. 4, the Cadillac of catatonic highs, remained.

By the hot, dry season of April and May, this China White swept southward, virtually unchecked by Burmese, Thai, or American antidrug efforts. Like a rising tide, it inundated jungle hamlets and mining camps, seeped into border towns, crested in the braying sprawl of Bangkok, then receded in a dozen major rivulets across the globe. International outrage was reserved for the powerful few who fought to control the wellhead of this heroin pipeline. Some, like the wild Wa, had been headhunters a generation ago. Others, like the Kuomintang (or KMT), the remnants of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Chinese army that fled from Yunnan Province to Burma in the late 1940s, were a lost, exiled band that now cared only for drug profits. But the most powerful, most cunning, most resilient among this collection of warlords, bandits, and lapsed patriots was Khun Sa, who had used the opium industry to enhance his power, prestige, and personal fortune for more than thirty years.

Through a maze of overseas smuggling routes controlled by the Triads, Khun Sa allegedly funneled tons of heroin No. 4 to the waiting, willing veins of addicts in Europe and the United States. At street level, this heroin was a far cry from the dime-bag ghetto smack of the 1970s. As Palmer knew all too well, purity levels had soared. Fifteen, twenty years ago, said DEA agents, a typical bag contained only 3 or 4 percent heroin. In the spring of 1993, when DEA made random street buys in twenty cities, the average, nationwide purity levels had leapt to 36 percent. The increase was even greater in the northeast: 80 percent pure in Philadelphia; 66 percent in New York City-Newark, N.J.; and 62 percent in Boston.

Whether grown and processed in Burma, Afghanistan, or Colombia, this heroin wrought health-care havoc. Even grizzled users such as The Sailor, who had mainlined nearly everything, had rarely tried anything as strong, or as deadly. There was more than bravado in the “brand” names—DOA, Murder One, TKO—there was truth in advertising. With rising street-level potency, more users overdosed. According to the Drug Abuse Warning Network (DAWN), a national survey of hospital emergency rooms, heroin-related ER visits climbed from 38,100 in 1988 to 63,000 in 1993—an increase of 65 percent. Over the same period, heroin-related ER visits in New York and Boston were even higher: 109 percent and 85 percent, respectively. Bad shit, this good thing.

“You gotta be careful,” The Sailor had told me. “You can get killed walking across the street; you can get killed with an overdose. About a month ago, I got some heroin and the dealer chased me down. He knew where I was getting high. He fucked up. He didn’t cut it right. It was pure. I missed my vein; I skin-popped it, and I almost died from that, it was so fucking strong.” The Sailor smiled, nearly nostalgic for the great hit that almost put him away. Then laughed his dry, chain-smoker’s laugh. “But that’s the chance you take. It’s the way life is. Don’t stop you from doing it. It don’t. That’s what you do. You do what you do.”

Overdoses weren’t the only health issue. While the public was being harangued with the safe-sex message, heroin had quietly become the major culprit in the spread of AIDS, which was transmitted when an infected addict shared needles. By 1994, intravenous (IV) drug use was blamed for 34 percent of reported AIDS cases in Massachusetts. Among men, IV drug use had supplanted homosexual sex as the primary mode for HIV transmission by 1992. Among women, IV drug use was the primary method of infection in two-thirds of the commonwealth’s cases. The cold numbers were equally troubling in New York: 47 percent of male AIDS cases were attributed to IV drug use, which had overtaken homosexual sex as the primary mode of HIV infection in 1987. Among women, IV drug use caused HIV infection in six of ten AIDS patients.

The Sailor sounded detached, almost resigned, as he spoke of a former lover he said died of AIDS several years ago. Junkie fatalism: “I shot dope with her. I had sex with her. We never used any precautions.… I won’t be surprised if I do come up positive. It ain’t gonna put me on no death trip. I’m ready for it if it comes up, all right? It’s hard, man, when you know you’re gonna die sooner than everyone else. But sometimes it really doesn’t matter when you die.”

The Sailor still held onto a dream: he was in Southeast Asia, beyond the Annamese Cordillera, the saw-toothed mountains he once saw from the deck of his destroyer. He was permanently AWOL, beyond the reach of his chief petty officer, of any goddamn officer. He was beyond the reach of his government, of any goddamn government. He was in Burma, nodding on a sun-bathed hillside. It was heaven on earth.

“Sit in a poppy field, scrape some opium off a plant, and just smoke it,” he said with a cackle. “Right there. Right in its environment.” No more connections. No more rip-off paranoia. No more hot shots. The Sailor laughed a parched Marlboro laugh. His lifelong habit, begun when he was eleven years old, had stolen his health, his wealth, his common-law wife, his lover. He drifted between cheap apartments, homeless shelters, veterans centers. The Sailor was on methadone now, but still danced with his harsh mistress, chipping smack about once a week. China White called the shots; The Sailor could not resist. Methadone promised no dreams. Sure, he was a needle freak. Sticking a spike in his arm, drawing blood, he got off on the whole vindictive scene, just oozing life.

“I miss that,” he croaked. “I like that. It’s crazy, but I like that. Heroin takes all the guilt, all the feelings away from you. That’s why I use. If I get to feeling bad, feeling depressed, get the poor-me’s, I see a bag of dope, it takes all that shit away. Automatic.”

Many younger, more affluent users, however, were disturbed by the prospect of a mainline-induced death sentence. But concerns about AIDS hadn’t deterred them from heroin—not when street-level purity often exceeded 50 percent. When heroin was that strong, dirty or stigmatizing needles could be avoided. Users could snort or smoke the drug (a practice dubbed “chasing the dragon” for the roiling fumes that resulted when heroin was heated on a piece of aluminum foil), drastically altering the demographics of smack. The DAWN reports had tracked an astounding shift in ingestion patterns from 1988 to 1993. In that five-year span, emergency-room visits attributed to sniffing or snorting heroin leapt 470 percent; episodes caused by IV injection rose 31 percent.

Users still lived in the ghetto, but they had also moved uptown and out to the suburbs. For sure, the usual suspects, The Sailor, the haunted Vietnam vets, the Times Square hookers, still used the shit. But college kids, fashion models, grunge musicians, and film stars had joined the swelling crowd. Of course, the long, depressing list of celebrity users stretched back to Billie Holiday, Charlie “Bird” Parker, and Lenny Bruce.

“It always comes back,” said Carlo A. Boccia, the special agent in charge of DEA’s New York field division who has waged counter-narcotics warfare for more than two decades. It has been a bloody, costly campaign, the law-enforcement equivalent of World War I stalemates at the Somme and Gallipoli. “Heroin is always here. We push it in a corner—boom—it’s back.”