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Wild in the streets
by Barbara Kantrowitz
Newsweek
August 1, 1993

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

YOU ARE REQUIRED TO READ THE COPYRIGHT NOTICE AT THIS LINK BEFORE YOU READ THE FOLLOWING WORK, THAT IS AVAILABLE SOLELY FOR PRIVATE STUDY, SCHOLARSHIP OR RESEARCH PURSUANT TO 17 U.S.C. SECTION 107 AND 108. IN THE EVENT THAT THE LIBRARY DETERMINES THAT UNLAWFUL COPYING OF THIS WORK HAS OCCURRED, THE LIBRARY HAS THE RIGHT TO BLOCK THE I.P. ADDRESS AT WHICH THE UNLAWFUL COPYING APPEARED TO HAVE OCCURRED. THANK YOU FOR RESPECTING THE RIGHTS OF COPYRIGHT OWNERS.

-- Body Count: Moral Poverty ... And How to Win America's War Against Crime and Drugs, by William J. Bennett, John J. Dilulio, Jr., John P. Walters

Charles Conrad didn't have a chance. He was 55 years old, crippled by multiple sclerosis and needed a walker or wheelchair to get around. The boys who allegedly attacked him earlier this month were young--17, 15 and 14--and they were ruthless. Police say that when Conrad returned to his suburban Atlanta condominium while they were burgling it, the boys did what they had to do. They got rid of him. Permanently.

Over a period of many hours--stretching from dusk on July 17 until dawn of the next day--they stabbed him with a kitchen knife and a barbecue fork, strangled him with a rope, and hit him on the head with a hammer and the barrel of a shotgun, according to a statement one of the boys, 14-year-old Carlos Alexander Nevarez, reportedly gave to police. At one point they realized they were hungry. So they heated up the macaroni and cheese they found in Conrad's kitchen, and washed it down with Dr Pepper.

Despite this torture, Conrad survived. According to the statement published by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, a grievously wounded Conrad begged the boys to shoot him and put a swift end to his agony. But, Nevarez said, the boys were afraid people would hear the gunshots. So they allegedly beat him some more, and then poured salt into his wounds to see if he was still alive. When his body twitched in response to the pain, they threw household knickknacks at him. After he was struck in the back by a brass eagle, "he stopped breathing," Nevarez told police. The boys then took off in Conrad's wheelchair-equipped van with their hard-earned loot: a stereo, a VCR, a camcorder and a shotgun, according to an indictment handed down last week. Even law-enforcement officials were shocked when they arrested the boys the next day. The DeKalb County district attorney, J. Tom Morgan, calls it "the worst crime scene I've ever seen."

Conrad's death was particularly gory, but it was not an isolated incident. Each day seems to bring a new horror story of vicious crimes by boys-and a few girls. Near Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., on July 14, a group of teenagers allegedly beat and stabbed a friend to death; police have yet to come up with a motive. A few days earlier in New York, a Brooklyn mother made the front pages for the saddest of distinctions: losing all three of her young sons to street violence. Some victims, such as the mentally retarded girl sexually assaulted by high school football players in Glen Ridge, NJ., get whole forests of publicity. But most victims are mourned only by the people who loved them. In February, Margaret Ensley's 17-year-old son Michael caught a bullet in the hallway of his high school in Reseda, Calif. She says a teen shot her son because he thought Michael gave him a funny look. The shooter, she says, is now serving 10 years in a youth-authority camp. "But I have life imprisonment without the possibility of parole," says Ensley, "because I won't ever have my son back again...When they were filling his crypt, I said, 'Lord, let me crawl up there with him,' because the pain was so unbearable."

Law-enforcement and public-health officials describe a virtual "epidemic" of youth violence in the last five years, spreading from the inner cities to the suburbs. "We're talking about younger and younger kids committing more and more serious crimes," says Indianapolis Prosecuting Attorney Jeff Modisett. "Violence is becoming a way of life." Much of it, but by no means all, can be found in poor neighborhoods, where a disproportionate number of victims and victimizers live side by side. But what separates one group from another is complex: being neglected or abused by parents; witnessing violence at an early age on the street or in the house; living in a culture that glamorizes youth violence in decades of movies from "A Clockwork Orange" to "Menace II Society"; the continuing mystery of evil. To that list add the most dangerous ingredient: the widespread availability of guns to kids. In a Harvard School of Public Health survey released last week, 59 percent of children in the sixth through the 12th grades said they "could get a handgun if they wanted one." More than a third of the students surveyed said they thought guns made it less likely that they would live to "a ripe old age." Cindy Rodriguez, a 14-year-old living in gang-riddled South-Central Los Angeles, is a testament to the ferocity of unrestrained firepower. Two and a half years ago, a gang bullet ripped through her body as she was talking to the mailman outside her house. Now she's paralyzed for life. And the bullets keep coming. "We hear gunshots every day," she says. "Sometimes I get scared. I'm in the shower and I hear it and I get all scared. But you have to live with the reality."

Violence is devastating this generation, as surely as polio cut down young people 40 years ago. Attorney General Janet Reno says youth violence is "the greatest single crime problem in America today." Between 1987 and 1991, the last year for which statistics are available, the number of teenagers arrested for murder around the country increased by an astounding 85 percent, according to the Department of justice. In 1991, 10- to 17-year-olds accounted for 17 percent of all violent-crime arrests; law-enforcement officials believe that figure is even higher now. Teenagers are not just the perpetrators; they're also the victims. According to the FBI, more than 2,200 murder victims in 1991 were under 18 -an average of more than six young people killed every day. The Justice Department estimates that each year, nearly a million young people between 12 and 19 are raped, robbed or assaulted, often by their peers.

That's the official count. The true number of injuries from teen violence could be even higher. When emergency medical technicians in Boston recently addressed a class of fifth graders, they were astonished to find that nearly three quarters of the children knew someone who had been shot or stabbed. "A lot of violence goes unmeasured," says Dr. Deborah Prothrow-Stith, assistant dean of the Harvard School of Public Health and author of "Deadly Consequences," a book about teen violence. Paramedic Richard Serino, who is a supervisor in the emergency room at Boston City Hospital, estimates that doctors save seven or eight wounded teens for every one who dies. Many of the "lucky ones," Serino says, end up paralyzed or with colostomy bags.

The statistics are shocking and so is the way some teenagers react when they're caught and accused of brutal crimes. "Hey, great! We've hit the big time," 17-year-old defendant Raul Omar Villareal allegedly boasted to another boy after hearing that they might be charged with murder. Villareal was one of six Houston teens arrested and charged last month in the brutal rape and strangulation of two young girls who made the fatal mistake of taking a shortcut through a wooded area where, police say, the boys were initiating two new members into their gang. In Dartmouth, Mass., this April, two 16-year-olds and one 15-year-old armed with clubs and knives barged into a high-school social-studies class and, police say, fatally stabbed a 16-year-old. One of the accused killers reportedly claimed that cult leader David Koresh was his idol and laughed about the killing afterward.

Dartmouth is a suburb of New Bedford, the sort of place city dwellers flee to, thinking they'll find a respite from city crime. While the odds may be a bit better, a picket fence and a driveway is no guarantee. Indeed, even suburban police departments around the nation have taken to keeping watch on groups they worry may develop into youth gangs. Thus far, most of these kids seem like extras from "West Side Story," bunches of boys content to deface walls and fight with clubs and chains.

The casual attitude toward violence is most acute in inner-city neighborhoods, where many youngsters have grown up to the sounds of sirens and gunshots in the night and the sight of blood-spattered sidewalks in the morning. After so many years in a war zone, trauma begins to seem normal. This is how Shaakara, a sweet-faced 6-year-old who fives in Uptown, one of Chicago's most dangerous areas, calmly describes one terrible scene she witnessed at a neighbor's apartment: "This lady, she got shot and her little baby had got cut. This man, he took the baby and cut her. He cut her on the throat. He killed the baby. All blood came out. This little boy, when he saw the baby, he called his grandmother and she came over. And you know, his grandmother got killed, but the little boy didn't get killed. He comes over to my house. That man, he took the grandmother and put her on the ground, and slammed her, and shut her in the door. Her whole body, shut in the door." After telling her tale, Shaakara smiles. "You know what I want to be when I grow up? A ballerina or a mermaid."

In this heightened atmosphere of violence, normal rules of behavior don't apply. As traditional social supports--home, school, community--have fallen away, new role models have taken their place. "It takes an entire village to raise a child, but the village isn't there for the children anymore," says Modisett, the Indianapolis prosecutor. "The only direction these kids receive is from their peers on the street, the local drug dealers and other role models who engage in criminal conduct." Katie Buckland, a Los Angeles prosecutor who volunteers in the city's schools, says the kids she sees have already given up the idea of conventional success and seize the opportunities available. "The kids that are selling crack when they're in the fifth grade are not the dumb kids," she says. "They're the smart kids. They're the ambitious kids...trying to climb up their own corporate ladder. And the only corporate ladder they see has to do with gangs and drugs."

With drugs the route to easy money, prison is the dominant institution shaping the culture, replacing church and school. In the last few years, more young black men have gone to jail than to college. Fathers, uncles, brothers, cousins have all done time. April Allen, a 15-year-old who lives in Boston's Roxbury section, has friends who think of jail as a kind of sleep-away camp. "The boys I know think it's fun to be in jail because other boys they know are in jail, too," she says. Prison is a way of looking; the dropped-waist, baggy-pants look is even called "jailing" in Miami. And prison is a way of acting. "In prison, the baddest, meanest guy runs the cell," says H. T. Smith, a lawyer and African-American activist who practices in Miami's Overtown ghetto. "Your neighborhood, your school--it's the same. You've got to show him you're crazy enough so he won't mess with you."

If prison provides the method of social interaction, guns provide the means. Alexis Vega, a 19-year-old New Yorker, explains the mentality on the streets where she grew up: "If a man threatens me, that's a threat to my life. So I go get a gun and make sure I shoot him first before he shoots me. Even though he might not mean it. just by saying it, it may scare me so much that I'm going to get him first." Vega has seen run-of-the-mill arguments turn into tragedies. "A bullet doesn't have anybody's name on it," says Vega. "Somebody shoots, they're so nervous, they'll catch you even though you don't have anything to do with it."

One kid with a gun is a finite danger; a gang equipped with Uzis, AK-47s and sawed-off shotguns means carnage. Unlike adult criminals, who usually act alone, violent teens normally move in a pack. That's typical teen behavior: hanging together. But these are well-equipped armies, not just a few kids milling outside a pizza parlor. There's a synergistic effect: one particularly aggressive kid can spur others to commit crimes they might not think of on their own. The victims are often chosen because they are perceived as weak or vulnerable, say social scientists who study children and aggression. As horrible as some of the crimes are, kids go along with the crowd rather than go it alone.

Some social scientists argue that teenage aggression is natural. In another era, they say, that aggression might have been channeled in a socially acceptable way--into the military, or hard physical labor--options that are still available to putative linebackers and soldiers. But other researchers who have studied today's violent teens say they are a new and dangerous breed. At a conference on teen-violence prevention in Washington, D. C., last week, psychologists and social workers discussed the causes of skyrocketing teen-crime rates. In one of the largest longitudinal studies of violent youth, scientists followed about 4,000 youngsters in Denver, Pittsburgh and Rochester, N.Y., for five years. By the age of 16, more than half admitted to some form of violent criminal behavior, says Terence P. Thornberry, the principal investigator in Rochester and a psychologist at the State University of New York in Albany. "Violence among teenagers is almost normative in our society," Thornberry told the conference. But not all violent teens were the same: the researchers found that 15 percent of the sample were responsible for 75 percent of the violent offenses.

What made the bad kids so bad? Thornberry and his colleagues identified a number of "risk factors" in the youths' background. "Violence does not drop out of the sky at age 15," Thornberry says. "it is part of a long developmental process that begins in early childhood." Kids who grow up in families where there is child abuse and maltreatment, spouse abuse and a history of violent behavior learn early on to act out physically when they are frustrated or upset. Poverty exacerbates the situation. Parents who haven't finished high school, who are unemployed or on welfare, or who began their families while they themselves were teenagers are more likely to have delinquent children. In New York and other big cities, counselors who work with delinquent youths say they see families with a history of generations of violence. Angela D'Arpa-Calandra, a former probation officer who now directs the juvenile Intensive Supervision Program, says she recently had such a case in Manhattan family court. When she walked into the courtroom, she saw a mother and a grandmother sitting with the 14-year-old offender. "I had the grandmother in criminal court in 1963," D'Arpa-Calandra says. "We didn't stop it there. The grandmother was 14 when she was arrested. The mother had this child when she was 14. It's like a cycle we must relive."

Problems in school also increase the likelihood that the youngster will turn to violence, the study found. People who work with young criminals report that many are barely literate. Learning disabilities are common among teens in the probation system, says Charntel Polite, a Brooklyn Probation officer who supervises 30 youthful offenders. "I have 15-or 16-year-olds in ninth or 10th grade whose reading levels are second or third grade."

Thornberry says the most effective prevention efforts concentrate on eliminating risk factors. For example, students with learning problems could get extra tutoring. Parents who have trouble maintaining discipline at home could get counseling or therapy. "Prevention programs need to start very early," Thornberry says, maybe even before elementary school. "Waiting until the teenage years is too late."

After a while, life on the streets begins to feel like home to older teenagers. Joaquin Ramos, a 19-year-old member of the Latin Counts in Detroit, says he spends his time "chillin' and hanging" with the Counts when he's not in jail. He's spent two years behind bars, but that hasn't made him turn away from the gang. The oldest of seven children, he never met his father, but he has been told that he was a member of the Bagly Boys, a popular gang a generation ago. Ramos began carrying a gun when he was 9; he became a full-fledged Count at the age of 13. He has watched three good friends--Bootis, Shadow and Showtime--die in street wars.

Bootis was shot when he left a party. "I looked right into his eyes and it looked like he was trying to say something," Ramos recalls. "There was snow on the ground and the blood from the back of his head was spreading all over it. Another buddy tried to lift his bead but the back of it was gone. He had a small hole right in the middle of his forehead. And then he was gone. He died. That was my buddy. We were real tight." He adds, "Would you say in the story that we love him and miss him and Shadow and Showtime, too?"

Some kids do manage to leave gang life, usually with the help of a supportive adult. William Jefferson, now 19, quit the Intervale gang in Boston's Roxbury section after he was shot. "My mom talked to me and told me I had to make a decision whether I wanted to do something with my life or stay on the street and possibly get killed." He started playing basketball and football at school; then he had to keep up his grades to stay on the teams. Last month he became the first of his mother's four children to graduate from high school. He plans to enter junior college this fall. Now, he says, he'll behave because "I have a lot to lose."

Two lives, two different choices. At the risk of sounding melodramatic, Joaquin Ramos and William Jefferson represent different paths for a generation at risk. The young men made their own decisions, but clearly they were influenced by those dear to them: for Ramos it was the gang, for Jefferson, his mother. Day by day, block by block, these are the small judgments that will end up governing our streets. There is little reason to be very optimistic.

On their way home from a pool party last month, two teenage girls took a shortcut into the woods, where they were viciously raped and strangled. Police arrested six alleged members of the Black N White gang.

In rural Massachusetts, Baldwin was charged with killing a 17-year-old girl with a baseball bat. The alleged motive: she wouldn't date him. He denies the charge.

Bobby Kent, the 20-year-old son of a stockbroker, was killed near a quarry pond July 14, his body stabbed, his head smashed with a bat. Police arrested six youths. One of them was his exgirlfriend, another a former pal.

Juveniles accounted for 17% of all violent-crime arrests in 1991.

Juvenile arrests for murder increased by 85% between 1987 and 1991.

Three of every 10 juvenile murder arrests involved a victim under the age of 18 in 1991.

SOURCES: OFFICE OF JUVENILE JUSTICE AND DELINQUENCY PREVENTION, U.S. JUSTICE DEPT.; FBI

Between 1987 and 1991, juvenile arrests for weapons violations increased 62%.

One out of 5 weapons arrests in 1991 was a juvenile arrest.

Black youths were arrested for weapons--law violations at a rate triple that of white youths in 1991; they were victims of homicides at a rate six times higher than whites.

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Why Are Kids Killing? Coincidence—or Scary Trend? A Spate of Murders Allegedly Committed by Teens Leaves Experts, Family and Police Seeking Answers
by Maria Eftimiades, Susan Christian Goulding, Anthony Duignan-Cabrera, Don Campbell, Jane Sims Podesta.
People Magazine
June 23, 1997

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

YOU ARE REQUIRED TO READ THE COPYRIGHT NOTICE AT THIS LINK BEFORE YOU READ THE FOLLOWING WORK, THAT IS AVAILABLE SOLELY FOR PRIVATE STUDY, SCHOLARSHIP OR RESEARCH PURSUANT TO 17 U.S.C. SECTION 107 AND 108. IN THE EVENT THAT THE LIBRARY DETERMINES THAT UNLAWFUL COPYING OF THIS WORK HAS OCCURRED, THE LIBRARY HAS THE RIGHT TO BLOCK THE I.P. ADDRESS AT WHICH THE UNLAWFUL COPYING APPEARED TO HAVE OCCURRED. THANK YOU FOR RESPECTING THE RIGHTS OF COPYRIGHT OWNERS.

-- Body Count: Moral Poverty ... And How to Win America's War Against Crime and Drugs, by William J. Bennett, John J. Dilulio, Jr., John P. Walters

DURING THE PAST DECADE THE NUMBER OF murders committed by teenagers has leaped from roughly 1,000 a year to nearly 4,000. Worrisome as that trend may be, a fleeting glance at recent headlines—announcing that, in Texas, a teenage couple, formerly students at U.S. military academies, will soon stand trial for the carefully plotted murder of a girl who interrupted the smooth course of their love affair or that, in New Jersey, an 18-year-old high school senior delivered a baby while attending her prom, left the infant in the trash and returned to the dance—suggests some teens these days are also committing crimes of incomprehensible callousness. "The young people involved in some of these violent acts are without the capacity to make the connection with another life," says Dr. David Hartman, the director of neuropsychology at the Isaac Ray Center for Psychiatry and Law in Chicago. "They need have no more reason for hurting another human being than they have for peeling an orange."

How they get to that point is a matter of heated debate. Poverty, broken homes and physical, psychological and sexual abuse are frequently cited, and clearly such factors do play a role. But New York psychologist Michael Schulman, the author of Bringing Up a Moral Child, observes, "Given the fact that most people who suffered similar kinds of abuse don't do these kinds of things, the explanations feel a little hollow." Indeed, as the following cases illustrate, kids accused of acts of casual violence come from a variety of backgrounds. For Schulman, the solution to the problem is both straightforward and daunting. "You need to teach the child that the family stands for good ness," he says, "not simply for comfort and intellectual achievement, but that moral excellence is honored."

Melissa Drexler, 18

Among members of the class of '97 at Lacey Township High School in New Jersey, Melissa Drexler, 18, was known as a quiet, diligent student—an aspiring fashion designer who dreamed of becoming the next Donna Karan. She seemed shy and opened up only to a few close friends. "When you get to know her, she can be exciting," says Jim Botsacos, 18, a longtime friend. "She likes to have fun."

But Drexler concealed more from her classmates than a desire to enjoy herself. Although it now appears that she was pregnant for most of her senior year, Drexler managed to hide her condition—from her classmates, parents and boyfriend, John Lewis, 20—by wearing baggy, loose-fitting clothes.

On June 6 she went to her senior prom. Dressed in a floor-length, black sleeveless velvet gown, Drexler arrived in a limousine at the Garden Manor banquet hall in Aberdeen, N.J., at about 7:45 p.m. with Lewis. She immediately retreated to the rest room with a classmate to freshen up. When her friend grew concerned that she was taking so long in one of the stalls, Drexler, Monmouth County prosecutors say, told her she was having a heavy period and to let their dates know she would be a while.

The girl returned to the rest room about 15 minutes later, and Drexler emerged, zipped her dress and touched up her makeup. A few minutes later, after asking the deejay to play a Metallica song, she hit the dance floor with Lewis, a Wal-Mart stockroom worker she had been dating for about two years. "She seemed normal," says fellow student Jeff Diab, 18. "All smiles." Meanwhile, a cleaning woman, summoned by school officials to clean up a blood-streaked stall in the ladies room, discovered the lifeless body of a 6-lb. 6-oz. baby boy in a tied garbage bag in a trash basket. After learning that Drexler was the last to use the rest room, teachers began questioning her. "She was not upset," says Monmouth County prosecutor Robert Honecker. "She indicated that she had delivered an infant." Such a blank response, though bewildering, is not unheard of, says Dr. Phillip Resnick, a professor of psychiatry at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. "[With] mothers who deny their pregnancy and don't form a bond, it's like a foreign body going through them—like a peach pit."

The incident has left Drexler's middle-class hometown of Forked River in shock. By all accounts, the teenager—who could face murder charges if prosecutors can prove the baby was alive at birth—was an indulged only child whose parents, John, a computer worker, and Marie, a bank employee, provided ample love and support. But Debbie Jacobson, a classmate's mother, says Melissa "is a child emotionally. She didn't make decisions on her own about things." Adds Botsacos: "Her family is almost too nice. They didn't want her to have a job. They bought her a car, paid for her gas, bought her clothes. She got what she wanted when she wanted it." This time it seems Drexler got something she didn't want—and cast it away.

Jeremy Strohmeyer, 18

Shortly before 4 a.m. on May 25, a security camera in a Primm, Nev., casino captured 7-year-old Sherrice Iverson-on her own as her father gambled nearby—playing hide-and-seek in a video arcade with Jeremy Strohmeyer, 18, a college-bound high school senior from Long Beach, Calif. Moments later, when Sherrice dashed into the women's room, Strohmeyer followed. There, allegedly, he raped and strangled her. He then continued celebrating the Memorial Day holiday weekend with best friend David Cash Jr., 18, and Cash's father. Police say the younger Cash had trailed Strohmeyer into the rest room but left after failing to persuade him to let the little girl alone. On his return to Long Beach, a friend says, Strohmeyer told him he'd had a great time.

Little in Strohmeyer's apparently ordinary, middle-class background—his mother, Winifred, is a marketing executive; his father, John, a well-to-do real estate investor—seems to account for the callousness of the murder of which he is accused. When a Los Angeles TV station aired the surveillance tape on May 26, several stunned classmates recognized him and told their parents, who tipped off police. Two days later, Strohmeyer was arrested. (Cash, who turned himself in, was released and has not been charged in the killing.) Jean Matz, a neighbor of the Strohmeyers', was shocked. "The mother was working all the time. She is very successful," Matz says. "[John] ran the house." Once a top student and volleyball player at Woodrow Wilson High School, Strohmeyer dropped off the team two months ago and, friends say, began losing weight. His grades had plummeted. Volleyball coach John Crutchfield suspected he was using methamphetamines, but Strohmeyer denied it. Around the same time, his father threw him out of the house—for disregarding curfew, police say—though he was living at home again prior to the crime. "He would drink too much at parties to impress people," says one classmate. "Most of the time he seemed nice, but he could get obnoxious." And there was one other hint of a darker side. A friend, Andy Edling, says that earlier this year, Strohmeyer had showed him an extensive collection of pornographic photos culled from the Internet. "What struck me most was the little children," Edling says. "I thought it was gross, and he just laughed."

Daphne Abdela, 15
Christopher Vasquez, 15

For all the thousands of New Yorkers who venture into Manhattan's Central Park by day, few are aware of the hidden world that flourishes in the park after dark. That's when teenagers like 15-year-old Daphne Abdela, daughter of a millionaire businessman, come in their Tommy Hilfiger jackets and baggy pants to share the night with other would-be rebels in an odd subculture of privileged kids playing "gangstas."

On May 22 the playacting stopped; now, Abdela and her new boyfriend, Christopher Vasquez, 15, stand accused of one of the grisliest crimes in recent New York history. Police say Vasquez attacked Michael McMorrow, a 44-year-old real estate agent with whom the two had been drinking, stabbing him 30 times, almost cutting off his nose and a hand. Then, Abdela allegedly told police, she instructed Vasquez "to gut" McMorrow so "it would sink" when they heaved his body into a lake.

Since their arraignment on murder charges, a portrait has emerged of two troubled teens, adrift and desperately seeking acceptance. Abdela was known as a quiet rich kid who got loud once she started drinking. "She always tried to act like she was from a bad neighborhood," says a friend. Vasquez, meanwhile, slight and bespectacled, attended the exclusive Beekman School but hoped to prove his toughness by joining a gang. A longtime friend says that in the past year, Vasquez suddenly changed. "He was never in school," he says. "He punched my friend in the face at this party...for no reason."

Both teens have a long history of emotional problems. Vasquez was taking Zoloft, an antidepressant, and Lorazepam, an antianxiety drug. And Abdela has undergone treatment for her drinking. Clearly her parents—Angelo, an Israeli-born top executive in an international food company, and Catherine, a French-born former model—had an inkling she was once again heading for trouble. Only one week before McMorrow's murder, they had withdrawn her from the competitive Jesuit-run Loyola School she attended and wait-listed her at the Day Top Village drug treatment center. Still, friends and teachers of both teens find the violence of the crime unfathomable. "If you're looking for some pattern of behavior," says Richard J. Soghoian, her former headmaster, "it's just not there. In fairness, it's not."

Alex Baranyi, 18
David Anderson, 18

In Bellevue, Wash., a comfortable Seattle suburb, it's easy to miss the pockets of despair amid the prosperity. Yet the likes of Alex Baranyi are more common than some would admit. Baranyi, now 18, whose parents had separated when he was 8, had been taken to Pennsylvania by his father, Alex Sr., a software consultant, then sent back to Washington to live with his mother, Patricia, an educational assistant. Last November, Baranyi and his best friend, David Anderson, 18, who had left home and moved in with friends, dropped out of high school. At night they hung out with other kids at a local bowling alley and at a Denny's, where they would sit drinking coffee and killing time.

The void in their lives was filled with fantasy games. In recent years, Baranyi and Anderson had become followers of so-called goth—for gothic—subculture, in which devotees dress in black and wear white makeup to give themselves a spectral look. Baranyi was also a fan of Highlander, a TV series about an immortal sword-wielding hero; he owned a sword collection himself and talked often of death. "Sometimes I thought he might be sort of suicidal," says Dawn Kindschi, 17, an acquaintance who had filed a complaint against Baranyi last year after he allegedly beat her.

Despite his antisocial appearance, that was Baranyi's only serious brush with the law—until this year. On Jan. 5 the body of Kimberly Ann Wilson, 20, was found in a Bellevue park. She had been clubbed with a baseball bat and strangled. When police went to the Wilson home to deliver the news, they found Kim's parents, William, 52, and Rose, 46, and her sister Julia, 17, bludgeoned and stabbed to death.

Acting on a tip, police brought Baranyi in for questioning. He allegedly confessed to murdering Kim, a friend of Anderson's, then to killing her family in the belief they might have known she was meeting them. Later, authorities arrested Anderson as a partner in the crime. The choice of Kim Wilson as victim may have been arbitrary. Police say Baranyi told them he simply wanted to kill someone because he was "in a rut." According to King County prosecutor Norm Maleng, evidence suggests that Baranyi and Anderson, who will go on trial in October, had committed the murders "for the sheer experience of killing." To Kevin Wulff, principal at Bellevue High, the local outcry over the slayings is a case of too little, too late. "We ignore [these kids] and hope they go away," says Wulff, "and then we are horrified when they commit these crimes."

Corey Arthur, 19

Kids like Corey Arthur were the reason Jonathan Levin got into teaching, so the irony was heartbreaking when New York City police arrested him for Levin's murder on June 7. Since Levin, 31, was the son of Time Warner CEO Gerald Levin, some thought his family's wealth had played a role in his death. In fact, police say Arthur, a dropout who was often absent from Levin's English class at William H. Taft High School three years before, chose his former teacher as a victim without knowing who Levin's father was.

Raised in New York's harshest neighborhoods, Arthur, 19, barely knew his own father, who died in April. An aspiring rapper, he had, by the age of 16, been charged with heroin and cocaine possession and had been sent to a boot-camp program for young offenders. "He felt nobody cared about him," says ex-girlfriend Crystal Jacobs. "The only love he got was from people [on the street]. He would tell me, 'You got to do right.' " A friend told The New York Times, "He always wanted to have money, but he never wanted to get a job."

Levin had a reputation for helping students in need. According to police, he was at his modest Manhattan apartment on May 30 when Arthur phoned asking to see him. Police say Arthur and Montoun Hart, 25 (who had seven arrests on his record), went to Levin's place late that afternoon and tortured him with a knife until he revealed his PIN number; they also say Arthur killed Levin with a bullet to the head and that $800 was withdrawn from his account at a nearby ATM machine.

Police began an intensive pursuit that ended when one of Arthur's ex-girlfriends turned him in. Charged with first-degree murder, Arthur could face the death penalty.

Amy Grossberg, 18
Brian Peterson, 19

To their parents and neighbors in the suburban enclave of Wyckoff, N.J., Amy Grossberg and Brian Peterson are simply a couple of kids who got into trouble, then made a tragic mistake. Of course the "mistake" the then 18-year-old sweethearts are accused of making involved nothing less than the murder of their newborn son and the depositing of his body in a Dumpster outside a Delaware motel last Nov. 12. Nevertheless "there's enormous support for the couple," says Joyce Harper, owner of a Wyckoff toy store where Peterson often buys Beanie Babies for Grossberg.

In an apparent attempt to explain themselves nationwide, Grossberg and her parents, Sonye and Alan, appeared on ABC's 20/20 on June 6 with interviewer Barbara Walters. "I would never hurt anything or anybody, especially something that could come from me," said Amy. Her mother, an interior designer (her husband is a furniture store owner), praised Amy's "very special" relationship with Peterson, who works part-time for his parents' wholesale video sales business and sees Amy weekly. Though Amy said nothing about her pregnancy all summer while she was home, and her parents were apparently unaware of it, Sonye characterized her relationship with her daughter as very close. "She's always so giving and caring," she said of Amy, who volunteers as an art teacher for children at Wyckoff's Temple Beth Rishon. "I can't believe that people don't see that about her."

What many viewers thought they saw instead was the Grossbergs' apparent detachment from a deeply disturbing crime. While defense lawyers argue that mitigating circumstances will become clear in court, Jerry Capone, a Wilmington, Del., attorney who represents many disadvantaged clients, says he is especially alarmed by teenagers like Grossberg and Peterson. "These kids from strong family backgrounds should have the proper moral background," he says. "That really frightens me. It means this lack of respect for human life cuts across all economic classes."

Contributors:Maria Eftimiades, Susan Christian Goulding, Anthony Duignan-Cabrera, Don Campbell, Jane Sims Podesta.

MORE FROM THIS ARTICLE

SUBURBAN NIGHTMARE New Jersey sweethearts Amy Grossberg and Brian Peterson stand accused of killing their baby, then placing his body in a Dumpster

LOST CHILD Melissa Drexler left her newborn in a trash can, then danced at her senior prom

DEADLY GAME Jeremy Strohmeyer allegedly killed a little girt playing hide-and-seek

PARK TERROR Christopher Vasquez is charged with knifing a man, then gutting him on orders from Daphne Abdela

ON A WHIM Alex Baranyi and David Anderson may have killed for the thrill of it

BROKEN TRUST Corey Arthur is accused of preying on his former teacher Jonathan Levin, killed for his bank card and PIN number

IN DENIAL For months, Amy Grossberg hid the pregnancy that ended with the death of her baby

[admin]

Why the Young Kill
by Sharon Begley
Newsweek
May 2, 1999

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-- Body Count: Moral Poverty ... And How to Win America's War Against Crime and Drugs, by William J. Bennett, John J. Dilulio, Jr., John P. Walters

The temptation, of course, is to seize on one cause, one single explanation for Littleton, and West Paducah, and Jonesboro and all the other towns that have acquired iconic status the way "Dallas" or "Munich" did for earlier generations. Surely the cause is having access to guns. Or being a victim of abuse at the hands of parents or peers. Or being immersed in a culture that glorifies violence and revenge. But there isn't one cause. And while that makes stemming the tide of youth violence a lot harder, it also makes it less of an unfathomable mystery. Science has a new understanding of the roots of violence that promises to explain why not every child with access to guns becomes an Eric Harris or a Dylan Klebold, and why not every child who feels ostracized, or who embraces the Goth esthetic, goes on a murderous rampage. The bottom line: you need a particular environment imposed on a particular biology to turn a child into a killer.

It should be said right off that attempts to trace violence to biology have long been tainted by racism, eugenics and plain old poor science. The turbulence of the 1960s led some physicians to advocate psychosurgery to "treat those people with low violence thresholds," as one 1967 letter to a medical journal put it. In other words, lobotomize the civil-rights and antiwar protesters. And if crimes are disproportionately committed by some ethnic groups, then finding genes or other traits common to that group risks tarring millions of innocent people. At the other end of the political spectrum, many conservatives view biological theories of violence as the mother of all insanity defenses, with biology not merely an explanation but an excuse. The conclusions emerging from interdisciplinary research in neuroscience and psychology, however, are not so simple-minded as to argue that violence is in the genes, or murder in the folds of the brain's frontal lobes. Instead, the picture is more nuanced, based as it is on the discovery that experience rewires the brain. The dawning realization of the constant back-and-forth between nature and nurture has resurrected the search for the biological roots of violence.

Early experiences seem to be especially powerful: a child's brain is more malleable than that of an adult. The dark side of the zero-to-3 movement, which emphasizes the huge potential for learning during this period, is that the young brain also is extra vulnerable to hurt in the first years of life. A child who suffers repeated "hits" of stress--abuse, neglect, terror--experiences physical changes in his brain, finds Dr. Bruce Perry of Baylor College of Medicine. The incessant flood of stress chemicals tends to reset the brain's system of fight-or-flight hormones, putting them on hair-trigger alert. The result is the kid who shows impulsive aggression, the kid who pops the classmate who disses him. For the outcast, hostile confrontations--not necessarily an elbow to the stomach at recess, but merely kids vacating en masse when he sits down in the cafeteria--can increase the level of stress hormones in his brain. And that can have dangerous con-sequences. "The early environment programs the nervous system to make an individual more or less reactive to stress," says biologist Michael Meaney of McGill University. "If parental care is inadequate or unsupportive, the [brain] may decide that the world stinks--and it better be ready to meet the challenge." This, then, is how having an abusive parent raises the risk of youth violence: it can change a child's brain. Forever after, influences like the mean-spiritedness that schools condone or the humiliation that's standard fare in adolescence pummel the mind of the child whose brain has been made excruciatingly vulnerable to them.

In other children, constant exposure to pain and violence can make their brain's system of stress hormones unresponsive, like a keypad that has been pushed so often it just stops working. These are the kids with antisocial personalities. They typically have low heart rates and impaired emotional sensitivity. Their signature is a lack of empathy, and their sensitivity to the world around them is practically nonexistent. Often they abuse animals: Kip Kinkel, the 15-year-old who killed his parents and shot 24 schoolmates last May, had a history of this; Luke Woodham, who killed three schoolmates and wounded seven at his high school in Pearl, Miss., in 1997, had previously beaten his dog with a club, wrapped it in a bag and set it on fire. These are also the adolescents who do not respond to punishment: nothing hurts. Their ability to feel, to react, has died, and so has their conscience. Hostile, impulsive aggressors usually feel sorry afterward. Antisocial aggressors don't feel at all. Paradoxically, though, they often have a keen sense of injustices aimed at themselves.

Inept parenting encompasses more than outright abuse, however. Parents who are withdrawn and remote, neglectful and passive, are at risk of shaping a child who (absent a compensating source of love and attention) shuts down emotionally. It's important to be clear about this: in-adequate parenting short of Dickensian neglect generally has little ill effect on most children. But to a vulnerable baby, the result of neglect can be tragic. Perry finds that neglect impairs the development of the brain's cortex, which controls feelings of belonging and attachment. "When there are experiences in early life that result in an underdeveloped capacity [to form relationships]," says Perry, "kids have a hard time empathizing with people. They tend to be relatively passive and perceive themselves to be stomped on by the outside world."

These neglected kids are the ones who desperately seek a script, an ideology that fits their sense of being humiliated and ostracized. Today's pop culture offers all too many dangerous ones, from the music of Rammstein to the game of Doom. Historically, most of those scripts have featured males. That may explain, at least in part, why the murderers are Andrews and Dylans rather than Ashleys and Kaitlins, suggests Deborah Prothrow-Smith of the Harvard School of Public Health. "But girls are now 25 percent of the adolescents arrested for violent crime," she notes. "This follows the media portrayal of girl superheroes beating people up," from Power Rangers to Xena. Another reason that the schoolyard murderers are boys is that girls tend to internalize ostracism and shame rather than turning it into anger. And just as girls could be the next wave of killers, so could even younger children. "Increasingly, we're seeing the high-risk population for lethal violence as being the 10- to 14-year-olds," says Richard Lieberman, a school psychologist in Los Angeles. "Developmentally, their concept of death is still magical. They still think it's temporary, like little Kenny in 'South Park'." Of course, there are loads of empty, emotionally unattached girls and boys. The large majority won't become violent. "But if they're in a violent environment," says Perry, "they're more likely to."

There seems to be a genetic component to the vulnerability that can turn into antisocial-personality disorder. It is only a tiny bend in the twig, but depending on how the child grows up, the bend will be exaggerated or straightened out. Such aspects of temperament as "irritability, impulsivity, hyperactivity and a low sensitivity to emotions in others are all biologically based," says psychologist James Garbarino of Cornell University, author of the upcoming book "Lost Boys: Why Our Sons Turn Violent and How We Can Save Them." A baby who is unreactive to hugs and smiles can be left to go her natural, antisocial way if frustrated parents become exasperated, withdrawn, neglectful or enraged. Or that child can be pushed back toward the land of the feeling by parents who never give up trying to engage and stimulate and form a loving bond with her. The different responses of parents produce different brains, and thus behaviors. "Behavior is the result of a dialogue between your brain and your experiences," concludes Debra Niehoff, author of the recent book "The Biology of Violence." "Although people are born with some biological givens, the brain has many blank pages. From the first moments of childhood the brain acts as a historian, recording our experiences in the language of neurochemistry."

There are some out-and-out brain pathologies that lead to violence. Lesions of the frontal lobe can induce apathy and distort both judgment and emotion. In the brain scans he has done in his Fairfield, Calif., clinic of 50 murderers, psychiatrist Daniel Amen finds several shared patterns. The structure called the cingulate gyrus, curving through the center of the brain, is hyperactive in murderers. The CG acts like the brain's transmission, shifting from one thought to another. When it is impaired, people get stuck on one thought. Also, the prefrontal cortex, which seems to act as the brain's super-visor, is sluggish in the 50 murderers. "If you have violent thoughts that you're stuck on and no supervisor, that's a prescription for trouble," says Amen, author of "Change Your Brain/Change Your Life." The sort of damage he finds can result from head trauma as well as exposure to toxic substances like alcohol during gestation.

Children who kill are not, with very few exceptions, amoral. But their morality is aberrant. "I killed because people like me are mistreated every day," said pudgy, bespectacled Luke Woodham, who murdered three students. "My whole life I felt outcasted, alone." So do a lot of adolescents. The difference is that at least some of the recent school killers felt emotionally or physically abandoned by those who should love them. Andrew Golden, who was 11 when he and Mitchell Johnson, 13, went on their killing spree in Jonesboro, Ark., was raised mainly by his grandparents while his parents worked. Mitchell mourned the loss of his father to divorce.

Unless they have another source of unconditional love, such boys fail to develop, or lose, the neural circuits that control the capacity to feel and to form healthy relationships. That makes them hypersensitive to perceived injustice. A sense of injustice is often accompanied by a feeling of abject powerlessness. An adult can often see his way to restoring a sense of self-worth, says psychiatrist James Gilligan of Harvard Medical School, through success in work or love. A child usually lacks the emotional skills to do that. As one killer told Garbarino's colleague, "I'd rather be wanted for murder than not wanted at all."

That the Littleton massacre ended in suicide may not be a coincidence. As Michael Carneal was wrestled to the ground after killing three fellow students in Paducah in 1997, he cried out, "Kill me now!" Kip Kinkel pleaded with the schoolmates who stopped him, "Shoot me!" With suicide "you get immortality," says Michael Flynn of John Jay College of Criminal Justice. "That is a great feeling of power for an adolescent who has no sense that he matters."

The good news is that understanding the roots of violence offers clues on how to prevent it. The bad news is that ever more children are exposed to the influences that, in the already vulnerable, can produce a bent toward murder. Juvenile homicide is twice as common today as it was in the mid-1980s. It isn't the brains kids are born with that has changed in half a generation; what has changed is the ubiquity of violence, the easy access to guns and the glorification of revenge in real life and in entertainment. To deny the role of these influences is like denying that air pollution triggers childhood asthma. Yes, to develop asthma a child needs a specific, biological vulnerability. But as long as some children have this respiratory vulnerability--and some always will--then allowing pollution to fill our air will make some children wheeze, and cough, and die. And as long as some children have a neurological vulnerability--and some always will--then turning a blind eye to bad parenting, bullying and the gun culture will make other children seethe, and withdraw, and kill.

[admin]

Time for Bill Bennett to Sit Down
by David Borden
Executive Director
stopthedrugwar.org
May 9, 2003

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This week's news of self-appointed virtue czar William Bennett's multi-million dollar dalliance with high-stakes gambling appalled and amused. Bennett's conservative Christian allies were unhappy because they consider gambling a sin; doubtless many others who don't take a moral view on the issue but are concerned about the misfortunes attending compulsive gambling were also negatively impressed by the sheer scale of it.

Critics of Bennett's moralizing were entertained by the hypocrisy -- and not for the first time. The former education secretary and drug czar -- whose malevolent drug and education protege John Walters is the current drug czar -- seems to frequently indulge in vices lying outside the focus of his rhetoric of the day, ceasing only after they are exposed. While pontificating as drug czar on the evils of drugs, including marijuana, and the need to severely punish drug users, he continued to smoke cigarettes until it was noted in the media. While Bennett's alcohol consumption has not yet drawn significant scrutiny, stories abound in private circles of his taste for mixed drinks, not only for dinner or parties, but in the morning and at other eyebrow-raising hours.

Now that his excessive gambling habits have been aired in the media, Bennett promises never to gamble again. "I have done too much gambling, and this is not an example I wish to set," he wrote in a statement released for the benefit of conservative organizations upset by the news. Still, he couldn't help but defend the success of his gambling financially -- Bennett claims to have won more than he's lost over time, telling magazines "you don't see what I walk away with."

That seems unlikely -- casinos are designed to make a profit, which means the more you gamble, the more certain you are to ultimately lose money. That's why the casinos were happy to provide Bennett with free hotel rooms and limousine rides worth tens of thousands of dollars, according to reports. Even if he did make money, as he said, he was statistically likely to fall that much further if he kept going.

But using Bennett's own logic, making that comment may be an even bigger sin than the gambling itself. Among Bennett's ideological notions as drug czar was the idea that casual drug users are a bigger problem than addicts -- he's said they should go to prison for long periods of time -- because their existence sends the message that drugs can be used safely, thereby encouraging others to use drugs.

Now I don't happen to believe casual drug users have that effect or that the kind of harm that Bennett is suggesting results from it if they do; I could be wrong, but I know of no evidence to indicate it. I do, however, consider it entirely possible that tales of success in gambling could encourage others to gamble, some of whom would develop serious problems. That could also be untrue; only a sociological study would tell us one way or the other. But certainly it's not less likely on the surface than Bennett's claim about the effect of casual drug users. Yet Bennett was willing to tell a national media outlet he had won enough to offset a loss of millions of dollars, revealing that information to millions of potential gamblers.

Not a great move for a professional punishment advocate. Maybe it's time for Bill Bennett to walk off the stage and sit down.

[admin]

Blacks Were Targeted for CIA Cocaine: It Can Be Proven
by Michael C. Ruppert
January 28, 1999
(© 1999 From The Wilderness Publications and Michael C. Ruppert at http://www.copvcia.com.

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For a long time, many people have believed that African-Americans were targeted by the Central Intelligence Agency to receive the cocaine which decimated black communities in the 1980s. It was, until now, widely accepted that the case could not be proven because of two fallacious straw obstacles to that proof. Both lie smack dab in the misuse of the word "crack" and that is why, in my lectures, I have strenuously objected to the term "CIA crack".

First, it cannot and probably never will be established that CIA had anything to do with the first creation of crack cocaine. Chemically, that problem could have been solved as a test question for anyone with a BS in chemistry. The answer: add water and baking soda to cocaine hydrochloride powder and cook on a stove. A study of the literature (including articles I wrote 14 years ago for The U.S. Journal of Drug and Alcohol Dependence), as opposed to, for example, that pertaining to LSD, shows no CIA involvement whatever in the genesis of crack cocaine. Also, there has never been any evidence provided that CIA facilitated the transport or sale of crack itself. What is beyond doubt is that CIA was directly responsible for the importation of tons of powdered cocaine into the U.S. and the protected delivery of that cocaine into the inner cities.

Another obstacle has been the fact that CIA imported so much cocaine that, even if every black man, woman and child in the country had been using it, they could not have used all of what CIA brought in. Ricky Ross, the celebrated dealer of Gary Webb's Dark Alliance, sold approximately four tons of cocaine during his roughly five years in business. Yet one CIA ring, that of Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo and Rafael Caro-Quintero, was moving four tons a month. And that was only a fraction of the total CIA operation.

Leaving the unsupportable arguments aside, is there a supportable case that CIA directly intended for African-Americans to receive the cocaine which it knew would be turned into crack cocaine and which it knew would prove so addictive as to destroy entire communities? The answer is absolutely, yes.

And the key to proving that CIA intended for blacks to receive the drugs which virtually destroyed their communities lies in the twofold approach, of proving that they brought the drugs in and interfered with law enforcement - AND that, by virtue of CIA's relationships with the academic and medical communities, they knew exactly what the end result would be. Knowing that, we then have a mountain of proof, especially since the release of volume II of the CIA's Inspector General's Report (10/98) that the CIA specifically intended and achieved a desired result.

For anyone not familiar with the ways in which CIA studies and manipulates emerging social and political trends I cannot encourage strongly enough a reading of The Secret Team by L. Fletcher Prouty, Col., USAF (ret.).

This article is a start, a beginning on the painful work that needs to be done to build a class-action lawsuit. Such a suit, by necessity, will have to include room for all the whites, Asians and Latinos who also fell prey to cocaine addiction. But this article should convince any reader that the argument is solid - and winnable. I thank Gary Webb and Orange County Weekly reporter Nick Schou for giving me the missing pieces I had waited nineteen years to find.

As a budding LAPD narcotics investigator I was selected in 1976 to attend a two-week DEA training school in Las Vegas. The diploma I received from that school, approximately 30% larger than the one I received from UCLA, hangs above my desk to this day. At that school I was given the official position of the DEA and the government, which was that cocaine was less addictive and less harmful than marijuana. I had only made one arrest for cocaine, a heroin addict who liked speed balls (heroin and cocaine mixed), and I had seen it less than a half dozen times in my life.

One of those times was right after my fiance Nordica D'Orsay, a CIA agent, had broken her ankle in the summer of 1976. Before I could take her to the emergency room she had to make some urgent calls from a pay phone equipped with the then new touch-tone technology. Our home phone was monitored, she said. Having broken both ankle bones she was in severe pain. She went into her purse and produced a paper bindle filled with a white crystalline powder. She rolled a dollar bill and snorted the powder. Her people, she said, recommended it to treat pain when an agent was wounded or over-tired and needed extra strength. Once she ingested what was in the bindle we delayed for about an hour while she made the urgent phone calls from a gas station. Only then was I permitted to take her to the hospital. Her ankle had swollen to the size of a grapefruit. She came out five hours later with a cast from her toes to her crotch. Who was I to question the CIA?

That was the only time I was ever aware of her in physical possession of cocaine. But it was not the only time she ever talked about it.

In 1979 Congress held rushed hearings into the perils of cocaine and was told, time and again by expert after expert that cocaine was not a problem because it was not seriously addictive, too expensive and not easy to find. The hearings, chaired by Republican Congressman Tennyson Guyer in the House Select Committee on Narcotics Abuse and Control did not live up to Guyer's hopes of finding a devil in the drug cocaine.

"Witness after witness trooped up to the microphone to tell Congress that cocaine was not only a relatively safe drug, but so rare that it could hardly be called a nuisance, much less the menace Guyer was advertising." (Webb - p24). Ron Siegel, PhD of UCLA's Neuropsychiatric Institute (NPI) had written in an earlier monograph, "The rediscovery of cocaine in the seventies was unavoidable because its stimulating and pleasure-causing properties reinforce the American character with its initiative, its energy, its restless activity and its boundless optimism." (Webb - p19).

Siegel, one of the world's leading experts on drug abuse had, however, written a February, 1979 article for The New England Journal of Medicine which warned of a growing trend toward the smoking of cocaine (freebase, not rock) in the western United States. He traced the origins of freebasing back to 1974 in the San Francisco Bay area. He, like others, noted that smoking was a much more effective and powerful way to ingest cocaine because the surface area of the lungs absorbed the drug more rapidly, more efficiently and in larger quantities. He cautioned that smoking cocaine was also many times more addictive than snorting. Yet Siegel concluded, "All in all the long term negative effects of cocaine use were consistently overshadowed by the long term positive benefits," (Webb - pp. 31-33).

The witnesses testifying before congress included the heads of the Drug Enforcement Administration, that National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) and a host of medical and psychiatric experts. The conclusion: cocaine was not a problem.

[NOTE: My sixteen years in 12 Step recovery from alcoholism and my work with scores of recovering alcoholics and addicts belies the fact that powdered cocaine can be, in and of itself, extremely destructive and addictive.]

Only one man, Dr. Robert Byck of Yale University was insistent that trouble was coming and it was BIG trouble. Byck was a professor of psychiatry and pharmacology at Yale Medical School. He began his testimony by stating, "What I would like to talk to you about for the most part is the importance of telling the truth. We have given a great deal of cocaine to many individuals and find it to be a most unremarkable drug."

But, according to Webb, "Byck told the Committee that he'd hesitated for a long time about coming forward with the information and was still reluctant to discuss the matter at a public hearing. 'Usually, when things like this are reported, the media advertises them, and this attention has been a problem with cocaine all along.' The information Byck had was known to only a handful of drug researchers around the world.

"For about a year, a Peruvian police psychiatrist named Dr. Raul Jeri had been insisting that wealthy drug users in Lima were being driven insane by cocaine. A psychiatrist in Bolivia, Dr. Nils Noya, began making similar claims shortly thereafter." What had been discovered was an addiction so overwhelming that middle and upper class students and middle class wage earners in Peru and Bolivia had abandoned every aspect of a normal human life, including eating, drinking, personal hygiene to the point of defecating in clothes that would remain unchanged for days, family and shelter in the pursuit of "basuco". (Webb - pp25-30).

Basuco, a sticky paste, was the first-stage product in the refinement of coca leaves into powder. Although frequently mixed with a cesspool of toxic waste such as gasoline, kerosene and other chemicals, the pharmacological effects of smoking basuco are identical to the effects of smoking crack cocaine which became popular in the US ten years later. So intense was the addiction that desperate South American psychiatrists had resorted to bilateral anterior cyngulotomies (lobotomies) to stop the addiction (Ruppert 3). But even these drastic measures resulted in a relapse rate of between 50-80% (Webb - p36) (Ruppert 2). Yale medical student David Paly, working under Dr. Byck, recalled a 1978 conversation with his mentor. "The substance of my conversation with Byck was that if this ever hits the U.S., we're in deep trouble." (Webb - p30)

Byck traveled to Peru to attend a symposium on cocaine with Siegel and other experts in 1979. Later he obtained police permits and federal grants to begin intensive research into cocaine smoking (Webb - p 31). The CIA routinely monitors overseas travels of U.S academics and the purposes of their travels. Since the Nixon Administration, emerging drug trends in producing countries had been a mandate of CIA collection efforts. When law enforcement grants, approvals and funding crossed international boundaries, the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA) and several special units within CIA were automatically notified. Here, we begin to see that CIA must have been well aware of the effects of basuco. The CIA's well-documented role in providing training, assistance and advice to Latin American law enforcement agencies guarantees that CIA was collecting intelligence on the destructiveness of cocaine smoking as soon as it began to be a problem. (Colby, Prouty). That was as far back as 1974. (Webb - p33).

By the time the government was compelled to acknowledge that cocaine smoking had reached the U.S., and that it was having a devastating effect, the experts, including Siegel and Byck, who was now warning of an epidemic of near biblical proportions, encountered nothing but resistance from the government.

According to Webb "Byck said the Food and Drug Administration shut down attempts to do any serious research on addiction or treatment, refusing to approve grant requests or research proposals and withholding government permits necessary to run experiments with controlled substances. 'The FDA almost totally road blocked our getting anything done. They insisted that they had total control over whether we could use a form of cocaine for experimental purposes, and without a so-called IND [an Investigation of New Drug permit] we couldn't go ahead with any cocaine experiments. And they wouldn't give us an IND.

"'Why not? Once you get into the morass of government, you never understand exactly who is doing what to whom and why.'" (Webb - p 37)

Again, to understand how CIA infiltrates various government agencies including the FDA, The Forest Service and the Postal Service I recommend Prouty and From The Wilderness (Dec. 1998).

What was Ron Siegel's experience? According to Webb, "When Siegel, under U.S. Government contract, finished a massive report on the history and literature of cocaine smoking, he couldn't get the government to publish it." (Webb - p37). This writer interviewed Ron Siegel a number of times in the mid 1980s and what I learned was that all of his studies had shown that "rock" smoking, as it was then called, was, in effect, the bubonic plague of drug abuse.

Between 1984 and 1987 I served as the West Coast Correspondent for The U.S. Journal of Drug and Alcohol Dependence. During that time I had a number of occasions to interview some of the world's leading experts on drug abuse and rock cocaine. They included Dr. Louis "Joly" West, Dr. Sidney Cohen and Ron Siegel. All were a part of UCLA's Neurospychiatric Institute (NPI) which is a world-renowned facility that includes among its specialties drug abuse research. NPI is also jointly funded by the RAND Corporation, which was a creation of the CIA and the U.S. Air Force. How tight is the relationship between NPI and RAND? A check of NPI's home page on the Internet (http://www.hsrcenter.org/program) reveals that 5 of 19 faculty scholars and 19 out of 54 current investigators at NPI come from the RAND Corporation.

A check of the RAND Corporation's home page (http://www.rand.org) leads to the following quote: "RAND's research agenda has always been shaped by the priorities of the nation. With roots in the Cold War competition with the Soviet Union, the early defense related agenda evolved -- in concert with the nation's attention -- to encompass such diverse subject areas as space, economic, social and political affairs overseas; and the direct role of government in social and economic problem solving at home."

I remember when I was as a young boy, that my father, who worked on CIA related projects for Martin-Marietta Corp, met frequently with people from the RAND Corporation. In fact, my first boyhood crush was on the daughter of a RAND executive. It was no small matter of pride in my family that RAND was known to be part of the CIA.

As further corroboration for RAND's connection to both UCLA and the CIA, I met with UCLA Political Science professor Paul Jabber in early 1982. It was Paul who confirmed for me that the National Security Council and CIA had approved the use of heroin smuggled through Kurdestan, as a means of (re)arming the Kurds to fight against Saddam Hussein in 1975. This was the operation which, when I discovered it, ended my LAPD career in 1978. (For further on this see my written Senate testimony at http://www.copvcia.com.)

Paul Jabber had been a RAND consultant and an NSC/CIA consultant throughout the Carter Administration. He was still a RAND consultant when I met him at UCLA.

A search of retired CIA officer Ralph McGehee's excellent CIABase (http://www.ciabase.com) reveals 73 pages of annotated references to CIA's longstanding relations with academia. Two portions of those printouts are telling. One, a response to a Freedom of Information Act request, turned up more than 900 pages of documents relating to CIA contracts with the University of California. Another quote indicates that, circa 1957-77, "Docs released under FOIA reveal long history contacts between CIA and University California. Activities cover wide range cooperation between several of its 9 campuses including: UC Vice Presidents 2-week tour with CIA in which he advised Agency relating to student unrest, recruiting UC students, Academic cover for Professors doing research for the CIA, and improving CIA's image on campuses; a series of CIA sponsored seminars in Berkeley and other sites for professors to share info with CIA; providing a steady flow of CIA material on China and the USSR to CIA-approved professors."

The CIA connections grow deeper and more ominous. Louis "Joly" West, who died this month, served for many years as Director of NPI. The documentation from government records is voluminous that West was a pioneer for CIA in the development of and experimentation with LSD in the 1950's and 1960s. The first time I met him a group of doctors were joking about how he had "administered 10,000 micrograms of LSD to an enraged elephant for the CIA. The elephant died. I recall one doctor quipping, "I sure am glad it was a communist elephant!"

One last note before we move on: Joly West, is extremely well documented from CIA's own records as having been one of the principal researchers in CIA's MK-ULTRA program which used drugs and torture to produce mind-control assassins and other useful servants. I recall one telling discussion with NPI's sympathetic Dr. Sid Cohen who knew of my past struggles against CIA. He told me, "CIA pretty much knows everything we do at NPI. It was set up that way from the start." Cohen was qualified to speak on this subject. He had been a consultant for the State Department, the U.S. Army and the World Health Organization.

If that was the case, and if NPI housed some of the world's foremost experts on crack cocaine, it is impossible not to believe that CIA didn't know what UCLA, RAND and the governments of Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia knew.

Until the book Dark Alliance and an absolutely fabulous series of articles appeared in The Orange County Weekly by reporter Nick Schou, I had been unconvinced that CIA had directly targeted African-Americans. I believed it in my heart, but I had never seen the evidence to prove it. In August 1996, right after the Webb stories appeared, I was a call-in guest on a number of radio talk shows with Gary, and I recall stating that I knew nothing about CIA selling crack cocaine on street corners, but I knew a great deal about CIA bringing it in on airplanes and boats. It was not until Schou's series and Webb's book appeared that I was not only convinced, I was certain that CIA had targeted blacks.

It is beyond the scope of this article to describe just how well Gary Webb used court records, DEA, Justice Department, CIA and L.A. County Sheriff's records to establish that the drug dealing operations of Danilo Blandon and Norwin Meneses were sanctioned and protected by both DEA and the CIA. The revelations in both volumes of the CIA's Inspector General's reports, as covered in From The Wilderness, corroborate much of Gary's work.

In particular, Webb documented how Ricky Ross always seemed to avoid arrest at the peak of his career. Danilo Blandon's direct connections to CIA assets and agents are now a given. Let's look at what Ricky Ross had to say about Blandon. "All I knew was like, back in LA he [Blandon] would always tell me when they was going to raid my houses. The police always thought I had somebody working for the police.

"And he was always giving me tips like, 'Man don't go back over to that house no more,' or 'Don't go to this house over here.'" (Webb - p179)

The police told of serious frustrations at trying to arrest Ross. The most telling event was when a joint task force of Sheriffs, LAPD and other agencies set out to raid fourteen different locations in 1986. All of them had been cleaned out by the time the surprise raids hit. (Webb - p310-321). Only one location, the home of Ronald Lister, turned up anything of value -- government documents. Both Webb and Schou tied Lister directly to CIA and Contra support operations and to Scott Weekly, an Annapolis classmate of Oliver North. Subsequent investigations, lasting into 1997, not only showed evidence of Weekly's links to CIA and DIA, including FBI wiretaps of his phone conversations, but also established links between Weekly, North and the staff of Vice President George Bush (Webb - pp320-323). Sheriff's deputies and LAPD officers were amazed and knew full well that they were investigating a CIA operation, which was being protected. Hundreds of pages of government documents mysteriously disappeared from Sheriff's custody and Blandon never got arrested. Neither did Ricky Ross until much later.

One of the heroes of Dark Alliance, Bell PD detective Jerry Guzetta, summed up all of the police experience in trying to arrest Ricky Ross and Danillo Blandon. "Every policeman who ever got close to Blandon was either told to back off, investigated by their department, forced to retire, or indicted," (Webb - p375).

In early November 1996, two weeks before I confronted CIA Director John Deutch at Locke High School in Watts, I attended another congressional town hall meeting in Compton hosted by Congresswoman Juanita Millender-McDonald. At that meeting, before I took the microphone to talk about CIA drug dealing, I had an opportunity to talk in private with Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Bromwich and the commander of LAPD's Narcotics Group, Commander (now Deputy Chief) Gregg Berg. I told both men exactly how CIA protected their drug operations.

At the time, all police agencies belonged to an organization known as the Narcotics Intelligence Network (NIN). Any law enforcement agency conducting an investigation of a drug trafficker must first run the suspect's name through a computer search to find out if anyone else has an ongoing investigation of that suspect. Such an arrangement is necessary to prevent one agency from arresting another agency's undercover operatives. What the CIA does is to use its contract agents or deep covers within local police departments to constantly monitor NIN, which has to be notified of pending raids. The CIA also uses its deep covers within police departments to monitor investigations and warn CIA assets in time to avoid arrest.

How did I know this? Ten years before the Ricky Ross raids, in 1976, my CIA agent fiance had told me this was how "her people" protected certain things. The job she was recruiting me for, which I refused to take, was to work myself, with a little help, into a position where I would be the one doing the monitoring -- and the warning. She once told me that she had asked "her people" if she could give me information which would lead directly to a Los Angeles arrest of a major dealer. They wouldn't let her because I had already told her that I would never overlook illegal narcotics. The unspoken message was that if I wouldn't overlook when asked, I couldn't be given a "freebie".

Lister, an ex-policeman who served as a bodyguard/courier for Blandon delivered both drugs and money while enjoying CIA protection. He and Blandon delivered drugs and guns all over South Central. Danillo Blandon even sold guns to Ricky Ross' immediate entourage. Ollie Newell, Ross's partner, was able to purchase a .50 caliber machine gun on a tripod (Webb p 188). This is a pure military weapon known as a "Ma Deuce," and something which is not obtainable at your local surplus store.

Webb and Schou also documented that the police and the FBI knew that Lister and Blandon were delivering not only guns but sophisticated radio equipment (which enabled the monitoring of secure police frequencies) to Ross and the gangs (Webb - pp. 179-193) (Schou). I knew then that the whole operation was protected from start to finish by the Central Intelligence Agency. Why? If you walk into a room filled with policemen and yell "Anybody want to take some drugs off the street?" maybe half the room will stand up. But if you walk into the same room and yell, "Anybody want to take some guns off the street?" you will be crushed in the ensuing stampede. Only the federal government, and especially the CIA, have the horsepower to make cops stay away from arresting those who put guns on the streets.

Nick Schou demonstrated how Lister, through arms dealer Tim La France and Weekly (who is himself a firearms master), was working on Agency contracts serious enough to secure him end-user certificates from the State Department to export weapons in a matter of days, when the process usually requires months. Indirect confirmation of these relationships was established when the FBI denied release of some of Lister's documents under provisions of the National Security Act (Webb - p 193).

As documented by phone records and telephone calls placed to the Fluor Corporation in Irvine, California by Lister's associates, Ron Lister held frequent meetings with a Fluor Vice President named Bill Nelson (Webb - pp191-193) (Schou). Bill Nelson was a retired Deputy Director of Operations (DDO) of the CIA who had personally overseen the destabilization and overthrow of Chile's Salvador Allende in the 1970s. The DDO is the second most powerful position in the CIA, and is directly in charge of all covert operations. The Fluor Corporation, according to confidential sources, was a major multi-national corporation which regularly provided services and cover for the CIA over a period of roughly fifteen years.

It is inconceivable that a courier and contractor like Lister could have held regular meetings with a retired DDO in Southern California unless he was protected at the highest levels. One good narcotics detective could have tailed Lister to one meeting which would have been enough to totally compromise the Agency -- especially if it had occurred just after Lister had transported twenty kilos of cocaine or a trunk load of sub-machine guns. Conversely, it is also inconceivable that a retired DDO would meet with anybody unless he knew everything in the world there was to know about that person beforehand. The Agency just does not work that way.

A former CIA officer, John Vanderwerker, confirmed to Schou that Nelson and Lister knew each other (Webb - p195).

Crack cocaine was particularly devastating for African-American communities. This was, I believe, by design. In early 1985, USC Sociologists Klein and Maxson researched the phenomenon of crack use. "One thing they were unable to explain was why crack was found only in L.A.'s black neighborhoods. 'The drug," the sociologists wrote, at least currently seems to be ethnically specific. Cocaine is found widely in the Black Community in Los Angeles, but it is almost totally absent from the Hispanic areas," (Webb - p184).

And the effects of crack use were, indeed, biblical. In 1985, 50% of the emergency room admissions in L.A were due to crack. Full-blown cocaine psychosis was occurring as soon as eight months after first use, and crack cocaine hit hardest among those African-Americans who had some college education and held steady jobs (Ruppert1&2).

I wrote in 1985. "So pervasive is the epidemic that it is threatening the political and social systems that have held black communities together in the face of cuts in social programs and rising unemployment in an already depressed economy," (Ruppert 1).

The Webster Commission, charged with finding the causes of the 1992 LA riot/insurrection, found that one of the primary causes was crack cocaine. The LA riots remain, to this day, the largest domestic insurrection since the civil war.

--------------------

Picture a jury trial for a man accused of arson. No one saw the man light the match (taught the dealers how to make the crack). Yet there is incontrovertible evidence that the man knew and had studied fire science and thus knew that by pouring gasoline onto dry wood and striking a match, that the wood building would burn. There is also incontrovertible evidence that the man brought gasoline, small bits of kindling and a person who liked to play with matches to a large building. There is also hard proof that the man, once a fire had started, deliberately interfered with fire fighters attempting to reach the blaze. Then he brought in lots more gasoline. Not only that, but the man provided the match striker with guns and radios which monitored the fire department frequencies so that he could fight off firefighters and continue lighting more fires.

As the building burned, and people died inside, our suspect attempted to cover-up for the match lighter, and interfered with law enforcement investigations into his activities. He even lied to Congress, which was alarmed by the damage and the number of deaths. And, being trusted by Congress, our suspect continued to thwart attempts to stop the fire and find the cause.

Such a man would be convicted of arson in a heartbeat.

10 April, 1985

We were tasked with flying six coolers marked "medical supplies" to San Lorenzo, Honduras. While we were flying on 9 April, Dr. Gus (General Gustavo Alverez), delivered six coolers to Dustoff operations. I opened all six coolers to check their contents. I only counted the packages of cocaine in one of the coolers. There were 110 packages. Major Hethcox, the Aviation Support Commander, sent his Administrative Officer, Lt. Willett, to Dustoff Operations to fly one leg of our flight as my co-pilot. I suspected Hethcox was curious why we were flying so much. We loaded the coolers marked "medical supplies" and headed for San Lorenzo (SLN). Upon arrival we hovered to a C-123 cargo aircraft that we had met the previous day. The C-123 was based out of El Salvador and was tasked with carrying the cargos from San Lorenzo back to El Salvador. I noticed something familiar as the C-123 pilot approached. It was Barry Seal, an old friend.

Barry was holding a jar of olives in his hand as he walked up to the chopper and greeted me. Barry had promised me weeks before in Panama, during a meeting with Harari, Noriega, and North, to see that I got some olives. I had visited the base liquor store (Class 6) at Howard Air Force Base, but it was out of olives, as was the commissary. I told him that I didn't expect "curb-service." He gave his cherub laugh and invited us to a caf‚ for a coka-cola. The crew joined us as he commandeered an Air Force truck for the short drive from the airstrip to the village.

Barry and I walked outside of the cafe so that we could talk privately. I asked Barry to level with me concerning the drugs and who was involved. I felt that Barry Seal was the only person I had met to date that I could get a straight answer out of. The following is what Barry Seal told me concerning the drugs in general and, more specifically, the destination of the drugs which we delivered to San Lorenzo on 9 and 10 April, 1985.

"The Contras needed weapons for their rebellion against the Sandinistas. When the CIA approached the Contras in the early 80's they promised total support in weapons, training, and money required to sustain the operations. This is what prompted the Nicaraguans to begin open recruiting against the Ortega-led Sandinista government. But, as time went on, the U.S. renigged on their promise to the rebels. Not only did the U.S. cut money needed for medical and food supplies for the Contra camps, but they also refused to provide the weaponry needed to stay alive. This left the Contras in a hell of a spot. William Casey met with Adolfo Colero and it was decided that the Contras would get the much needed money and weapons in exchange for cocaine. Casey put Ollie North over the project. North, at the CIAs promptings, recruited Seal to oversee delivery of the products, and a man named Ramon Navarro (Medellin Cartel) to train the Contras in the manufacturing process. Colero was the "point man" for the Contras. He dealt with Washington and others as needed. Contra leader Enrique Bermudez was tasked with getting the cocaine kitchens built and protected. Bermudez had solicited three other Contra commanders to assist in this project. Their names are Commander Fernando, Commander Franklin, and Commander Marlan. Ramon Navarro supplied the cocaine paste and raw coca leaves to the Contras. The U.S. provided the equipment. It was delivered to the camps by Chinook helicopters (CH-47) out of Ft. Campbell, Kentucky (159th Aviation Battalion). It was Barry's job to deliver the finished product and monies to destinations as dictated by Mr. North.

Barry gave me the names of his various drop points and told me to be very wary of North. "He'll give up his mamma if he has to!" was his comment concerning North's lack of honor. He also gave me the names of U.S. officials, politicians, and drug enforcement officials involved in the cocaine enterprise.

I asked him to be exact about the shipments so that I could better understand. He used the six coolers that we just delivered as his example. He said that these coolers and the coolers delivered the previous day would be taken to El Salvador. From El Salvador they would be taken to a site in Southern California. There it would be distributed in rock form called "crack." I made note of his comments and his "Boss Hog" list, as Barry called it, on the back of the flight plan concerning this specific flight. The notes were made on the evening of 10 April, 1985.



Transcription:

Delivered 6 coolers of cocaine to SLN. Met Bany Seal in C-123. Ramon Navarro was with Seal. Asked Seal what was up with the cocaine being made in contra camps. - Said it was a CIA OPN. This shipment was going to Calif to make a drug called crack. Seal said that the CIA planned to get all the niggers in the U.S. hooked on it & then throw 'em in prison. Said the $'s for the crack goes to buy weapons for the contras. Asked him who is involved -- he said it goes all the way to the white house. Said I could talk to the boss -- he'd be here (in Honduras) in a couple days. Took notes on back of AA. Msn request for RMTC. Will include with this flight plan. Msn RQ dtd 6 April.

-- The Chip Tatum Chronicles: Testimony of Government Drug Running, by Chip Tatum

_______________

SOURCES:

The Dark Alliance The Straight Dope- Between The Rock and a Hard Place by Michael C. Ruppert, The LA WEEKLY, March 8-14, 1985 (referenced as Ruppert 1).

- Rock Cocaine Hits L.A. by Michael C. Ruppert, The U.S. Journal of Drug and Alcohol Dependence, February, 1985 (referenced as Ruppert 2).

- U.S. Drug Experts Cancel S.A. Trip, by Michael C. Ruppert, The U.S. Journal of Drug and Alcohol Dependence, November, 1984 (referenced as Ruppert 3).

- Thy Will Be Done, The Conquest of the Amazon: Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil. - Gerard Colby, Harper Collins, 1995 (Referenced as Colby).

- The Secret Team (3rd Edition), L. Fletcher Prouty (1973, 1992, 1997). This book has been erased even from the Library of Congress. To my knowledge it is available only on the Internet at http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/ST (referenced as Prouty).

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"Crack King" (Freeway Ricky Ross)
by Myra Panache
© 2016

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Introduction:

Rayful Edmond, III may have introduced crack cocaine to the East Coast (Washington, D.C.) but ‘Freeway’ Ricky Ross has the distinction of introducing crack to the West Coast (Los Angeles). Ross was also the first person to cook up powdered cocaine into ‘rocks,’ he invented this process, calling it, ‘ready rock.’ Ross grossed $3 million dollars per day in drug profits despite being illiterate, he couldn’t read or write.



“CRACK KING” (FREEWAY RICKY ROSS):

Ricky Donnell Ross (pictured above) grew up poor in Troup, Texas. He and his family moved to South Central, Los Angeles.

Ross was a talented tennis player at Dorsey High in the 1970’s. His dream of a college scholarship evaporated when his coach discovered he could neither read nor write.

Ross dropped out of school and attended a trade center where he learned to bind books. To pay his bills, Ross picked up a side racket, stolen car parts. He was arrested in the late 70’s for stealing a car and had to quit the trade center while the charges were pending.

During the Christmas holidays, a friend told Ross about a jet-set drug called cocaine, the friend also told Ross that the drug was going to be the new thing and everybody was doing it. At the time, in South Central, cocaine was virtually non-existent because it was the drug of the rich and famous. Intrigued, Ross set off to find out more about this drug.

Ross got connected through a former teacher who hooked him up with a South American contact who sold Ross inexpensive amounts of cocaine.

Ross would eventually head the first cocaine ring in South Central, grossing upwards to $3 million dollars per day.

Despite being the biggest drug deal to come up from the streets of South Central, Ross had a reputation for helping people out and giving money back to the community. He also drove flashy cars and wore expensive clothes and he never got high, he didn’t drink or beat women.

He invested the money in millions of dollars worth of real estate, including houses, motels, theaters and several other businesses. His nickname ‘Freeway,’ came for the fact that he owned properties near the Harbor Freeway in Los Angeles.

Ross would set up five cookhouses, where he turned the powder into crack. The houses had huge steel vats of cocaine bubbling atop restaurant-size gas ranges.

Barry and I walked outside of the cafe so that we could talk privately. I asked Barry to level with me concerning the drugs and who was involved. I felt that Barry Seal was the only person I had met to date that I could get a straight answer out of. The following is what Barry Seal told me concerning the drugs in general and, more specifically, the destination of the drugs which we delivered to San Lorenzo on 9 and 10 April, 1985.

"The Contras needed weapons for their rebellion against the Sandinistas. When the CIA approached the Contras in the early 80's they promised total support in weapons, training, and money required to sustain the operations. This is what prompted the Nicaraguans to begin open recruiting against the Ortega-led Sandinista government. But, as time went on, the U.S. renigged on their promise to the rebels. Not only did the U.S. cut money needed for medical and food supplies for the Contra camps, but they also refused to provide the weaponry needed to stay alive. This left the Contras in a hell of a spot. William Casey met with Adolfo Colero and it was decided that the Contras would get the much needed money and weapons in exchange for cocaine. Casey put Ollie North over the project. North, at the CIAs promptings, recruited Seal to oversee delivery of the products, and a man named Ramon Navarro (Medellin Cartel) to train the Contras in the manufacturing process. Colero was the "point man" for the Contras. He dealt with Washington and others as needed. Contra leader Enrique Bermudez was tasked with getting the cocaine kitchens built and protected. Bermudez had solicited three other Contra commanders to assist in this project. Their names are Commander Fernando, Commander Franklin, and Commander Marlan. Ramon Navarro supplied the cocaine paste and raw coca leaves to the Contras. The U.S. provided the equipment. It was delivered to the camps by Chinook helicopters (CH-47) out of Ft. Campbell, Kentucky (159th Aviation Battalion). It was Barry's job to deliver the finished product and monies to destinations as dictated by Mr. North.

Barry gave me the names of his various drop points and told me to be very wary of North. "He'll give up his mamma if he has to!" was his comment concerning North's lack of honor. He also gave me the names of U.S. officials, politicians, and drug enforcement officials involved in the cocaine enterprise.

I asked him to be exact about the shipments so that I could better understand. He used the six coolers that we just delivered as his example. He said that these coolers and the coolers delivered the previous day would be taken to El Salvador. From El Salvador they would be taken to a site in Southern California. There it would be distributed in rock form called "crack." I made note of his comments and his "Boss Hog" list, as Barry called it, on the back of the flight plan concerning this specific flight. The notes were made on the evening of 10 April, 1985.



Transcription:

Delivered 6 coolers of cocaine to SLN. Met Bany Seal in C-123. Ramon Navarro was with Seal. Asked Seal what was up with the cocaine being made in contra camps. - Said it was a CIA OPN. This shipment was going to Calif to make a drug called crack. Seal said that the CIA planned to get all the niggers in the U.S. hooked on it & then throw 'em in prison. Said the $'s for the crack goes to buy weapons for the contras. Asked him who is involved -- he said it goes all the way to the white house. Said I could talk to the boss -- he'd be here (in Honduras) in a couple days. Took notes on back of AA. Msn request for RMTC. Will include with this flight plan. Msn RQ dtd 6 April.

-- The Chip Tatum Chronicles: Testimony of Government Drug Running, by Chip Tatum

Ross was being supplied with 100 kilos of cocaine a week, which was rocked up and distributed to major gangs in his area. At wholesale prices, that’s $65 million to $130 million worth of cocaine per year, depending on the going price of a kilo.

Ross expanded his empire to include: St. Louis, New Orleans, Texas, Kansas City, Oklahoma, Indiana and Seattle.

In city after city, local dealers either bought from Ross or got left behind. It didn’t make a difference to Rick what anyone else was selling if for. It would just go in and undercut himself $10,000 a key.

Before long, the supplier was giving Ross hundreds of kilos of cocaine on consignment -- sell now, pay later -- strategy that aided in the expansion of Ross’ crack empire.

In 1987, under pressure from a Task Force, Ross decided to retire from the drug trade and move to Cincinnati but he shelved these plans when he was approached and agreed to help a friend unload 13 kilos of cocaine, the friend offered the kilos to Ross for $10,000 per kilo.

Ross started during business in New York and Miami. In 1986, Ross was arrested on federal charges in Los Angeles for conspiracy to distribute cocaine in St. Louis. The case was later dismissed for lack of evidence.

In 1988, Ross allegedly attended a meeting in Kentucky, about the transportation of cocaine from Miami on an unknown date.

In 1989, the DEA tried to seize assets owned by Ross that were believed to be the proceeds of drug sales.

Ricky Ross also became the suspect in a bank robbery in Indianapolis, Indiana. A bank teller identified Ross from a photographic spread as the bank robber. The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Indiana decline to prosecute the case.

Ross was suspected of another robbery for the theft of $337,673 in jewelry from the ‘Shane Company’ in Indianapolis.

Early investigative reports found that beginning in 1987, Ross had recruited young blacks from Los Angeles to travel to Cincinnati to sell cocaine and crack on the streets. Most of these people were reported gang members. The recruits were given apartments, beepers, cocaine and instructions on how to conduct street sales by using phone booths, pagers and mopeds. The drugs were stored in the trunks of parked cars placed around the neighborhoods. In Cincinnati, Ross was known as the “Six Million Dollar Man” because people perceived that he was making a fortune.

In June 1989, ten individuals, including Ross were indicted on drug charges in Cincinnati. After Ross was arrested on state charges in Los Angeles for assault on a police officer, he was transported back to Cincinnati and held without bail, pending trial on indictment.

Ross pled guilty to the charges in Cincinnati and was sentenced to 121 months in prison and three years supervised release -- a sentence within the guideline range.

After his release, he was arrested again in 1993 on a warrant issued from Smith County, Texas, arising out of the interception of a call in 1988, which Ross agreed to supply a cousin in Tyler, Texas with two kilos of cocaine. Ross pled no contest to the Texas state charges of conspiracy to possess cocaine and was sentenced to ten years to run concurrently with his federal sentence in Ohio. He was paroled in 1994 by the state of Texas.

After his release, Ross said he hoped to head back to his old neighborhood as soon as possible and devote his life to warning youngsters about the mistakes that kept him locked up for most of the last five years. Ross was reportedly broke, having lost his drug profits to attorney fees, shaky business deals and double-crossing rivals. Ross also stated that he learned to read and write in jail.

Ross didn’t keep that promise to go clean, in 1996, Ross was sentenced to life imprisonment after being convicted of trying to purchase more than 100 kilograms of cocaine from a federal agent. The sentence was brought to a federal court of appeals where his sentence was reduced to 20 years. Ross is eligible for parole in two 2008.

Currently a movie is in pre-production based on his life, titled “Freeway” Ricky Ross. The movie is slated for a 2008 release.

Source: “Dark Alliance” series by Gary Webb

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Casual Drug Users Should Be Shot, Gates Says
by Ronald J. Ostrow
Los Angeles Times
September 06, 1990

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WASHINGTON — Casual drug users "ought to be taken out and shot," Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl F. Gates told a Senate hearing Wednesday on the first anniversary of the Bush Administration's war on drugs.

Gates, discussing his comment to the Senate Judiciary Committee, said his harsh assessment was aimed at those "who blast some pot on a casual basis" despite the illegality of the act, as opposed to hard-core addicts who are driven by their physical need for illicit drugs.

Gates, whose remark to lawmakers was reminiscent of a 1972 proposal by former Los Angeles Police Chief Edward M. Davis to hang airline hijackers at the airport, said in an interview outside the hearing that he was not being facetious.

"We're in a war," Gates said, and even casual drug use "is treason."

In Southern California, reaction to Gates' remarks was mixed.

Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner, an advocate of stronger penalties against casual drug users, said he agreed with Gates in concept, although not necessarily with his "colorful choice of language."

Los Angeles Police Lt. George V. Aliano, president of the Los Angeles Police Protective League, said that, although police officers generally agree that casual drug users should be dealt with more severely, Gates' comments were overly "severe," if not "inhuman," and reflected an attitude of "giving up" on drug users.

"There are a lot of police officers, like other people in society, whose children, brothers or sisters, may be casual users," he said. "And none of us want to see that (shooting) happen to them. We haven't given up on our people."

Ramona Ripston, director of the ACLU of Southern California, said that Gates' proposed "smoke a joint, lose your life" approach to law enforcement was "absolutely absurd" and "shows a disrespect for the entire judicial process."

In a briefing earlier in the day to mark the anniversary of the anti-drug campaign, President Bush cited "clear signs of progress" in the fight against narcotics but said that "the crisis is far from over."

Federal drug czar William J. Bennett, citing various measures of improvement, said the nation's drug scourge "is no longer getting worse, and in some very significant respects is now getting better--not victory, but success."

But Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.), the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman who led the drive to establish Bennett's office, coupled praise for the Administration's efforts to build strong public disapproval of drug use with what he sees as shortcomings in the program.

Although casual drug use "appears to be plummeting," Biden told the hearing, the nation "probably has more weekly cocaine users today than ever (and) the hard-core addict count is up and appears to continue to rise."

Biden, citing a Judiciary Committee staff assessment of the first-year effort, said the Administration has significantly under-counted weekly, or "frequent," cocaine users, contending the number is close to 2.4 million--three times the Administration's estimate.

Bennett cited several accomplishments--disruption of drug cartel operations in Latin America, indications of cocaine supply shortages such as sharply rising wholesale prices and declining purity, and a drop in cocaine-related admissions to hospital emergency rooms.

"Last year's hopeless cause is this year's revived opportunity for victory," Bennett said.

In a report on leading drug indicators issued by Bennett's office, he conceded that not all trends are encouraging. By most measures, "violent crime in the United States continues unabated," the report said, while noting that the relationship between drugs and crime "is ambiguous and complex."

"Although the wave of recent homicides across the country is commonly associated with the drug trade, many law enforcement experts speculate that rising murder rates in many cities might be due, paradoxically, to a shrinking drug market--a situation in which gangs and dealers battle one another over restricted turf and fewer customers," the paper stated.

Bennett, in his oral comments, characterized the phenomenon as "one criminal drug organization blowing another away."

Biden, whose committee has held 25 hearings on the Administration's drug strategy, suggested improvements in three areas. He said more emphasis should be placed on combatting hard-core addiction, efforts should be expanded to move the economies of Andean cocaine-growing countries away from their "drug dependency" and more support should be provided for drug education.

Biden said the Administration's strategy aims primarily at casual drug use, "but it is hard-core users that cause our crime problems and are responsible for a tremendous percentage of drug distribution."

"Getting these addicts off the street--into drug treatment or into jail, whichever is appropriate--is the only answer," Biden said.

The panel's staff report found that, over the last year, fewer than one in 10 pregnant addicts received treatment, about 300,000 more "drug babies" were born, fewer than one in seven imprisoned addicts was treated and 3.6 million criminal drug users were released without having been treated.

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'Crack baby' study ends with unexpected but clear result
by Susan FitzGerald
The Inquirer
July 22, 2013

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Jaimee Drakewood hurried in from the rain, eager to get to her final appointment at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.

Ever since her birth 23 years ago, a team of researchers has been tracking every aspect of her development - gauging her progress as an infant, measuring her IQ as a preschooler, even peering into her adolescent brain using an MRI machine.

Now, after nearly a quarter century, the federally funded study was ending, and the question the researchers had been asking was answered.

Did cocaine harm the long-term development of children like Jaimee, who were exposed to the drug in their mother's womb?

The researchers had expected the answer would be a resounding yes. But it wasn't. Another factor would prove far more critical.

A crack epidemic was raging in Philadelphia in 1989 when Hallam Hurt, then chair of neonatology at Albert Einstein Medical Center on North Broad Street, began a study to evaluate the effects of in-utero cocaine exposure on babies. In maternity wards in Philadelphia and elsewhere, caregivers were seeing more mothers hooked on cheap, smokable crack cocaine. A 1989 study in Philadelphia found that nearly one in six newborns at city hospitals had mothers who tested positive for cocaine.

Troubling stories were circulating about the so-called crack babies. They had small heads and were easily agitated and prone to tremors and bad muscle tone, according to reports, many of which were anecdotal. Worse, the babies seemed aloof and avoided eye contact. Some social workers predicted a lost generation - kids with a host of learning and emotional deficits who would overwhelm school systems and not be able to hold a job or form meaningful relationships. The "crack baby" image became symbolic of bad mothering, and some cocaine-using mothers had their babies taken from them or, in a few cases, were arrested.

It was amid that climate that Hurt organized a study of 224 near-term or full-term babies born at Einstein between 1989 and 1992 - half with mothers who used cocaine during pregnancy and half who were not exposed to the drug in utero. All the babies came from low-income families, and nearly all were African Americans.

Hurt hoped the study would inform doctors and nurses caring for cocaine-exposed babies and even guide policies for drug prevention, treatment, and follow-up interventions. But she never anticipated that the study, funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, would become one of the largest and longest-running studies of in-utero cocaine exposure.

One mother who signed up was Jaimee's mom, Karen Drakewood. She was on an all-night crack binge in a drug house near her home in the city's West Oak Lane section when she went into labor. Jaimee was born Jan. 13, 1990, weighing an even 7 pounds.

"Jaimee was beautiful when she was born. A head full of hair. She looked like a porcelain doll," Karen Drakewood, now 51, said recently in her Overbrook kitchen. "She was perfect."

But Drakewood knew looks could be deceiving.

"My worst fear was that Jaimee would be slow, mentally retarded, or something like that because of me doing drugs," she said. She agreed to enroll her baby in the cocaine study at Einstein. Drakewood promised herself that she would turn her life around for the sake of Jaimee and her older daughter, but she soon went back to smoking crack.

Hurt arrived early at Children's Hospital one morning in June to give a talk on her team's findings to coworkers. After nearly 25 years of studying the effects of cocaine and publishing or presenting dozens of findings, it wasn't easy to summarize it in a PowerPoint presentation. The study received nearly $7.9 million in federal funding over the years, as well as $130,000 from the Einstein Society.

Hurt, who had taken her team from Einstein to Children's in 2003, began her lecture with quotations from the media around the time the study began. A social worker on TV predicted that a crack baby would grow up to "have an IQ of perhaps 50." A print article quoted a psychologist as saying "crack was interfering with the central core of what it is to be human," and yet another article predicted that crack babies were "doomed to a life of uncertain suffering, of probable deviance, of permanent inferiority."

Hurt, who is also a professor of pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania, is always quick to point out that cocaine can have devastating effects on pregnancy. The drug can cause a problematic rise in a pregnant woman's blood pressure, trigger premature labor, and may be linked to a dangerous condition in which the placenta tears away from the uterine wall. Babies born prematurely, no matter the cause, are at risk for a host of medical and developmental problems. On top of that, a parent's drug use can create a chaotic home life for a child.

Hurt's study enrolled only full-term babies so the possible effects of prematurity did not skew the results. The babies were then evaluated periodically, beginning at six months and then every six or 12 months on through young adulthood. Their mothers agreed to be tested for drug use throughout the study.

The researchers consistently found no significant differences between the cocaine-exposed children and the controls. At age 4, for instance, the average IQ of the cocaine-exposed children was 79.0 and the average IQ for the nonexposed children was 81.9. Both numbers are well below the average of 90 to 109 for U.S. children in the same age group. When it came to school readiness at age 6, about 25 percent of children in each group scored in the abnormal range on tests for math and letter and word recognition.

"We went looking for the effects of cocaine," Hurt said. But after a time "we began to ask, 'Was there something else going on?' "

While the cocaine-exposed children and a group of nonexposed controls performed about the same on tests, both groups lagged on developmental and intellectual measures compared to the norm. Hurt and her team began to think the "something else" was poverty.

As the children grew, the researchers did many evaluations to tease out environmental factors that could be affecting their development. On the upside, they found that children being raised in a nurturing home - measured by such factors as caregiver warmth and affection and language stimulation - were doing better than kids in a less nurturing home. On the downside, they found that 81 percent of the children had seen someone arrested; 74 percent had heard gunshots; 35 percent had seen someone get shot; and 19 percent had seen a dead body outside - and the kids were only 7 years old at the time. Those children who reported a high exposure to violence were likelier to show signs of depression and anxiety and to have lower self-esteem.

More recently, the team did MRI scans on the participants' brains. Some research has suggested that gestational cocaine exposure can affect brain development, especially the dopamine system, which in turn can harm cognitive function. An area of concern is "executive functioning," a set of skills involved in planning, problem-solving, and working memory.

The investigators found one brain area linked to attention skills that differed between exposed and nonexposed children, but they could not find any clinically significant effect on behavioral tests of attention skills.

Drug use did not differ between the exposed and nonexposed participants as young adults. About 42 percent used marijuana and three tested positive for cocaine one time each.

The team has kept tabs on 110 of the 224 children originally in the study. Of the 110, two are dead - one shot in a bar and another in a drive-by shooting - three are in prison, six graduated from college, and six more are on track to graduate. There have been 60 children born to the 110 participants.

The years of tracking kids have led Hurt to a conclusion she didn't see coming.

"Poverty is a more powerful influence on the outcome of inner-city children than gestational exposure to cocaine," Hurt said at her May lecture.

Other researchers also couldn't find any devastating effects from cocaine exposure in the womb. Claire Coles, a psychiatry professor at Emory University, has been tracking a group of low-income Atlanta children. Her work has found that cocaine exposure does not seem to affect children's overall cognition and school performance, but some evidence suggests that these children are less able to regulate their reactions to stressful stimuli, which could affect learning and emotional health.

Coles said her research had found nothing to back up predictions that cocaine-exposed babies were doomed for life. "As a society we say, 'Cocaine is bad and therefore it must cause damage to babies,' " Coles said. "When you have a myth, it tends to linger for a long time."

Deborah A. Frank, a pediatrics professor at Boston University who has tracked a similar group of children, said the "crack baby" label led to erroneous stereotyping. "You can't walk into a classroom and tell this kid was exposed and this kid was not," Frank said. "Unfortunately, there are so many factors that affect poor kids. They have to deal with so much stress and deprivation. We have also found that exposure to violence is a huge factor."

Frank said that cocaine - along with other illicit drugs, alcohol, and cigarettes - "isn't good for babies," but the belief that they would "grow up to be addicts and criminals is not true. Some kids have stunned us with how well they've done."

Jaimee Drakewood came to her last visit at Children's with her 16-month-old son KyMani in tow. It was the 31st time she had met with the researchers.

"We do appreciate everything you've done, because it's not easy to get to all these appointments," said team member Kathleen Dooley, as she handed Drakewood a framed certificate of appreciation. "We are proud of you and we feel you are family, because you are."

The team plans to stay in touch with study participants each year. They have started a new study that uses MRI and other tools to explore the neural and cognitive effects of poverty on infant development.

"Given what we learned," Hurt said, "we are invested in better understanding the effects of poverty. How can early effects be detected? Which developing systems are affected? And most important, how can findings inform interventions for our children?"

The team considers Jaimee and her mother, Karen, among their best success stories. Jaimee is heading into her senior year at Tuskegee University in Alabama and hopes to become a food inspector. She is home for the summer with her son and working as a lifeguard at a city pool.

After a few starts and stops, including a year in jail, Karen Drakewood is off drugs and works as a residential adviser at Gaudenzia House. Her older daughter just received a master's degree at Drexel University; her son is a student at Florida Atlantic University. Even in the worst moments, Karen Drakewood said she tried to show her kids "what their future could hold." "If a child sees the light, they will follow it."

Jaimee Drakewood credits her big sister and mother for keeping her on track. "I've seen my mom at her lowest point and I've seen her at her highest. That hasn't stopped me from seeing the superwoman in her regardless of where she was at," Jaimee said.

Despite her family's history, Jaimee believes she and her siblings are "destined to have accomplishments, to be greater than our parents."

Susan FitzGerald, a former Inquirer reporter, has written periodically about the cocaine study. Now an independent journalist, she is coathor of a parenting book, Letting Go With Love and Confidence and can be reached at sfitzgerald610@msn.com .

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Coverup: Behind the Iran Contra Affair
Narrated by Elizabeth Montgomery
Music by Ruben Blades, Richard Elliot, Pink Floyd, Lou Reed
Produced by Barbara Trent, Gary Meyer, David Kasper
Directed by Barbara Trent

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Why Kids Are Ruining America
Teens are running roughshod over this country -- murdering, raping, gambling away the nation's future -- and we have the bills for counseling and prison to prove it. Sure, not all kids are bad -- but collectively, they're getting worse. Why should we blame ourselves?
by Bret Easton Ellis
Photographs by Mary Ellen Mark
George Magazine
June/July, 1996

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This being an election year, politicians will feel compelled to demonstrate their sympathy with the electorate by trotting out the usual standby diagnoses of what is plaguing the country: a collapsing middle class, rising crime, a poor educational system, welfare, prurient entertainment, the budget deficit. But there's something far more insidious infecting America: Kids are ruining all of our lives. Their predilection for violent crime is at an all-time high, which has, in turn, inspired a multitude of new laws and regulations that threaten to dismantle the concept of civil liberties in the U.S. Add to this the fact that kids control the entertainment industry with their buying power, not to mention that they lie and cheat more than ever, and it's not surprising that a fair amount of hand-wringing (a nice euphemism for freaking out) is going on.

I have been responsible for demonizing the kids of my generation in four consecutive books (with a fifth on the way), though it was Less Than Zero -- set in L.A., the city where I grew up -- that brought the first taste of notoriety to both me and them. A jaundiced eye cast, a youthful disgust with American values, parental authority distrusted. But when I was a teeanger, in the early '80s, I felt I was growing up in a fairly sinister period. Exclude the fact that I witnessed a thousand onscreen deaths of my peers in the slasher movies that opened every week, and still it was the seemingly excessive behavior that disturbed me: the obsessive club-hopping, the sexual ambiguity (pre-AIDS), the casual drug use (pre-Just Say No), the studied nihilism; all of this set in an increasingly dangerous city. So when I wrote that book, I truly felt we were all headed for disaster (and for those who stayed in Hollywood and became screenwriters, we were); though now, by comparison, it looks like a relatively innocent era.

There never was really any moment in my own youth when I felt I was on the verge of careening into crime or mayhem -- with the exception of occasional drug use or driving while intoxicated. But class created the boundaries of what was tolerable. The people I knew growing up were for the most part rich (or, in the particulars of L.A. life, nouveau riche), but we had the same concerns and interests as did most kids, rich or poor: status, the desire for things, the cloying need for acceptance, an obsession with the way we looked, sex and junk culture and pop music. We also tended to ape the attitudes of our parents even while parodying them: We drove their cars, we took their pharmaceuticals, we went to their hairdressers, we watched the way they held themselves at parties. It was a put-on in some ways, if an extravagantly sophisticated sone. (Sometimes, though, it was hard to see where the put-on ended.) No matter how flawed or ridiculous our parents seemed, they still held on to a rigid set of values: screwed-up values at times but never explicitly antisocial.

It would be easy to be glib and condescending about the topic of kids in America, but things have changed drastically in the last 20- years, to the point where one can really only chuckle in grim disbelief. Cheating on exams? Smoking cigarettes? Shoplifting? You wish. Murder, rape, robbery, vandalism: the overwhelming majority of these crimes are committed by people under 25, and the rate is escalating rapidly.

Given that the generation who raised this group of kids was so disconnected, so embroiled in its own narcissism, who can blame the kids themselves? We get the kids we deserve. And when your formative years are so sketcy, and you live in a world where drugs are as available as soda and sex will kill you if it's not planned carefully (even though condom sales among kids are stagnant); a world where divorce reigns; where your fear of violence is so paralyzing your classmates carry box cutters and guns to school; and then you pile on top of this world the usual set of adolescent anxieties, is it any wonder that kids either turn into computer geeks alienated from actual experience or retreat into the solidarity of urban gang life? What did we expect the outcome to be? Eddie Haskell?

Should the government decide what's best for kids? Well, it decides what's best for their parents, so, in some cases, I'm inclined to think yes. For example, having lived in Los Angeles, I have no sympathy for gang members who complain about city curfews. Let Louisiana lower the drinking age to 18, as it did in March. Let cyberporn rule the Internet; make gambling more easily available to kids. Why bother baby-proofing society? The way kids are built today, they will surely just resent it. Besides, it's always better to work with kids than against them. They're going to take over anyway. Consider this consolation as you proceed through these scenes of minors in America: The kids of today will have to deal with the kids of tomorrow.



THEY KILL: A KNOCKED-OUT WINDOW, SNIPPED TELEPHONE WIRES. A RANSACKED LIVING ROOM SPLATTERED WITH CANINE BLOOD AND FECES. A BED STRIPPED AND BLOODSTAINED. NEXT TO IT AN OPEN JAR OF VASELINE. POLICE IN NEW PORT RICHEY, FLORIDA, STUMBLED UPON THIS gruesome scene at the home of 71-year-old Mildred Boroski in March 1995. They had come to tell the widow that they'd found her red Ford Tempo abandoned on a street by the Anclote River. But at the modest house, with its pink awnings and palm tree out front, no one was home.

TV crews swarmed into the middle-class neighborhood looking for answers. Johnathan Grimshaw, a tall, wiry 17-year-old, who lived across the street and sang in the school choir, gazed into the cameras as he stroked Boroski's cat, Twinkles. "She was such a nice old lady," he said, adding that he planned to adopt the pet.

Four days later, Boroski's partially clothed corpse was found in a nearby woods. Two months later, police arrested Grimshaw and another neighborhood boy, 17-year-old Nathan Ramirez, for first-degree murder and kidnapping. The teens reportedly confessed to the crime, saying it was a burglary gone awry: They had been lured into the elderly woman's home by the birthday presents stacked in the living room from her celebration the day before. Once the teens were in the house, the widow's poodle started yapping, so they bludgeoned it with a crowbar. They tied up Boroski with telephone cords, and Grimshaw allegedly raped her. They snagged two guns belong to her late husband and $30 in cash. They shoved Boroski into her car and drove to the woods, where Ramirez allegedly shot her twice in the head. Then the boys blew the cash on video games.

The murder was just the latest in a series of brutal acts by local youth against the elderly residents of Florida. Neighbors were still aghast over the so-called pinkie murder in nearby Hudson, in which a trio of teenagers -- the youngest age 14 -- killed a 55-year-old man and his 75-year-old mother, sawing off the man's little finger as a memento. "We're going to find someone to kill," Alvin Morton, the eldest of the three, had told his friends. Before that, another trio of teens had raped an elderly woman and forced her husband to watch. Why was so much evil flourishing in this region, residents wondered.

New Port Richey is a mellow, almost entirely white community where bingo is a big to-do. With affordable housing and lots of golf courses, this Gulf town of 17,000 is filled largely with retirees, many of whom now see the young as the enemy. Sales of guns and security systems have soared. "We're considered the runaway capital of Florida," says Mike Schreck, a local homicide detective. "Most crimes are committed by juveniles."

By Florida standards, the area's juvenile crime rate is low. But both the state's juvenile and overall crime rates rank among the highest in the country. Last year in Florida, more than 102,000 juveniles were charged with criminal offenses; more than 12,000 were arrested for violent felonies: murder, manslaughter, rape, robbery and assault with a deadly weapon.

Florida's statistics mirror nationwide trends. And sociologists are troubled by the prediction that the national teen population will swell by more than 20 percent in the next decade, thanks to a mini-baby boom in the last 1980s. "We are facing a potential bloodbath of teenage violence in years ahead that will be so bad, we'll look back at the 1990s and say those were the good old days," says James Alan Fox, dean of criminal justice at Boston's Northeastern University. "Teenagers have higher rates for violent crime than any other age-group. The rate of killing by teenagers has increased 172 percent since 1985."

Fox's dire forecast is underscored by Pulitizer Prize-winning author Edward Humes, whose recent book, No Matter How Loud I Shout, documents a year in the L.A. juvenile court. "We have an army forming on the horizon," says Humes. "It's going to invade in the next 10 to 15 years, and we're not doing anything to defend ourselves."

The typical response of local authorities is to crack down on youth activities that could lead to violence. In Florida, cops enforce curfews in many cities and narcotics squads have set up drug stings in schools. As in other states, Florida's courts often try violent kids as adults; Morton, the pinkie murder ringleader, now sits on death row.

Punishment

It's Friday, the equivalent of open-mike night in Judge Michael Corriero's Manhattan courtroom. There's the ninth-grader who went on a robbery spree, the two girls who wielded a butcher's knife to steal a 12-year-old's knapsack, the 15-year-old accused of fatally shooting a man. Judge Corriero, who could pass for Al Pacino's younger brother, listens intently before deciding who gets jail and who gets probation, who gets youthful-offender status and who gets thrown into the much harsher adult system.

Rehabilitation or punishment? This vexing question, which Corriero weighs dozens of times each day, lies at the heart of a major political and philosophical battle over juvenile crime, which could have the emotional explosiveness of last year's welfare reform debate.

This crackdown on young lawbreakers has been fueled by the rising number of juveniles arrested for violent crimes. After remaining virtually constant between 1972 and the late '80s, the juvenile crime rate nationwide began to spike in 1990 and by 1992 had reached a 20-year high.

From 1988 to 1991, the youth murder-arrest rate climbed 80 percent. A handful of stomach-churning incidents also made teenage offenders seem more impulsive and vicious. Now, Hawaii is the only state that treats all kids under age 16 as juveniles. In Illinois and North Carolina, 13-year-old offenders can be treated as adults; in Vermont, 10 is the cut-off. In New York, only murder suspects under age seven are automatically treated as juveniles, and Governor George Pataki recently vowed to further toughen the state's law.

Both Democrats and Republicans have recognized the political rewards of outraged fist-pounding: 700 legislative proposals to prosecute minors as adults were introduced last year, a trend that President Clinton promised, in his State of the Union address, to pursue.

Meanwhile, 24 states allow kids under the age of 18 to get the death penalty. Although no criminal has been executed while a minor, some sentenced while minors have been put to death. Currently, 42 juveniles sit on death row.

-- Patricia Cohen

THEY NEED MORE LAWS

"HOW COME YOUR PANTS ARE SO SLACK IF YOU'RE NOT GANG-BANGIN'?" DEMANDS DEPUTY SHERIFF DAN BELLAND, TUGGING THE WAISTBAND OF THE 15-YEAR-OLD LATINO LEANING spread-eagled over the hood of his cruiser. The kid pleads absolute innocence, while his friend stays silent. It's 9:45 on a Friday night in Lancaster, California, and Belland has just found a pair of teens hanging out on a dimly lit corner. "Curfew in fifteen," barks Belland. "Don't let me see your faces."

With five minutes to go before ten o'clock, Belland guns his cruiser into a local strip mall multiplex parking lot on the scruffy northern edge of L.A. County and noses it up alongside a half-dozen teens just out from seeing Happy Gilmore. Freezing their attention with a spotlight, Belland rolls down his window and warns: "y'got five minutes to go. I see any of you here past ten, I'm doing the curfew thing on you. Got it?" The kids scatter, some heading for the pay phone to call for a ride home.

In the Antelope Valley desert communities of Lancaster and Palmdale, city fathers are intent on preventing the spread of the youth violence that plagues the city of Los Angeles 50 miles to the south -- a place satanized in local parlance as simply "Down Below." If the kids violate curfew, they will be written up, part of Lancaster's three-year-old experiment in strictly enforcing an older municipal ordinance. That will oblige them to appear in juvenile traffic court -- where due process is streamlined -- accompanied by at least one parent. For the first offense, a parent can expect to pay up to $250. For a second violation, the fine can triple, and the teen can be slapped with probation and community-service work, theoretically even jail time.

Apart from the routine nightly patrol, the sheriff's department conducts a Valleywide "curfew sweep" on average once per month, combing the parks, fast-food joints and mall parking lots for minors and writing them up -- as many as 70 per operation. But that's just one of many law enforcement obstacles these teens must navigate. The conservatives who dominate the politics of Antelope Valley have established random high school drug inspections by dope-sniffing dogs. All seven public high schools now have a permanent, armed deputy sheriff on campus. Some kids caught in truancy raids are required to attend morality lectures by a former sheriff's deputy who is also a fundamentalist preacher. And teens are offered rewards of up to $1,000 for turning in peers involved with weapons, drugs, graffiti or other crimes. A new "daytime loitering by minors" ordinance will start fining parents just as the curfew law does.

In the private sector, the local mall prohibits groups of more than four teens from congregating. A dress code bans baseball caps worn backwards or sideways. "This was a quiet area off the beaten path in the '60s and '70s," says conservative mayor George Runner, a moving force behind many of the teen laws. "But with our phenomenal growth in the '80s, things started getting out of hand. Graffiti started appearing and people felt violated, like who's in control out there? So we started attacking the causal factors." Graffiti is down 75 percent since the curfew law started to be aggressively enforced, the mayor claims. Local police say youth crime is "stable" and argue that without this host of special measures, things would get worse.

Across America, some 1,000 cities and towns enforce juvenile curfew laws. Of the nation's largest 200 cities, 160 use curfew ordinances, including Houston, Dallas, San Diego, Miami and New Orleans. In Charleston, South Carolina, police ask parents to sign permission forms allowing officers to bring children home if found on the street after hours. In San Diego, detained kids are routinely handcuffed, fingerprinted, photographed and held, often overnight, until a parent comes calling.

A growing number of communities are also taking measures aimed specifically at gang suppression, including prohibiting young people from wearing certain colors, fraternizing with suspected gang members or displaying hand signals. In Jefferson Parish, near New Orleans, the police compose lists of suspected gang members and contact their parents. In Mentor-on-the-Lake, Ohio, 20 miles outside Cleveland, antigang rules include daytime curfews. Proponents of such laws argue that they are merely responding to a youth crime epidemic. But critics of the curfew laws -- such as the American Civil Liberties Union, which is waging legal battles to stop their implementation -- say these statutes criminalize status as opposed to conduct; do little if anything to address the economic and social roots of teen crime; ratchet up youth resentment; and are designed mainly to placate a frightened and aging electorate.

Many teens complain that their elders would do better to invest resources in activities and jobs. "There's no place to go, nothing to do around here," complains a 17-year-old senior at Lancaster's Quartz Hill High School. "You party at someone's house or hang out at the Taco Bell. Now the cops get you coming from either one."

Meanwhile, in Lancaster, a city rattled by near-tectonic social shifts, the get-tough approach still enjoys wide popularity. Through the '70s and '80s, Lancaster and neighboring Palmdate were among the fastest-growing American towns. A stream of almost entirely white, middle- and working-class families poured out of a declining Los Angeles and took up well-paying jobs in the booming aerospace sector. But defense downsizing hammered the local economy. Today, the two cities continue to grow at slower if still appreciable rates -- 3.5 percent instead of 12 percent -- but attract a poorer, more racially mixed group of settlers. "People used to come here looking for a future," Deputy Belland says as we cruise 30th Street. "Now, about the only future you're gonna find is in law enforcement."

With that we pull into the beach-size parking lot of the Taco Bell, at the corner of 30th West and Avenue L -- notorious as the site of a 1991 youth shooting and as the hangout for the Valley's high school kids. "You could come here on some nights and find 200 kids just hanging out," says Belland. "Our phones down at the station would be ringing off the hook with calls from citizens afraid to use the other stores in the shopping center." But on this Friday night, at 11:30 there are only two or three cars in the lot, and everyone inside them is of age. Belland looks out over the rest of the empty parking lot. The cold desert wind pushes weeds and papers across it, giving the place the feel of a sodium-lit ghost town. "I guess this curfew thing is working," he says. "It's mighty quiet tonight."

-- by Marc Cooper

Florida officials, like their counterparts in other states, are also trying to understand just what makes kids turn to crime. In Tampa, 50 miles south of New Port Richey, a two-story yellow cinder-block building houses the jewel of Florida's recent efforts. The Juvenile Assessment Center (JAC) is the first stop for young lawbreakers in Hillsborough County. Here cops, counselors, juvenile justice officials, human resource groups and substance abuse specialists join to assess juvenile crime from all angles. More than 20,000 cases have passed through here since May 1993. JAC has two sections: one for truants, the other for kids who've been arrested. In the latter, all doors are locked and movements videotaped. Three deputies stand behind computers, pulling records from police and judicial data banks. A restraining chair sits in one corner, awaiting the unruly, who are strapped in and wheeled to a separate room.

On a Wednesday afternoon, nine youths -- some black; some white -- are dropped off at JAC, fingerprinted, photographed and given a drug test. They are asked 139 questions about family, school, drug use, friends, sex and their emotional well-being. Eight of the nine have been there before. Most come from violent backgrounds, and most live with single parents, almost always their mothers. Their crimes are typical: car theft, assault, shoplifting, drug possession and dealing. It's not unusual to see a lengthy rap sheet: A 16-year-old may have more than 20 offenses. "We've had little kids abusing their parents," says Deputy Mary Horne. "We've had eight-year-olds in here for sexual battery. Nothing shocks us anymore. After working here, I don't want to have kids."

Some JAC youths will land in group homes, where they will continue schooling and learn job skills such as woodworking. Some are put into intervention programs, such as Drug Court. Others will be put on probation or house arrest. And all will be assigned a caseworker to recommend them to assorted family and peer counseling groups. Despite the individualized attention, tracking and involvement of families and schools, many kids will be back.

A tremor of anxiety seems to run through the place. How can the community predict which teens will turn murderous and, more important, how can they reverse the tendency? So far, no one has arrived at a surefire tool to identify the seeds of evil behavior -- the search goes on across the country, as it has over the centuries. "You can assess kids from now until doomsday and it still adds up to nothing if you don't have places to send them," says Michael J. Dale, law professor at Nova Southeastern University in Ford Lauderdale and former director of the Youth Law Center in San Francisco. "Some kids just need a haven to get them away from their homes. Others need to be locked up for a good long time. And there are lots of in-betweens. Figuring out which kids need what is not the hardest part. The hard part is doing something about it."

Parental Rights

As the government increasingly sets parameters for teens, some parents are fighting to ensure that their child-rearing decisions remain preeminent. In 1995, the Christian Coalition proposed a parental-rights amendment to the Constitution. Sex education, parental consent for abortions and home schooling are among the issues that have spurred this drive.

Teachers' unions, abortion rights advocates and civil liberties groups have called the movement a "stealth campaign" to give Christian conservatives more control over public education. Greg Erken, executive director of the parental-rights group Of the People, claims its own proposed amendment on the state level is an exercise in consciousness-raising. "We want to get a debate going about whether parents really matter. Or can we have teachers, social workers and cops raising children? In a democracy, it's an act of faith that if you give citizens rights, they'll act responsibly. We're saying that we ought to place that same faith in citizens in their capacity as parents." Prince v. Massachusetts (1955), the decision that declared the state's right to enforce school attendance, vaccination and child labor laws and to protect children from abuse, would not be challenged, proponents argue. The amendment has been introduced in 24 states, and an endorsement in January by Governor George Allen of Virginia highlighted the issue. The Senate Judiciary Committee will vote on a parental-rights bill co-sponsored by Bob Dole this summer.

-- Joy Press

THEY BLOW MONEY

A PILE OF $5 BILLS FLUTTERS ON THE SIDEWALK IN FRONT OF CROWN FRIED CHICKEN, A JERSEY CITY HANGOUT RIGHT ACROSS THE STREET FROM LINCOLN HIGH SCHOOL. A GROUP OF LINCOLN STUDENTS IS GATHERED AROUND THE CASH, throwing dice. The game is called C-low, and students say it's not uncommon to see $500 riding on a singl eroll. Today, the kids are playing for just five bucks a game, but at this harried, casinolike pace, the stakes and the consequences can add up: Last year, a dispute over a C-low game led to the shooting death of 18-year-old Ricky Bradley, a former student at nearby Snyder High School. As the game continues, the pressure builds on the players not to let down the growing number of spectators -- the guys smoking pot and bobbing to the chaotic rhythms of four competing boom boxes, and the girls inside Crown eating lunch and watching the game through the plate-glass windows. A 17-year-old student blows on the three dice, rubs them against the arch of his sneakers for luck, then casts them toward the pile of cash: double threes and a four.

Doubles and a five or six will beat his roll, as will triples, or the elusive, magical combination known as C-low: four-five-six. A one-two-three combination is an automatic loss -- "aced" -- and the onlookers taunt the next roller with calls of "123rd Street, last stop!" The kid confidently tosses the dice against the concrete wall. The crowd closes in, the young girls inside. Crown press their faces to the window. "C-low, baby!" he shouts. Then, reaching for the money, he says, "That's dough."

C-low, a street variation on craps, has been around for years, but it's showing a strange resurgence among high school students these days. It's part of a nationwide gambling fixation among the young. Studies by Harvard Medical School and Illinois State University have concluded that between 6 and 8 percent of teenagers are compulsive or problem gamblers. Dr. Howard Shaffer, the director of Harvard's Center for Addiction Studies, believes that for kids in the '90s, gambling addiction is becoming as big a problem as drug addiction. And as with drugs, gambling often leads to other crimes. In Newark this year, a 16-year-old boy was charged with pimping his girlfriend to pay off his sports gambling debts. And in suburban Nutley, authorities busted a high school bookmaking ring after one debtor was kidnapped and then abandoned near a housing project in Newark's Central Ward.

To gamble, kids need money, and these days, they have access to plenty. According to Teenage Research Unlimited, youngsters in the U.S. spend $109 billion a year; two-thirds have their own bank accounts, and nearly one in five plays the stock market. By the time they're 19 years old, 37 percent carry credit cards.

If it's not their own money they're spending, kids are telling their parents what to buy. And their power is growing rapidly, says James McNeal, a professor of marketing at Texas A&M University, who found that preteens directly influence the spending of $170 billion a year. Indirectly, they influence the spending of hundreds of billions more.

Habits formed in early years often translate into adult problems. Ed Looney, head of the Council on Compulsive Gambling of New Jersey, says that the majority of adult compulsive gamblers who call his hot line say they placed their first bets by age 14. "They start out with pogs or milk tops, then go to C-low, lottery tickets and on to sports, horses and casinos," he says.

Ray, a 28-year-old member of Gamblers Anonymous in New Jersey, says his problem started "at about nine," when he first saw older kids pitching quarters. "One day a fella hit $50 and I thought he was like a millionaire. I played and lost nine bucks to my brother. I stole from my sister to pay for it." The bottom fell out last year, he says, when "my fiancee walked out on me after six years because I was drinking and gambling." Ray joined Gamblers Anonymous -- whose members pledge not to buy even raffle tickets or invest in the stock market -- and says he hasn't wagered a dime in 12 months.

Finding ways for kids to cut down on spending isn't a political priority. In fact, as the bottom falls out of education funding, schools increasingly rely on the support of the private sector, which inevitably comes with strings attached. Advertisements proliferate on the sides of school buses and even in textbooks. To deal with their addiction and debts, kids are lesft to their own devices. In New Jersey, a proposal before the assembly to include one hour a year on compulsive gambling in the high-school health curriculum is opposed by Governor Christine Todd Whitman's Department of Education. And of the state's nearly $1 billion annual gambling-related revenue, $130,000 has been allotted for gambling-treatment programs. When asked what he would do if C-low got him into the red, a 16-year-old boy lingering outside the Crown in Jersey City didn't hesitate before answering: "I'd hold somebody up and get the money."

Under Surveillance

At Seminole Middle School, in Plantation, Florida, an intricate web of cameras provides sweeping coverage of hallways, doorways, the cafeteria and a bicycle rack. A supervisor armed with a Handycam at Dana Hills High School, in Dana Point, California, zeroes in on a student skipping class. At Hazen High School, in Renton, Washington, students watch one another on a 19-inch video monitor located in a lounge. While the mode of surveillance varies, a rapidly increasing number of schools -- some 3,000 to date, according to the National School Safety Center -- are succumbing to the allure of electronic-age security.

Dr. Roger Damerow, superintendent of schools for Waterbury, Connecticut, says that the roughly $22,000 from the Federal Safe and Drug Free Schools Program invested on surveillance cameras was money well-spent. "Our goal is to deter bad behavior, such as making an obscene gesture at a passing car or consciously creating trouble. Our intent isn't evil; it's simply to ensure the safety of our children and create a record of who did what to whom. We're occupying the moral high ground here."

Don Sadler, director of operations for the Huntsville, Alabama, school system, where an elaborate Integrated Services Digital Network was recently installed, agrees. The nearly $2 million spent in the past ten years to monitor all of its 44 schools has saved Huntsville $700,000 in insurance premiums alone. Adds Sadler, "Regardless of financial concerns, any measures to create a safe environment can't be justly criticized."

Students at Middleton High School, in Middleton, Wisconsin, might feel differently. In a case of life imitates art or, more specifically, life imitates the film Sliver, a reporter for the school newspaper discovered a hidden video camera whose scope covered the entire boy's locker room. The principal, Charlene Gearing, had it removed. She told the press that although the camera, installed by her predecessor, was meant to prevent crime, it was still an invasion of privacy.

Loren Siegel, director of public education for the American Civil Liberties Union, sees the enormous increase in the use of video surveillance across the United States as cause for concern. "The availability of new technologies makes it easier. But just because it's easier doesn't make it wiser."

-- Chris Nutter

THEY CONTROL THE ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRY

THE TWINS CAN'T SING. THEY CAN'T DANCE. THEY CAN'T ACT AND THEY'RE NOT FUNNY. MULTI-TALENTLESS THEY MAY BE, BUT THE NINE-YEAR-OLD OLSEN SISTERS, MARY-KATE AND ASHLEY, ARE PERCHED PRETTILY ATOP A SHOW BUSINESS EMPIRE whose tentacles reach deep into many media. At the tender age of nine months, the girls made their small-screen double-duty debut as the gurgling, chimplike Michelle on Full House, a sitcom so squishy it should have been preceded by a parental guidance notice warning off any diabetics in the audience. Nonetheless, it consistently ranked among the 15 highest-rated shows during its seven-season run.

The elusive charm of the blond, blue-eyed Olsens led to popular demand for more entertainment products in which the two sibs could be seen in their unremarkably identical glory. Top-rated TV movies begat CDs, feature films and their own upcoming sitcom. A series of home videos -- some featuring the Olsen girls as the crime-solving Trenchcoat Twins, others with them in their jammies inviting watchers to a sleep-over -- propelled their company, DualStar, into second place in home video income, behind only the colossus Disney.

If the above information causes you to scratch your head and mutter, "Olsens? Trenchcoat? Sleep-over? Huh?" chances are you're clawing at a bald spot that first felt the pressure back in 1977, when Star Wars changed the face of entertainment. Star Wars was a B movie given A treatment. It was also a lunch pail, a video game, a comic book, a pillowcase and a hamburger wrapper -- in other words, all about kids. And since then, since that moment of epiphany when it became evident that a bunch of clueless, pockmarked, metal-mouthed 12-year-olds could not only open a movie but also supply the repeat business to push it into the stratosphere, everything's been all about kids.

Star Wars was an explicit warning to the over-30s that it was time to head home and microwave their own popcorn, because the national multiplex was about to be cordoned off by a velvet rope that they stood no hope of squeezing past. Of the top 20 grossers of all time, only two predate Star Wars: the kid-sedating Gone With the Wind and Jaws, which pretty much wrote the summer-movie-as-thrill-ride rule book. And only four -- Forrest Gump, Beverly Hills Cop, Ghost and Terminator 2: Judgment Day -- could be described as containing even vaguely adult themes. If the '80s was an extended exercise in adolescent wish fulfillment, the current decade has seen movie screens crammed with fresh-faced, moist-nosed preteens, not a goatee or a track mark among them. Eighties teen tycoon John Hughes became the kind of kindergarten with Home Alone as he ransacked the creche for younger and younger talent. Family-aimed features have swelled the bank accounts of actors Elijah Wood, Tina Majorino, Christina Ricci, Gaby Hoffman, Jesse Bradford, Brian Bonsall, Jason James Richter and Brad Renfro. Even Jim Carrey and Saturday Night Live spawn Adam Sandler and Chris Farley can attribute a substantial part of their success to the prepubescent audience that wets its pants every time one of these cut-ups wets his pants.

It's the tots who went and went and went, and made their parents take them and take them and take them, to The Lion King, Beauty & the Beast, Pocahontas and The Little Mermaid, which in turn funded Disney's attempts to pursue legitimacy with Oliver Stone's Nixon and Martin Scorsese's forthcoming Dalai Lama biopic (I'm already planning not to go see it).

It's the tykes, transfixed by the purple dinosaur Barney and taught to talk by Sesame Street, that have kept PBS in the anesthetic business. Nielsen ratings -- toppers Seinfeld and Friends may be too packed with overgrown kids to allow for any genuine anklebiters among the cast but the nightly listings are otherwise awash in precocity, training bras and prom traumas. A full three cable networks -- Nickelodeon, Disney and MTV -- are devoted entirely to teen tastes. ABC and the laughingstock netlets WB and UPN all set aside entire nights of programming for kids under age 14. CBS has its yenta Mary Poppins in The Nanncy. Even NBC, with its massed ranks of the adorable twentysomething audiences, still makes room for its Fresh Prince and for Brotherly Love -- the vehicle for Blossom veteran Joey Lawrence and his two brothers. Hoping to slice off a little of the Olsen action for themselves are two other sets of twins: Tia and Tamera Mowry, the scary, synchronized scenery-chewers from Sister Sister; and the va-va-voomy future centerfolds Cynthia and Brittany Danile from Sweet Valley High.

The adolescent dollar has always oiled the pop chart wheels, but in 1991, when Billboard introduced the SoundScan method of sales tabulation (whereby pop charts reflect actual record sales rather than the number of records shipped out to stores), previously marginalized genres swept into prominence. Suddenly, the collective appetite for grunge and gangsta rap, hitherto regarded as the province of stubbly, academic rockpress scribblers, caused hernias and heart murmurs among radio programmers and record executives caught on the hop once again by the mercurial nature of ... the kids! Meanwhile, the younger brothers and sisters of the pierced constituency began buying releases by their own contemporaries, sending such product skyrocketing up the charts. Queen of the pack is the sloe-eyed, platinum-selling Brandy, who is positioned to take over preeminence from that granny Whitney Houston. Nipping at Brandy's heels are the similarly single-monikered Monica, 3T (the sons of the much-maligned Tito Jackson) and the excellently named Immature.

Does anyone these days launch a big-budget movie, album, television show or software without factoring teen appeal into the equation? Doubtful. The kids have the disposable income, they've got the free time, and they've got the obsessive nature.

You might have thought that, rather than receiving the V-chip without complaint, craven network executives and communications paymasters could have mustered the defense that, far from brutalizing and desensitizing the nation's youth with shows pitched over their heads, the networks were actually coddling and pampering kids with everything they could ever hope to see. Because everything's about kids. You want to know why you get bored so fast watching television? Why you can't pay attention to anything for more than two minutes? Why you covet your friends' possessions and why you burst into frustrated tears at the slightest provocation? Because you're immersed in a world of kid-aimed entertainment, and it's having an adverse affect on your emotional growth. The first pol who proposes compulsory installation of a K-chip will win by a landslide.

TEN THINGS KIDS HAVE WRECKED FOR ADULTS:

1. CIGARETTE MACHINES

2. ASPIRIN BOTTLES

3. CYBERSEX

4. SEX IN GENERAL

5. BROADWAY

6. BACKSEAT CAR WINDOWS

7. SCENIC OVERLOOKS

8. WOODSTOCK

9. GUNS

10. DINOSAURS