Inside the DEA and the City's Drug Trade Through An Upper East Side Heroin Den Updated December 14, 2009 2:11pm
By Jon Schuppe, Joe Valiquette and Jason Tucker
DNAinfo Staff
MANHATTAN — In his 28 years of battling drug traffickers, John P. Gilbride has seen lots of changes in the way New York’s criminal underworld operates.
What he notices most is that the dealers have gone indoors. Many of them convert apartments into mini factories, called “heroin mills,” where they cut and package kilos of the drug into street-ready portions.
Last year, his agents busted one of those mills across the street from an E. 75th Street school yard on the Upper East Side that was run by a New Jersey man and raked in $4 million a year. DNAinfo takes you on an virtual peek inside the mill, and what Drug Enforcement Administration agents found when the raided it — everything from a syringe-filled mini-fridge, to ledgers full of locations for drug deliveries throughout Manhattan.
“When I first worked in the city in the early 1980s, New York was a much different city than it is today,” said Gilbride, in an exclusive interview with DNAinfo.
“Drug trafficking groups were running rampant, you had the crack epidemic, you had crack gangs that were extremely violent, and individuals were controlling sections of New York City.”
Gilbride, who's run the DEA’s New York office since 2005, became a street agent in the 1980s, when large swaths of the city were plagued by open-air drug markets and Wild West-style shootouts. He was shot by cocaine traffickers while working undercover in 1988.
Today the city is a much different place. Violence has dropped dramatically. The open-air markets have disappeared from many neighborhoods. Gilbride credits law-enforcement crackdowns — led by the New York Police Department — that returned the streets to law-abiding citizens.
But that doesn’t mean drugs aren’t any less of a threat. New York remains an international drug-trafficking hub.
Typically, South American cocaine and heroin is transported directly to New York, where mid-level traffickers prepare it for distribution throughout the five boroughs and to cities and suburbs along the East Coast.
After diluting the drugs and breaking them down into individual packages, these New York-based operators can make hundreds of thousands of dollars in profits from each kilo they process.
The purity of heroin has risen dramatically in the last few decades, making it easier, and cheaper, for people to use, Gilbride said. Drug dealers have also added marketing techniques to their violent business model, stamping glassines with name brands such as "911" so users can more easily find the heroin they're looking for.
Gilbride, a New Jersey native, started at the DEA’s New York office in 1981 as an intern while he was still an undergraduate at Northeastern University. He had no idea what the agency did at first, but after working in the office’s command center, checking license plates and making criminal background checks for street agents, he soon fell in love with the place.
He became fascinated with undercover agents who “could go out and change their whole persona, meet with some of the nastiest drug trafficking bad guys in New York City at one point, then go home and play racquetball or take their kids to a basketball game,” he said.
“At the end of that six months, I knew I wanted a career in drug law enforcement.”
