Blue: The LAPD and the Battle to Redeem American Policing by Joe Domanick Page B

overnight.
    So, embracing their righteousness, conservative politicians demonized an entire class of people. And they successfully demanded and got the only solution they were capable of understanding: crime and drug wars that featured deeply inhumane, inflexible, mass incarceration policies such asCalifornia’s three-strikes law—a law under which hundreds of petty thieves, many from Los Angeles, were sentenced to twenty-five years to life in prison for stealing a steak, $10 worth of sunglasses, a bottle of vitamins, or less than $3 in AA batteries.
    Such was the lay of the land when Andre Christian and Alfred Lomas went from hustling to dealing crack cocaine in the early eighties.
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    Theintroduction of crack into Los Angeles started in about 1982, when America’s multibillion-dollar War on Drugs successfully shut down the huge supply of cocaine flowing into south Florida through Cuban distributors connected to Colombian drug cartels. Given the amount of money at stake, a new port of entry for Colombian cocaine quickly sprung up, funneled through already established Mexican marijuana and heroin distribution lines into Los Angeles and Southern California—thus changing the entire dynamic of drug distribution in America. Suddenlythere were huge amounts of money bubbling up inside South Los Angeles. African-American dealers like the entrepreneurial “Freeway Ricky Ross” became local legends, and then the gangs found themselves awash in cash.
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    Powder cocaine in the eighties was not meant for poor people, not at $100 a gram. But then, as the Southern California coke market started becoming saturated, somebody figured out that by mixing powder coke with baking soda and boiling the combination, you could create twice as much product to sell. And then , by cutting it up into small pieces before it dried, you could turn the mixture into a hard, solid, smokable substance—“rock,” or crack cocaine. The altered form provided an immediate, powerful, euphoric rush far more intense than snorting powder cocaine, while in the process creating a whole new class of insatiable consumers of the drug.
    A hit or two of snorted cocaine and you’d be up for hours; a pull or two on a crack pipe would last about twenty minutes, and then you’d want another hit—desperately. Customers would come back sooner and far more often. And because it was so inexpensive—$5, $10, $25, $50, depending on the size of the rock—anybody could scrape up the money to try to keep their high going—making it initially seem to be the perfect ghetto drug.
    And Andre Christian, who was nothing if not a son of the ghetto, soon became one of those kids that LAPD sergeant Charlie Beck was trying to bust in crack houses all over South Los Angeles. When he was sixteen, a dealer had set Christian up in a street-level apartment with an opening in the door through which he’d push his $25 or $50 rocks. He began making $300 or more a night, three or four nights a week. To an outsider it might not seem worth the trouble, given the risk. But for a high school kid from the projects, it was a dream come true. He bought new clothes, got a nice car and a regular motel room out by Los Angeles International Airport at the Snooty Fox, one of those rooms with a heart-shaped bed. Suddenly he had so much money he didn’t know how to spend it all, and there he was, still just a kid.

Andre Christian, Wednesday, April 29, 1992, Jordan Downs
    By 1993, Andre Christian had grown into a businessman—a part-time criminal businessman, to be sure, but one who was trying otherwise to put the thug life behind him. When he arrived in Jordan Downs on that first evening of the riots with his girlfriend and her kids, he’d been anticipating a demonstration. Immediately, however, he saw how wrong he’d been. Everybody was out on the streets and sidewalks talking about revenge. Nobody was yet rioting. But it was clear they were all just waiting for someone to