When crack epidemic overtook Charlottesville

Sweet Town.
That was a nickname for Charlottesville in the late 1980s and early ’90s. It wasn’t something cooked up by officials to tout the city as one of the best places to live. It’s what drug dealers called Charlottesville because sales of crack cocaine were booming.
Those dealers could get three times what they charged in New York City or Washington for the highly addictive drug.
By 1988, drug gangs had infiltrated the city. Open-air drug markets were running all hours — dealers and users crowded street corners and front yards alike, as crack was sold with impunity.

But there was a public uproar and police fought back with such operations as Ready Rock and Rock Crusher.
While police didn’t completely clean up the city, they came out on top. The dealers no longer owned the streets.
And with all the bad that happened, the ruined lives and violence, something good came out of it for local law enforcement: the creation of the Jefferson Area Drug Enforcement task force, which is heading into its 15th year.
The Charlottesville area still has a drug problem, according to Lt. Don Campbell, who was around during the crack boom and now heads the 10-man JADE unit, but it’s nothing like it was then.

When Chip Harding joined the city police department in 1978, there wasn’t much concern about illegal drugs.
But by 1984, he had climbed the ranks and saw that many crimes were directly linked to drugs — primarily addicts stealing to feed the habit.
“I really was interested in it,” he said recently.
Harding, now the Albemarle County sheriff, said he tried to convince supervisors that there was a drug problem in Charlottesville, but they didn’t buy it.
Eventually he built up enough cases working drug crimes “on the side” to convince them, and later in 1984, Harding was named the department’s first narcotics officer.
Old-timers thought Harding was a hotshot.
“There was a lot of resentment,” said Charlottesville police Capt. Bryant Bibb, who would eventually join Harding as a narcotics detective.
It didn’t take long for Harding and his original narcotics partner, Allen Kirby, to prove those doubters wrong.
In August 1984, they busted a city man who had 120 pounds of marijuana in his house. By July of the following year they had broken up a huge cocaine ring based out of Fluvanna and discovered a $20 million cocaine warehouse in Orange.
By the end of 1986, the cases had mounted to include University of Virginia students, including high-profile athletes.
Because of the drug cases, for the first time a U.S. attorney and a federal grand jury set up shop in the city.
Charlottesville had become a national story for its illegal drug problem.
“You had people going, ‘Oh my God, maybe we do have a drug problem,’” Harding said.

‘Knocking out … cases’

In 1987, Bibb replaced Kirby and Campbell joined the city drug unit, making it a three-man force.
The three were kicking down doors and doing “jump outs,” where they hopped out of unmarked cars to bust dealers.
They had pagers — this was the pre-cell phone era — so informants could beep them.
“We rode around with rolls of quarters,” Harding said.
Bibb and Harding admit they were pushing limits, taking risks, but they were a small unit learning on the fly.
And it was working. In 1988, they made 103 drug arrests.
“We were knocking out some cases,” Harding said.
By the end of 1988, they had put away most of the local drug dealers. That victory, however, opened the door for even more trouble.

When crack came to town

In late 1988 there were signs that crack — a recent phenomenon in the U.S. at the time — was moving into the Charlottesville area.
By October, the narcotics cops noticed an open-air crack market had developed.
And the dealers weren’t local. They came from places such as New York and D.C., and some were foreigners, primarily Jamaicans.
Before the detectives knew what hit them, the crack trade exploded.
“It went from zero to 100 overnight,” Bibb said.
“It was a drive-through drug market,” Campbell said.
People crowded on corners and in yards.
Bibb and Harding said users weren’t confined to any one class; rich and poor alike were using crack.
The crack market had become lucrative, brazen and sophisticated.
The dealers were raking in the dough, even the small guys — detectives would bust teenagers with thousands of dollars in their pockets.
Campbell recalled a detective arresting one dealer twice in one night.
Spotters wore headset transmitters and warned dealers when “5-0” was coming.
As time passed, residents became fed up, complaining publicly and holding neighborhood meetings.
“It was almost like the community was being held hostage,” Campbell said.
And the drug problem impacted other crimes.
“You were either stealing or dealing,” Bibb said.
Violence and the threat of it increased, as the outside drug gangs carried automatic weapons.
“It was so out of control,” Bibb said.
The three-man narcotics unit was overwhelmed.
So they teamed up with the Virginia State Police and launched Operation Ready Rock, the street name for crack. In March 1989, they arrested about 40 in the operation.
In June, Operation Rock Crusher netted more than two dozen crack dealers.
That was only the beginning. The years passed and the battle raged on. By 1992, the drug unit had grown and morphed into a three-pronged force in order to deal with crack and other illegal drug markets.
One was a federal task force that focused on the big fish. It netted three kingpins and broke up a UVa drug ring in which three fraternity houses were seized.
There was the non-crack unit, composed of local police who focused mostly on cocaine and marijuana.
The third was a unit headed by Campbell and it focused on the street-level crack market.
Harding oversaw the three task forces, and eventually determined there needed to be better organization.
At his suggestion, the three task forces were made one, and in 1995 became known as JADE.

War on drugs continues

By the late ’90s, the local open-air crack market had been all but wiped out.
A combination of police work and the fact that the drug had ravaged so many lives led to decreased crack use locally and nationwide.
The Charlottesville of today and the one during the crack boom are night and day, Campbell said.
“It’s nothing compared to what it used to be on the streets,” he said. “It’s amazing what the street looks like now.”

Even so, he said the fight against drugs, including crack, is a “constant battle,” Campbell said.
Cocaine and crack are the drugs of choice in Charlottesville, and are JADE’s primary focus, because of the violent groups involved in trafficking them, he said.
Campbell is the only one of the three men who still works in narcotics. But Harding and Bibb still keep up with what is happening. All three said the war on drugs sometimes seems like a losing battle.
Bibb believes they are seeing in current dealers and users the residuals of the early days of crack.
Those who were babies in crack houses then are young adults with drug problems now, and “they’re mad,” he said.
Campbell said that as long as there is demand, there’ll be someone to sell drugs.
Either way, he said the drug war must continue.

“A lot of people say the war on drugs has failed,” said Campbell, whose JADE task force is composed of officers from the Charlottesville, Albemarle, UVa and state police departments.
But, he added, critics don’t understand. If police quit arresting drug dealers, those criminals would overrun society.
Harding is proud of the work they’ve done, but less optimistic about the war on drugs.

He believes there should be more emphasis put on users, finding ways to get them off drugs instead of simply putting them in jail or prison.
As long as users want drugs, he said, you’ll never get rid of drug dealers.
“In the scope of things, it’s a drop in the mud puddle,” he said of the effect arrests have on the illegal drug trade. “It doesn’t amount to much.”