Pardon my French.
I dealt with this story yesterday, but even as I was busy moving today, I couldn’t help but think about this story for some reason. So once I got settled in, I cranked up the computer and Ye Olde Internets, and took another look at it. Now I know what was bothering me.
NYP:
Cop-slay alliance smashed
Crips & Bloods suckers taken down
Bloods and Crips in a rough corner of Queens put their beef on ice to form a murderous, drug-pushing union that was caught on wiretaps plotting to use a sniper rifle to pick off beat cops from rooftops, authorities said yesterday.
The gangbangers were among 104 thugs busted for a massive drug and gun operation, where some members also brazenly boasted on YouTube rap videos they would “spray the Man” with bullets, sources said.
Police Commissioner Ray Kelly and Queens DA Richard Brown announced the arrests as part of a large-scale probe focused on the “Flocc” street gang.
Based in Far Rockaway and Jamaica, the gang alliance raked in $15,000 a week from peddling guns and narcotics, but were secretly wiretapped for hundreds of hours during the two-year probe dubbed Operation Under Siege.
During one eavesdropping session, cops overheard Keith Livingston venting about how uniformed cops flooding crime-plagued Sutphin Boulevard were interfering with his drug-dealing operations last September.
“I’m going to shoot the beat walkers,” Livingston, a Blood associate, declared as he allegedly laid out an assassination plan that included hiding out on a rooftop and blazing away with a gun.
Not that I ever thought that black gang-banger dope dealers were the sharpest tacks in the rug, but they’re even dumber than I thought. Dumbasses.
Let’s argue for the sake of discussion that Mr. Livingston et al.’s plot wasn’t broken up, and indeed would have come to pass. He would have been successful in scaring the cops to stay out of his particular section of Queens. While he thinks that would have been good for “business,” it would have worked against him in the long run.
The reason the illicit drug trade is so lucrative is because it is so risky. (“With great risk comes great reward,” goes the old saying.) The reason it’s so risky is because: (1) Buying, selling and transporting those drugs are illegal, and (2) The authorities enforce those laws just enough, Goldilocks-like. What I mean by that is that if they enforced those laws too well, then even the biggest money on Earth wouldn’t be worth going into the dope dealing business. If they rarely enforce them, then the business isn’t risky, ergo the reward isn’t great.
If the NYPD were driven out of his neighborhood, what do you think would happen to the price of drugs there? It would go through the floor. It wouldn’t go down too far, though, because there is still the risky matter of getting the dope from its place of manufacture in Mexico or South America, across the U.S. border, and from there to New York City. However, since the long-distance transporters would be the only ones taking the risks, they would get virtually all the rewards.
If drugs were totally legalized, like tomorrow, then things like weed and crack would eventually become nothing more than typical low-margin commodities like corn and wheat. Let me ask you this — How many part time clerks at a convenience store that sells Doritos and Wheat Thins do you know drive Escalades with chrome spinners, kilowatt subwoofers, DVD changers and multiple LCD TV screens? Mr. Livingston would have only served to reduce his own standard of living.
