Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (2 page)

On a different afternoon a few years earlier, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, a wealthy Orthodox Jewish trader walked in on a scene that he could not understand. His three-year-old son was standing over his sleeping older brother
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holding a knife, ready to stab him. “Why, my son, why?” the trader asked. The little boy said that he hated his brother.

The boy was going to hate a lot of people in his life—almost everyone, in fact. He would later declare
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that “the majority of the human race are dubs and dumbbells and have rotten judgment and no brains.” He would plunge his knife into many people, as soon as he had gained enough wealth and power to get other people to wield the weapon. Normally a man with his personality type would end up in prison, but this little boy didn’t. He was handed an industry where his capacity for violence was not just rewarded, but required: the new market for illegal drugs in North America. When he was finally shot—separated by twenty blocks, countless killings, and many millions of dollars from his sleeping brother on that night—he was a free man.

This is how Arnold Rothstein entered the drug war.

On yet another afternoon, in 1920, a six-year-old girl lay on the floor of a brothel in Baltimore listening to jazz records. Her mother was convinced
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this music was the work of Satan and wouldn’t let her hear a note of it at home, so the child offered to perform small cleaning tasks for the madam of the local whorehouse on one condition: instead of being paid a nickel like the other kids, she would take her pay on this floor, in rapt hours left alone to listen. It gave her a feeling
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she couldn’t describe—and she was determined, one day, to create this feeling in other people.

Even after she was raped, and after she was pimped, and after she started to inject heroin to take away the pain, this music would still be there waiting for her.

This is how Billie Holiday entered the drug war.

When Harry and Arnold and Billie were born, drugs were freely available throughout the world. You could go to any American pharmacy and buy products made from the same ingredients as heroin and cocaine. The most popular cough mixtures
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in the United States contained opiates, a new soft drink called Coca-Cola was made from the same plant as snortable cocaine, and over in Britain, the classiest department stores sold heroin tins for society women.

But they lived at a time when American culture was looking for an outlet for its swelling tide of anxiety—a real, physical object it could destroy, in the hope that this would destroy its fear of a world that was changing more rapidly than their parents and grandparents could ever have imagined. It settled on these chemicals. In 1914—a century ago—they resolved: Destroy them. Wipe them from the earth. Set yourself free.

As this decision was made, Harry and Arnold and Billie found themselves scattered across that first battlefield, and pressed into combat.

When Billie Holiday stood on stage,
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her hair was pulled back tightly, her face was round and shining in the lights, and her voice was scratched with pain. It was on one of these nights,
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in 1939, that she started to sing a song that would become iconic:

Southern trees bear a strange fruit,
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Blood on the leaves and blood at the root.

Before, black women had—with very few exceptions
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—been allowed on stage only as beaming caricatures, stripped of all real feeling. But now, here, she was Lady Day, a black woman expressing grief and fury at the mass murder of her brothers
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in the South—their battered bodies hanging from the trees.

“It was extremely brave, when you think about it,” her goddaughter Lorraine Feather told me. At that time, “every song was about love. You simply did not have a piece of music being performed at some hotel that was about the killing of people—about such a sordid and cruel fact. It was not done. Ever.” And to have an African American woman doing such a song? About lynching? But Billie did it because the song
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“seemed to spell out all the things that had killed” her father, Clarence, in the South.

The audience listened, hushed. Many years later, this moment would be called “the beginning of the civil rights movement.”
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Lady Day was ordered by the authorities to stop singing this song. She refused.

Her harassment by Harry’s Federal Bureau of Narcotics
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began the next day. Before long, he would play a crucial role in killing her.

From his first day in office, Harry Anslinger had a problem, and everybody knew it. He had just been appointed
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head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics—a tiny agency, buried in the gray bowels of the Treasury Department in Washington, D.C.—and it seemed to be on the brink of being abolished. This was the old Department of Prohibition, but prohibition had been abolished and his men needed a new role, fast. As he looked over his new staff
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just a few years before his pursuit of Billie began, he saw a sunken army who had spent fourteen years waging war on alcohol only to see alcohol win, and win big. These men were notoriously corrupt
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and crooked—but now Harry was supposed to whip them into a force capable of wiping drugs from the United States forever.

And that was only the first obstacle. Many drugs, including marijuana, were still legal,
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and the Supreme Court had recently ruled that people addicted to harder drugs should be dealt with by doctors, not bang-’em-up men like Harry. And then—almost before he had settled into
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his office chair—Harry’s budget was slashed by $700,000. What was the point of this department, this position, this work? It seemed his new kingdom of drug prohibition could crumble into bureaucratic history at any moment.

Within a few years, the stress of trying to hold this together and creating a role for himself would make all of Harry’s hair fall out
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and leave him looking, according to his staff, like a wrestler printed in primary colors
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on a fading poster.

Harry believed that the response
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to being dealt a weak hand should always be to dramatically raise the stakes. He pledged to eradicate all drugs, everywhere—and within thirty years, he succeeded in turning this crumbling department, with these disheartened men, into the headquarters for a global war that would last for a hundred years and counting. He could do it because he was a bureaucratic genius—and, even more crucially, because there was a deep strain in American culture that was waiting for a man like him, with a sure and certain answer to their questions about chemicals.

Ever since that day in his neighbor’s farmhouse, Harry had known that he wanted to lead the charge to wipe drugs from the earth—but nobody imagined that, from where he started, he could ever do it, never mind so quickly. His dad was a Swiss hairdresser
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who had fled his home in the mountains to avoid military conscription and eventually washed up in Pennsylvania, where he had nine kids. He couldn’t afford much schooling for them, so when the eighth child, Harry, was fourteen, he was forced to go out to work on the railroad.
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He was a determined boy,
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and he insisted on working for money in the afternoons and evenings so he could keep going to school every morning.

But it was in his paid work that Harry got his greatest education; there, laying the train tracks for the state of Pennsylvania, he got his first glimpse of something dark and hidden—and it would become his second lifelong obsession. It was his task to supervise
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a large number of recent Sicilian immigrants. Sometimes, he wrote, he heard them talking darkly in hushed asides about something called a “Black Hand.”
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Harry recorded their thoughts in the style of the pulp fiction thrillers he was obsessed with. You didn’t mention it in front of strangers. You didn’t mention it even in front of your family unless you had to. But it could destroy you with one swipe. What could this Black Hand be?
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Nobody would tell.

But one morning, Harry found one of his work crew
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—an Italian man named Giovanni—bleeding in a ditch. He had been shot multiple times. When Giovanni woke up in the hospital, Harry was there, ready to hear what had happened, but the workman was too terrified to speak. Anslinger spent hours assuring him that he could keep him and his family safe.

Finally, Giovanni spoke. He said he was being forced to pay protection money by a man called “Big Mouth Sam,” one of the thugs belonging to a group called the Mafia that had come to the United States from Sicily and remained hidden amidst the Italian immigrants. The Mafia, Giovanni told Harry, were engaged in all sorts of crimes, and people on the railroad were being charged a “terror tax”—you gave the Mafia money or else
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you ended up in a hospital bed like this, or worse.

Anslinger went to confront Big Mouth Sam—a “squat, black-haired and ox-shouldered” immigrant—and said, “If Giovanni dies, I’m going to see to it that you hang.
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Do you understand that?” Big Mouth tried to reply, but Harry insisted: “And if he lives and you ever bother him again, or any of my men, or try to shake any of them down any more, I’ll kill you with my own hands.”

After that, Anslinger became obsessed with the Mafia, at a time when most Americans refused to believe it even existed. This is hard for us to understand today, but the official position of every official in U.S. law enforcement until the 1960s—from J. Edgar Hoover on down—was that the Mafia was a preposterous conspiracy theory, no more real than the Loch Ness Monster.
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They reacted the way we would now if a law enforcement agent preached Trutherism, or Birtherism, or the belief that Freemasons are secretly manipulating world events: with bafflement at the idea that anyone could believe something so silly.
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