The Connect- with Johnny Mitchell - Exploring The Heart Of New York City's Drug Trade (Washington Heights) Ep. 27

Episode Date: March 9, 2023

Johnny returns to the Dominican neighborhood of Washington Heights, New York City- to explore the culture of drug trafficking and to pay homage to the place that made him rich. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Even though this is a drug-infested neighborhood, you can't even tell because everybody's out, everybody's very friendly. All the dirt and the grime and the crime is, it's under the surface. That's when I see lights behind me start to flash. I didn't even think. I just hit it. I was driving like my life depended on. Then I parked the car, hopped out, closed the door, and I started running. And he pulls out a burner, shank. It's like six inches.

And he passes it to me. And he goes, here, that's yours. Don't ever leave the cell block without this. the reason I made it out of that place alive. What's up, everyone? Welcome back to The Connect. My name is Johnny Mitchell. As always, follow us on social media. Subscribe to us on YouTube and turn on alerts so you get notified whenever we drop new content. Listen to us on Spotify, iTunes. You can listen to all of these episodes. Go over there and download us right now. And of course, the Patreon. Patreon.com slash the Connect show. It's where we drop our weekly podcast episodes of The Connect. And you get all that behind

the scenes footage as well, stuff that's too raw to show you on YouTube. It's the best way to support us. All right, you guys, let's get into the episode. All right, so if you're a fan of the show, you know that I made my money as a weed man, a weed trafficker in one of the last eras where you could blow up and get rich selling marijuana. And the way I did that was shipping it across the country to the East Coast, where the markup was double, even triple what you could make selling in Oregon and on the West Coast. I had several groups of buyers who I would ship my product to.

Some came in and out, some didn't last. There were two groups of people, though, that really were thorough, real scramblers, as we used to call them. One was a group of mob-connected Italian kids, young guys like me out of Philadelphia. But the other group was the group that really made me more money

than I could have ever imagined. This was a group of Dominican drug dealers, from the neighborhood of Washington Heights in New York City. While we were in New York City filming with our friend Unique, the Kingpin from Harlem, we decided to take a trip up to Washington Heights to pay homage to the neighborhood that made us rich. So when you reach a certain level of the drug game, you kind of lose touch with how it is that your product gets distributed. I would just send out huge amounts of marijuana and then cash would come back to me. It was like magic.

I thought it would be cool to actually go. to the territory where my product got funneled and distributed to consumers on the final end of the chain. This is where Washington Heights begins. And back in the day, this was one of my main buying spots. This is where I used to get my pounds from Portland to the Dominican gangs that run this entire neighborhood. It's all Dominicans.

And what I found was that my merchandise helped to launch a culture and a reputation for Washington Heights that persists throughout New York City to this day. So many of my grams have been smoked up in this very neighborhood. Yeah, this is the neighborhood that it came to because this is where this has the reputation for that good good weed and that was coming out of Portland, Oregon. And that reputation is uptown. What is Washington Heights? It is a small, very beautiful neighborhood at the very top of Manhattan Island. And for many years in the early 20th century, it was exclusively a Jewish neighborhood. And in about the mid to late 70s, it became an enclave for newly arrived immigrants

from the Dominican Republic. And there are other island counterparts were the Jamaicans, who settled mostly in Brooklyn. So if you're a cartel from Columbia or Mexico, you can send as much product up to America as you want, but if you don't have anybody on the other end to receive it and move it on the retail level, you're stuck. And that's where the Dominicans and the Jamaicans really stepped up and made organizations, like those in Mexico and Columbia, very, very wealthy. And I don't know why. I don't know what it was about that island that just made them gangsters.

Probably the history of it, right? Just like Jamaicans. They were really the ones who were able to take that product wholesale from the cartels, organize themselves, and distribute it on a retail street level. All these blocks used to have what we used to call as companies, right? Because, you know, you had the Dominicans were set up like a real company structure with their drug trade. It wasn't like what you see on TV,

crackheads and the Bronx. No, it was, they ran these things like a real company. You had your salesperson. You had the manager. You had the general manager who's coming to supply the manager. They ran it like a real company. You had to look out on the corner. It sounds like they were Dominican's fresh from the island.

Fresh from the island and everybody had a job. At the beginning of the cocaine boom, the two major markets were Miami and New York. City. Miami was easy for the Colombians because there was so many Colombian immigrants there already that they naturally became the distributors of the wholesale bricks coming up from Medellin and Kali. New York didn't have those kind of numbers of Colombian immigrants. They needed foot soldiers to help get the volume up. So in the early 80s, when Dominicans started flooding New York City and specifically Washington Heights, as Spanish speakers, naturally they allied with the

and became the exclusive retailers of Colombian cocaine bricks. And because they populated neighborhoods like Washington Heights and Inwood at the very top of Manhattan, this is how Uptown became associated with the best neighborhood in New York City to cop cocaine. Drug dealers from all five boroughs would head up to Washington Heights where they could find a source that had the best product at the lowest price and then take that back to their respective neighborhoods where they would either sell. it off as powder or cook it up into crack cocaine. Washington Heights is strategically one of the best

locations in New York for drug trafficking. It's flanked on both sides by major freeways. On the east side, you have the FDR drive. On the west side, you have the west side highway. And then you have I-95, which takes you directly into 165th Street in the very heart of Washington Heights, which can then pop you up to the Bronx, Westchester, into Connecticut, or it can take you back through into New Jersey, Pennsylvania and into upstate New York. We're uptown, which is closer to the George Washington Bridge, which is closer to Connecticut, which is closer to Pennsylvania. You know, so you've got all these areas.

This is the tri-state area. You're closer to Connecticut. All these things, Jersey. So all these different states, especially at those times when Unique was outside, you have no choice but to come to New York and get whatever you need it because this is the hub. This is the hub. Like the hub for the whole East Coast. And because of that, the drug dealers had to be very noticeable.

You had to be outside because, like I said, there were players coming from all over the tri-state, and they would drive here. And it's a gamble, right? Like you said, it's a rolling dice, but you've got to come here and actually see the person physically. You can't just call somebody. You've got to show up.

So in the 80s and 90s, you could just drive through the heights and see a black dude speaking rapid-fire Spanish. And you would see. You can tell that there. There's a bit. Back then, there was a lot of people always hanging outside, but you can see the difference. You know, because you're in the underground, you know what you're looking for.

You get to the block. You're looking for the two, three dudes that look familiar, right? So that's what you're looking for, right? And that's what it would be. Physically, you would have to be there and see it. You do see these out of town place and you see guys searching and looking and you stop them, and you tell them, yo, and they go, yo, what's up, you know? And you have the conversation right there and there.

And literally, weigh out whatever you needed right there and send you on you. your way. Dude, look at this building right here. This is crazy, right? Like, it's, uh, it looks nice, but then you go inside of one of them and, uh, it's fucked up still. But, you know, it's like the Spanish people, even though this is a drug-infested neighborhood, you can't even tell because everybody's out, everybody's very friendly. Like, it reminds me of Latin America, where all the dirt and the grime and the crime is, it's under the surface. There's a certain warmth to Washington Heights. It's an immigrant neighborhood and it's got that Latin solidarity. When you come in, you had these different buildings that's hidden so you can do what you want to do.

So I heard back in the day sometimes when the cops will be running chasing somebody through the courtyard, people would be leaning out the windows throwing shit at the cops. Exactly. You know what I mean? So that's how everybody look out for everybody, you know? There's a sense of pride in the community. When you're there, you don't feel like you're in the ghetto. You come up here, you'd be respectful. They came out. They was real respectful. And they took care of their property.

Every morning they was out here sweeping and washing down the sidewalk, you know, and just made sure everything was proper, you know? And, you know, they knew that we was hustling and we made sure. The neighborhood was safe. Nobody bothered the regular business owners or the patrons that came through. It was just all respect and love up here, man. But the culture of high-level drug trafficking has been there. There's a history in the heights of a ready of a big, of a lot.

large drug trade in a large situation where people did already exchange these things. And it was the 70s and 80s that really set that foundation. The average Dominican makes about $50 per month, barely enough money to survive. Selling crack cocaine on the streets of America, they can make thousands of dollars in profits every week. It's a temptation that more and more people here are finding hard to resist. What's up, you guys? I've got to take a minute to thank our amazing sponsor for today's episode, Manscape,

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It's unbeatable. You guys, do yourself a favor and start grooming the right way. Let's get back into the episode. So now it's the mid-90s, and the crack era has started to wane. The Colombian super cartels, Kali and Medellin, collapsed. The first-generation Dominican kingpins either got locked up or they fled back to the DR. But it was their children, the second-generation Dominicans, who stepped in to fill the void. and they found a new product

to kind of make up for the sluggish coke sales. They was here selling the cocaine, but then the younger generation after that, that smoked the weed, they started getting the good weed. And they got nothing but their best weed. And that was, you got it, marijuana from the West Coast. Because before, you know, for example, you had to invest, I don't know, maybe $30,000 into a brick of cocaine

for you to go ahead and, you know, flip that or whatever the case may be, which now you take that same thing. $30,000 and you go buy 20 pounds of haze and you kind of getting the same points now, right? Because now before back then, you will make a couple thousand wholesale all for sour, off a haze. So as you know, if you've been watching the channel, most of the weed in America back in the 70s and 80s was imported. First from the Colombians, then the Jamaicans, and then finally the Mexican cartels, specifically Guadalajara. But in the 90s, on the West Coast, is when domestic marijuana really started the beach. boom, specifically in the northwest, where I'm from.

And as time moved on, more and more West Coast traffickers realized they had a gold mine in the Midwest and East Coast markets. Back then, you buy a pound of weed from Portland, and it'll be a coming two pound bags. They couldn't get the quality that we had. All that imploded weed that they had from Mexico was like garbage compared to the shit that we had in Northern California and Southern Oregon, the stuff

that I was moving. And when you go buy the weed, you know the little wood chucks that they put around a tree like that for make it look good? They'll actually take the wood chucks because it was brown like the weed and throw it in the bag and mix it in with it and use the wood chucks as the weight. So you might get a quarter pound and you get three and a half ounces. You know what I mean? Of weed and you get a half ounce of woodchalk. You know what I mean? And in Unique's time in the early 90s, West Coast Bud in New York was a lot of.

luxury. None of that stuff existed, you know, until maybe like 15 years ago for us here, right? And then even 15 years ago, it was still very rare, like for you to get sour, like... Most people were still smoking Mexican bud. Unique had that purple or that sour diesel or the haze. These were synonyms for West Coast weed. You got weed from Portland, Oregon. You're going to make the most money because everybody's coming to get it because it had that good green, that fluffy with the purple hairs and, you know what I mean? No seeds, never, you know what I mean? Every drug dealer in New York City

wanted a West Coast connect, a Portland connect, a Cali connect. So somebody had a Portland Arden connect, that was like having a Colombian connect, you know what I mean, for cocaine. That's the equivalent with the weed when you talk about Portland. We had the best weed at the lowest wholesale prices, and it was endless.

The good chronic starts coming from Portland, Oregon, right? my hometown where I was, you know, shipping pounds out of. Many, many, many grams. It was cheaper. Right. It was cheaper and better. But if you didn't have that West Coast plug, that Oregon-Calie Connect, you had to go somewhere like Florida,

where they have really high-grade bud, but you're paying a lot more, and you would have to shop around and go out to multiple different sources just to try to find something that fit your budget and your quality demands. Even then, it was a little bit different because it wasn't just one person in Miami.

as well. You will shop. You will go down to Miami and shop. You had one guy, but if that guy had nothing, maybe he'll go and shop for you, but then maybe you go ahead and shop with somebody else. And you'll bump into other New Yorkers over there, right? Because it's like, oh, shit, yo, what's up? You know, I found this much. How much did you find? And then sometimes, you know, we'll exchange. You'll exchange maybe work or money or whatever it was, right? And it was those second generation of Dominican immigrants in Washington Heights, the descendants of the crack and Coke Kingpins of the 80s who stepped up and started moving West Coast weed. 2001, 2002, you know, all like my brothers just started coming home.

I had a bunch of, you know, all their friends were coming home. And they went through a transition from Coke to weed. Right. Because now haze is a big deal, and you can make thousands of dollars on haze. Memorial Day weekend is almost here, and it's time to kick off summer right. When I'm getting ready for the first big weekend of summer, Total Wine and More is my go-toe, especially when I'm firing up the grill with family.

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So it was the spring of 2010, and I was out in Philly meeting with my buyers down there. I was doing a little bit of networking, checking on operations. And one night we were out partying, and I was buying out the bar, being a good supplier, so to speak. And I meet this kid named Alex, this really good-looking, light-skinned Dominican guy. And he was a good kid. He was a college kid. He went to Rutgers. He wasn't involved in the street. But his cousins were. And as soon as he found out what I did and where I was from, he got all excited.

He was like, oh, my cousins would love to meet you. And I needed new customers at the time. I didn't want to rely fully on the kids who were moving for me in Philly. So I thought, let's expand the market a little bit, Mitchell. And I agreed to go up to New York and meet with these guys. So the next day, instead of flying back to Portland, I took the Amtrak from Philly up to New York. I get on the subway at Penn Station with the address that Alex had given me. And I took the train up to the heights to Inwood, actually, the very tip of the island.

You could see the Bronx on the other side of the river. He told me I was looking for a street called Dyckman. So I get off the subway at Dykman, and I go to the address that Alex gave me, and I meet his cousins. And they operated at the back of a Boost Mobile store, right there on the commercial strip, right on Dykman. Real nice guys. Very Latin, welcoming. Oh, you're a friend to Alex? Okay.

Oh, you're from Portland? Oh, I'd never been to California, you know? Just good dudes, potheads, right? They explained to me that they either owned or had agreements with all of the small business owners in that little area that they controlled in Washington Heights. The beauty supply store, the nail salon, the produce guy, even the dental office on the corner.

They arranged it so they could use these businesses to receive as many packages as I could get them. You know, they use people's apartments in the block to me to store stuff and pay them, so everybody was on a payroll, you know what I mean? This is how the Heights works. Ordinary people will facilitate an illegal activity. I mean, it's poor.

People are struggling. And like you said, these are fresh off the boat from the DR. You know, they're coming from the third world country. Santa Domingo, you get killed for nothing. Absolutely. Same situation as the Jamaicans. It's rough. You have a rough childhood.

You know, like their gang fights were a little bit different. They're chopping each other up with machete. So they come here, it's a little bit easier for them. They're like, oh, I just got to stand here and wait for people. I'm not going to rob nobody. I'm going to do it. I'm going to make all the money in the world and send them back home. Yeah.

This is the kind of solidarity that exists in the Heights. So when I got back to Portland, I had shipping labels made with the addresses over in New York connected to phony addresses in Portland. And I started shipping them the product. I couldn't move it fast enough. Part of the reason I moved it so fast was I was giving it to them for the long. I would get pounds, so we buy them in southern Oregon, in the forest where they're grown. And, you know, I would buy a pound of weed for 2,000.

And I would sell it to my guys out here for 3,200. I didn't realize it at the time, but I was severely undercutting myself on the price that I charged them per pound. I was giving them them them sheds for like 35. Oh, yeah, that's super love. And that's like that back then. I knew something was strange when they asked me what the ticket was, and I told them 3,200 a pound. and I got no pushback. I can remember when Sawa was a $6,000 pound.

But it wasn't until this trip to Washington Heights that I realized how much money I lost out on. They had more demand that I could give them. Of course, of course. Well, think about it like this. But they were turning around and wholesaling for six. They were wholesale and break it down. Just so you understand,

we selling at the time is 0.4 for $10. That's... Do you understand? Point four. Yeah. point eight, maybe a point nine for $20. Yeah. Back then, my West Coast weed went for about 6,000 a pound wholesale in New York City.

They were making more money wholesaling my shit than I was. I could have made twice as much money as I did if I had just known what to charge them. They must have been devastated when I got locked up. Because they never haggled with me. No, you never haggle because- You should probably charge these guys. Absolutely. Now I can't because they are so used to the ticket.

Well, think about it. You're still alive. The Dominicans made me more money in a shorter amount of time than any other group of people that I ship product. I preferred them over the Italian kids. Those were good guys, but they were not really street guys. Their family was. They were legacy mafia kids, but they planned on moving on after college.

They planned on becoming legit in something other than drug dealing. The Dominicans, that's what they did. They were street guys. They were dope dealers at the end of the day. I wanted somebody who was in it for life. So then, of course, I took a fall. I got locked up, and I lost touch with those cats from the Heights. But years later, I returned to Dyckman to see how the neighborhood had changed

and how the game had changed since New York legalized weed. All right now, we're up here on our dikemen. You know what I mean? So we're going to sit. We ain't going to hit the side speed. Everybody know what it is. But this is where all the weeds used to come back in the day to get the best, what we call chronic over to Mecca.

the moths, you know what I mean? So this is where all the weed was at. And this is Dominican town, man. It's Dominican land. In many ways, it's changed a lot. And in some ways, it's still like the 1980s. My producer and I went to buy a bag of weed just as an experiment. And we walked into one of these little alleyways below one of those old tenement buildings.

And they were selling weed like Unique used to sell it at his herb gate spot back in the 1970s. But unlike back then, they had a menu on a white tree. board that was plastered to the side of the wall. Okay, so this is like a typical Washington Heights weed spot. So it's through one of these little walkways at the side of the buildings. And what you do is you come down here and usually there's a door back here, right? It's usually like a whole iron door. And what they'll do is there'll be some dudes on the other side of this and there'll just be a hole cutout in the side of the door.

And you just tell them what you want. and you'll pass them through a 20 or 40, 100, whatever, and I'll just slip you back, your chronic. It's that simple, you know? And then what are the cops going to do? They can't get in here. Take them a half an hour. They'll have to cut the whole thing out.

And by that time, you're fucking long gone. So, yeah, that's, and there's spots like that all over this neighborhood, just dotted through it. So there's that part of Washington Heights, that real trap drug dealer operations that still go on. But then later that day, we walked past a guy who basically had an ice cream truck filled with different weed flavors selling it right out of the open.

He was parked right on the street in front of the projects. Okay, so right behind me, there's a weed truck just right out in the open selling 20 bags of good wheat, fire, stuff you would see in like a dispensary in California. And it's just like an old van that they post on the side of the road like it's a lemonade stand or something. So that's the evolution, right?

Like it's probably weed that comes from Portland, probably from the West Coast. But they're out here selling it in the open, cops don't care, nobody's fucking with it. You got the menu up here. One gram of good weed, 15 bucks. So that's how much the prices have come down. Back in 2010, in my day,

they could probably get $35 for a gram of good weed, like fire, indoor weed that they're selling here. So you just see, like, the whole country is flooded now. We interviewed some guys, some locals, born and raised in Washington Heights. And so now here I am in a building in Washington Heights, talking with dudes, maybe not these exact people, but, you know, a weed man. Somebody. Yeah, similar situation for sure.

Okay, cool. So tell me, tell us who you are. All right, well, my name is Ramon Reyes. I have a brand called Happy Monkey, Born in Rays, New York, Washington Heights. They called themselves Legacy Kids. Legacy guy my whole life, and what we mean by Legacy is basically the street guys, right? They used to operate in the old world, in the underground. They were drug dealers.

Did you start working in Washington Heights? All day. Gotcha. Born and raised. So that's where I started everything. Everything I learned it in my full walls, in my apartment before I even came outside. They started out as corner boys and guys who would wave customers down on the streets back in the day.

So you grow up in these things just like, for example, like Goodfellas, right? In Goodfellas, you see him at a young age doing all these things for the homies on the block, right? You ain't even there yet, but you get paid for doing errands. You get paid for us. It had to translate because you had the black guys from Pennsylvania coming to buy drugs. They don't know what they talk about. So I would just get paid just to translate. Then they had their own weed spots where they were working off packs.

So by the time I kind of made my own little wounds, I had my brother in the game already, right? So he was coming back and forth. He was growing in Miami. So I was able to take my little chips and kind of work for them, right? And my guys up here in Washington Heights, I would able to like, you know, know, maybe one of his friends know that I'm going down to Miami, they'll send me down with some money and something like that, right? So I'll win extra money doing things on the side for my guys and still do stuff for me, right? So I was able to kind of use that money, go down to Miami,

buy with them, right? So I'll have, let's say, I don't know, anywhere from $5 to $10,000 on my own and put it in with them, I was able to put the packs together, right? And finally, they met guys like me and started importing it wholesale. That changed the game, right? Because now you got a whole menu. Before it wasn't even a menu. Now you've got a whole menu of these different streams and, you know, the young guys are coming up. Now the weed is legal in New York, many of them, like the growers who we interviewed down in Sinaloa, Mexico, are transitioning into the legal game. Between me and my partner, we did apply for a card license, what we call it here. So it's a program that they have that the state has had that unleashed retail licenses to those who were affected by the war on drugs.

Like myself, you know, I was convicted and I ended up a probation with someone. weed because they caught me with some weed. So we definitely apply for some retail. So if we get the retail, I'm definitely open up a brick and mortar in New York City. Absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely. Oh yeah. They take pride in their product, just like they take pride in their neighborhood. They consider themselves artists on a certain level. And so they soon will have their own grow operations and be operating legal weed storefronts, just like they're doing down in Mexico and just like we're doing here on the West Coast. Follow us on Instagram is Happy Monkey with the U-H-A-A-W-P-Y-M-U-N-K-E-Y underscore.

Happy Monkey, follow us. New York City is my favorite place on Earth, and Washington Heights is my favorite neighborhood, if only because she made me rich. A lot of money runs New York, so it's not gang culture, it's money culture. Sure, right? All right, guys, that's been today's episode.

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