Robbing Drug Dealers

NEW LINES IN CRIMINOLOGY

An Aldine de Gruyter Series of Texts and Monographs

SERIES EDITOR
Thomas G. Blomberg, Florida State University

Thomas G. Blomberg and Karol Lucken

American Penology
A History of Control

Bruce A. Jacobs
Robbing Drug Dealers
Violence Beyond the Law
Robbing Drug Dealers
Violence Beyond the Law

BRUCE A. JACOBS

Aldine de Gruyter
New York
About the Author

Bruce A. Jacobs
Associate Professor of Criminology and Fellow, Center for Metropoli-
tan Studies, University of Missouri-St. Louis.

Copyright 02000 by Walter de Gruyter, Inc., New York

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Jacobs, Bruce A. (Bruce Abel), 1968-

Robbing drug dealers : violence beyond the law / Bruce A. Jacobs.
p. cm. -- (New lines in criminology)
Includes biblographical references and index.
ISBN 0-202-30647-X (cloth : alk. paper) -- ISBN 0-202-30648-8
(pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Robbery. 2. Narcotics dealers--Crimes against. I. Title. 11. Series.

HV6652.J332200
364 ‘52--dc21
00-056983

Manufactured in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
 Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments vii

1 Researching Drug Robbery 1

with Richard Wright

2 Motivation 23

3 Target Selection 47

4 Enactment 73

5 Managing Retaliation 111

6 Order Beyond the Law 129

References 147
Index 163

V
This page intentionally left blank
 Preface and
Acknow Zedgments

R
ATES OF ARMED ROBBERY have been declining steadily for
the better part of ten years. Much of the decline has been
ttributed to decreases in crack use, incapacitation effects
from swelling prison populations, and the absorption of offenders
into a rapidly expanding U.S. economy (Blumsteinand Rosenfeld
1998).Yet some criminologists assert that the decline may, at least
in part, be illusory, and that offenders are simply shifting to vic-
tims who can’t or won’t call the police (Johnson, personal com-
munication).Foremost among such targets are drug dealers who,
in many ways, represent the perfect victim.
They are visible, accessible, and plentiful. They deal only in
cash. Many are targets of their own making- flossing, bragging,
or otherwise calling attention to themselves. Others are identified
through gossip or inside [Link] urban topography pro-
vides numerous staging areas from which to attack them. Rob-
beries can be melded with drug purchases, allowing perpetrators
to capitalize on the element of surprise. Compliance is secured
rapidly and at acceptable risk. Bystanders are reluctant to inter-
vene; on the streets, no one wants to get involved in someone
else’s troubles. The threat of retaliation is real but can be reduced

vii
viii Preface and Acknowledgments

to tolerable levels. And dealers obviously cannot go to the police

to report their victimization.
Despite the widely held assumption that violence is something
that happens only (or primarily) to law-abiding citizens, the dis-
proportionate share of criminal victims are themselves involved
in crime. Yet extant scholarship has failed to explore the contin-
gencies that mediate offenses such as drug robbery-from the
forces that inspire it, to the methods used to select targets, to the
means employed to generate compliance, to the tactics used to
thwart retaliatory attempts after the crime has ended. Given that
predatory behavior between and among offenders ultimately
spreads to society writ large (the so-called contagion effect), a re-
search gap of striking proportions has emerged. This book
intends to fill this gap, drawing from the accounts of active of-
fenders.
No book ever is written in isolation, and I would like to take
this opportunity to thank several persons who have been instru-
mental in its development and execution. My sincere apprecia-
tion goes to Richard Wright for convincing me to take an even
tighter focus on armed robbery, and that such a focus would be
worthwhile. Richard provided the catalyzing force necessary to
get this study up and running, and wrote most of the grant pro-
posal responsible for funding the research. His initial enthusiasm
was as contagious as the conflict spirals he kept harping on. Spe-
cial thanks also go to Volkan Topalli, a vital member of the research
team, whose incisive interviewing style brought out nuances in
the data I might have otherwise missed. His cool management
of volatile informants was invaluable as well; on numerous oc-
casions, Volkan defused combustible situations with a firm and
steady hand. Thanks go as well to my esteemed colleagues in
the Department of Criminology at the University of Missouri-
St. Louis. The manuscript is much better off for the advice, coun-
sel, and criticism offered by Eric Baumer, Bob Bursik, Jennifer
Bursik, Scott Decker, Dave Klinger, Janet Lauritsen, Volkan To-
palli, and (especially) Rick Rosenfeld and Richard Wright. I am
indebted to Laurie Mitchell, transcriptionist extraordinaire,
whose ear for street dialect is matched only by her conscien-
tiousness and attention to detail. I also would like to extend my
Preface and Acknowledgments ix

gratitude to Bruce Johnson, whose advice and contacts have

proved invaluable, both personally and professionally. As al-
ways, thanks go to my loving wife Jennifer for her support and
perceptive editorial suggestions, to my parents Lynn and Frank,
to my brother and sister (David and Joy), and to my son Noah
Benjamin, just for being there. Finally, I would like to thank
Richard Koffler, executive editor at Aldine de Gruyter. His open-
ness to a ”cold pitch” at the American Society of Criminology’s
(ASC) annual meeting in Toronto will be forever appreciated. U1-
timately, this book would not have been possible without his
leadership and guidance.
The research on which this manuscript is based was funded by
Grant No. 98-1SDRP from the National Consortium on Violence
Research. Points of view or opinions expressed in this book are
those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of
the funding agency. Portions of Chapter 1 were reprinted with
permission from Criminology (2000) 38:171-98 (Bruce A. Jacobs,
Volkan Topalli, and Richard Wright) and Northeastern Universi-
ty Press (BruceA. Jacobs, Dealing Crack: The Social World of Street-
corner Selling, Boston, 1999). Chapter 5 was adapted from
Criminology (2000) 38:171-98 (Bruce A. Jacobs, Volkan Topalli,
and Richard Wright). Segments of this article also appear else-
where in the book, and are again reprinted with permission.
This page intentionally left blank
 CHAPTER ONE

Researching
Drug Robbery
with Richard Wright

F
EW SOCIAL SETTINGS are more perilous than the world of
street-corner drugs. Burns and rip-offs are taken-for-granted
features of the scene. Exploiting others for material gain is
to be expected in a context systematically organized around mu-
tual predation (Jacobs 1999:66). Robbing drug dealers figures
prominently. Their allure as targets is not difficult to fathom. They
are plentiful, visible, and accessible. They deal strictly in cash and
tend to have lots of it; drug selling is a high-volume, repeat busi-
ness. Their merchandise is valuable, portable, and flexible; it can
be used, sold, or both. They often wear clothing and jewelry with
considerable monetary worth and greater trophy value; on the
streets, filched property enhances the taker’s status (Anderson
1999:30, 75). Drug sellers cannot rely on bystanders to come to
their aid; operative norms dictate that witnesses mind their own
business or suffer the consequences. They have no recourse to the
police either: black market entrepreneurs cannot be ”victims”
and therefore lack access to official means of grievance redress.
Drug sellers are scapegoats and held responsible, both rightly
and wrongly, for the wholesale destruction of individuals and
communities alike, which legitimizes them as victims.

1
2 Researching Drug Robbery

A widely recognized feature of the urban street scene, drug rob-

beries rarely appear in official crime statistics. This owes largely
to their extralegal status. But these offenses are important. They
make an enormous contribution to the violent reputation of many
high-crime neighborhoods; as many as 50 percent of all drug-
related homicides may be a consequence of drug robbery and re-
lated forms of predation (see Brownstein et al. 1992).They play a
crucial role in shaping the interactional environment within which
illicit transactions are conducted. They can fuel officialrates of se-
rious violence, resulting in injuries or deaths that cannot be cov-
ered up. This may trigger a contagion of aggression, whereby
widening circles of persons are drawn into emergent conflicts (at-
tempts to settle grievances generate countergrievances and this,
in turn, spawns lethal retaliatory cycles; see Blumstein 1995;
Tedeschi and Felson 1994). ”Imperfect retaliation” may be one
consequence-vengeance-driven crimes in which victims seek to
restore reciprocity at some innocent third party’s expense. The
instability that results can have serious and long-term conse-
quences, within drug markets and beyond them.
For all of the studies on street robbery, and there are many (see,
for example, Cook 1976;Feeney 1986;Gabor et al. 1987;Katz 1988;
Pettiway 1982; Shover 1996; Wright and Decker 1997),none have
explored the contextual, situational, and interactional factors that
mediate drug robberies. This omission is as glaring as it is under-
standable. The imprudence of robbing other criminals is widely
assumed. Offenders are thought to be armed, organized, and
pugnacious. The specter of material loss and reputational dam-
age makes resistance a foregone conclusion. The latter can be par-
ticularly intolerable and thereby energize reprisal all by itself: To
give in without a fight is to punk out. And to punk out chances
the ultimate stigma. Indeed, cowards will find that their criminal
careers come to a rapid and ignominious end. In the criminal un-
derworld, there is no place, or mercy, for the weak.
Yet criminologists paradoxically observe that a major benefit of
robbing fellow criminals is that they cannot report the offense to
authorities (Wright and Decker 1997). The obvious question
emerges: Why should offenders elect to reduce their chances of
getting arrested at the cost of increasing their odds of being
Researching Drug Robberies 3

killed? What is it that allows them to accept this putatively

greater risk?
The present book aims to address this and related questions,
exploring the dynamics that make robbing drug dealers not only
acceptable, but preferred. It examines the evolution of the of-
fense-from the forces that inspire it, to the methods used to se-
lect targets, to the means employed to generate compliance, to the
tactics used to thwart retaliatory attempts after the crime has end-
ed. It investigates the totality of offender decision making,
assessing the ways in which motivational factors, situational
characteristics, and environmental cues come together in the
mind of the criminal to both trigger and shape the offense. It ex-
plores the interactional contingencies that swirl around all phas-
es of such crimes, posing and answering a number of important
questions. How, for example, does the possession or presence of
weapons, actual or perceived, shape the planning and commis-
sion of drug robberies? How is victim compliance defined and se-
cured in an inherently dangerous and unstable context? How do
spatial, physical, and temporal features of the offending context
influence offender decision making? How do fears of victim re-
taliation enter into the decision-making calculus before, during,
and after offenses?
Answers to these questions are situated within a larger phe-
nomenological context. Criminal decision making, after all, does
not occur in a vacuum. It is essential to specify precisely how im-
portant foreground influences mediate, and are mediated by, of-
fender behavior. The analytic framework applied to do this is a
hybrid of rational choice theory and phenomenological interac-
tionism (see Wright and Decker 1994). Both focus on the imme-
diate circumstances relevant to crime and its commission. Both
also highlight the situational and sequential nature of criminal
decision making (Wright and Decker 1994).Rational choice theo-
ry, however, treats the process as a calculated and deliberate one;
offenders carefully weigh the costs and benefits of a contemplat-
ed act before determining the best course of action. "As such, it
stresses the objective factors that shape offenders' decisions . . . "
(Wright and Decker 1994:31).Phenomenological interactionism,
by contrast, explores "feeling" states as the driving force behind
4 Researching Drug Robbery

choice. Subjective issues are paramount; crime is a function of

emotion and flows of behavior as they interface with ongoing so-
cial activity. Combining the two approaches permits the assess-
ment of the dual impact of ”hard, verifiable contingencies” (such
as risks, rewards, and physical obstacles; Wright and Decker
1994:31)and mood /intuition on emergent conduct. The tensions,
dilemmas, and contradictions that result-and their larger im-
plications for order and violence beyond the law-emerge as core
concerns of the book. Indeed, chapter 6 concludes the monograph
by attempting to resolve them.
A study of drug robbery is urgently needed. Not only could it
lead to a better understanding of how cycles of urban street vio-
lence are promoted and intensified, it might also suggest critical
points of intervention to break these cycles before they spin out
of control. The best way to accomplish this is to go to the offend-
ers themselves. They have a unique firsthand perspective of un-
deniable importance. The book takes a ”naturalistic” approach to
this end, exploring the offense from the perspective of those who
actually commit such crimes (see also Matza 1969).

DRUGS AND CRIME

Drug robbery is situated squarely within the drugs-crime

nexus, one of the most powerful and exhaustively studied rela-
tionships in all of criminology. Despite some quibbling about
causal order, the general consensus is that drug use, especially
hard-drug use, succeeds criminal behavior but then intensifies it
(see, for example, Ball et al. 1983; Nurco et al. 1981; Shaffer et al.
1985).This intensification most often is attributed to an increas-
ing need to generate large amounts of cash to sustain a habit.
Psychopharmacological, economically compulsive, and systemic
factors are principally implicated (Goldstein 1985).
Drugs affect mood, resulting in increased excitability, irra-
tionality, and aggressiveness. Consumption becomes very ex-
pensive very quickly, inciting users to commit income-generating
crimes to maintain (or increase) their levels of use; the heaviest
Drugs and Crime 5

users commit the most offenses, the widest variety, and the most
serious of them (Inciardi 1986). Predation and violence, finally,
are said to inhere structurally in drug markets. This is a function
of chronic disputes over finances, product quality, and turf: indi-
viduals who "mess with the money" must pay the consequences;
burned customers retaliate lest they be burned again; market
share is acquired by seizing it from others. Though legal firms
face many of the same dilemmas, they have institutional means
available to resolve conflicts. On the streets, the principal means
of grievance-redress is violence (Brownstein 2000:47; Maher
1997:196; see also Goldstein 1985; Hughes 1977).
Though the drugs-violence relationship has been investi-
gated less systematically than it perhaps deserves-most stud-
ies are correlational and ignore mediating foreground influ-
ences as well as situational contingencies (for an example, see
Kingery et al. 1992)-it has received substantial scholarly at-
tention nonetheless. Research focused directly on robbers indi-
cates that these offenders use the proceeds from their crimes to
support heavy drug use (Feeney 1986; Shover 1996; Tunnel1
1992). Of particular interest, Inciardi et al. (1993) found that
nearly a quarter of the substance-using offenders in their study
had taken drugs from another user by force or threat of force
within the previous year, and that more than half of the sample
had themselves been victims of a drug robbery. Their research,
however, provided little information on the situational and in-
teractional mechanisms that shaped such offenses. Wright and
Decker (1997),as part of a larger investigation of armed robbery,
interviewed a subset of offenders who targeted drug dealers.
Though insightful, their research was more suggestive than
anything else-leaving a number of critical gaps in our under-
standing of the situational and interactional context within
which drug robberies are committed.
The bulk of the drugs-violence work is recent, systemically fo-
cused (see, for example, Riley 1998), and centered on crack co-
caine, a substance that emerged on the street scene circa 1985.
Burgeoning demand for this cheap and highly addictive stimu-
lant provoked explosive competition among distributors. Rapid
deregulation and turf wars followed (Jacobs 1999a;Johnson et al.
6 Researching Drug Robbery

1997). Drug markets underwent wholesale destabilization. Epi-

demic levels of homicide and assault resulted (Blumstein and
Rosenfeld 1998), spurred on by the drug’s volatile pharmacolo-
gy: The crack high is brief, activates a compulsive need for more,
and results in an intense, post-use crash. Wanton, often ruthless
violence by users is a common consequence (see Maher 1997:56).
Worsening matters, significantly more persons consumed and
dealt this drug than ever consumed or dealt heroin or cocaine
powder during their respective hey-days (Golub and Johnson
1997a).Large numbers of people were heavy daily users, smok-
ing the substance in copious amounts with unparalleled fre-
quency (Riley 1997). And crack market participants typically
conducted transactions in ways that raised their ”personal and
aggregate risk” (for example, impulsive buying / selling habits,
multiple supply sources, large and unregulated dealing net-
works; see Riley 1998). In combination with widely available
firearms, extensive gun-toting, the nonchalant way in which
many participants used their weapons, and the dispersion of
firearms to persons tangentially involved in the scene, the urban
landscape came to mirror the Wild West (for these and other
points, see Jacobs 1999a:67).Indeed, the wave of violence associ-
ated with crack’s emergence is thought to be worse than any pre-
vious drug epidemic.
Urban communities were wholly unprepared for the emergent
crisis. Formal and informal social controls imploded under the
awesome pressure. Out-migration to the suburbs-already ro-
bust after years of deindustrialization-accelerated at an un-
precedented pace. Social capital disappeared in vacuum-like
fashion (Hamid 1998), taking vital economic resources with it.
The sweeping destruction of neighborhoods and individuals
took on a life of its own. Businesses closed. Housing crumbled.
Churches and other stabilizing institutions ceased to hold any re-
straining influence. Infrastructure disintegrated for lack of up-
keep. Once tranquil, law-abiding communities became killing
fields into which outsiders wandered at their peril (see Inciardi et
al. 1993).
Crack use has now declined and markets have restabilized
(Brownstein 1996; Curtis 1999),but drug selling remains a pow-
Drugs and Crime 7

erfully destructive urban force. A small, but stubbornly recalci-

trant number of chronic users persists, served by an equally per-
sistent cadre of hard-core sellers (see Golub and Johnson 1997a
and b). A growing population of marijuana and heroin consumers
is joining the scene. Drug Use Forecasting data indicate that for
the first time in several reporting cycles, the percentage of urban
arrestees testing positive for marijuana is equal to or greater than
those testing positive for cocaine (see, for example, DUF 1997; Ce-
sar 1997a and b). Meanwhile, 320,000 occasional heroin users and
810,000 chronic users were reported nationwide (ONDCP 1996),
up from 136,000 in 1990 and 692,000 in 1992, respectively. Many
have been lured by cheaper, purer, snortable smack perceived to
be safe and nonstigmatizing (see Gervitz 1997;Jacobs 1999b).Ur-
ban drug selling thus continues to thrive, and drug robbery re-
mains an attractive offense. Though the illegal standing of drugs
ultimately is responsible for their exaggerated value (the risk of
arrest, theft, injury, and death must be built into their cost; see
Reuter et al. 1990), as well as the exposed status of dealers, this
does not matter. Instability is a fact of life in settings beyond the
law. Drug robbery one of its primary sources, must be dissected
if meaningful improvements in urban communities are to be
realized.

METHODS

This research draws from the accounts of active drug robbers

operating on the streets of St. Louis, M0.l Like other early twenty-
first century rustbelt cities of similar size and type, St. Louis is
foundering. Home to a once vibrant manufacturing sector, it has
become a shell of its former self. Urban decay is firmly en-
trenched. Opportunities for high-paid work are few and far be-
tween. Citizens are fleeing to outlying suburbs in record numbers,
seeking a better life. Difficult-to-replace tax revenue and social
capital are going with them. In the past decade, 15 percent of the
city’s population ”escaped;” 9,000 residents out-migrated in 1997
alone (Mihalopoulos 1998).St. Louis’ small base figure of 340,000
8 Researching Drug Robbery

citizens makes the impact terribly acute. The city is developing a

concentrated population of the ”truly disadvantaged” (Wilson
1987; 1996), people with insufficient resources and substantial
social-service needs that cannot be met and are getting worse.
Social disorganization is pervasive and provides an ideal context
in which drug markets and the violence that permeates them can
thrive.
The city’s crime rate consistently exceeds that of most U.S. ur-
ban locales. In 1999, St. Louis ranked number one in total crimes
per capita among American cities with populations larger than
100,000, and fourth in homicides (Hackney et al. 2000). Rates of
robbery and serious assault consistently place St. Louis in the top
five in the nation (see, for example, FBI 1996); the city’s violent
crime index recently earned it the shameful distinction of being
five times higher than the national average, while its homicide
rate came in at six times the national figure (see also Hackney et
al. 2000). Increases and decreases in these rates tend to mirror oth-
er U.S. cities, albeit at a different scale. This makes St. Louis an
ideal laboratory for investigating important correlates of violent
crime such as drug robbery (Rosenfeld and Decker 1996).
Historically, St. Louis has had one of the largest and most ac-
tive illicit drug markets in the midwestern United States. Crack,
heroin, PCP, and marijuana are sold openly on many inner-city
street corners and are available at virtually any hour. Markets are
dominated by freelance sellers-vendors who sell for their own
personal profit and who exhibit little in the way of formal orga-
nization. Not infrequently, a number of dealers will occupy the
same street, corner, or vacant lot at the same time. Though not al-
ways blatant, transactions can easily be observed with a mod-
icum of effort. Arrestees persistently have high rates of cocaine-,
opiate-, and marijuana-positiveurine specimens; they are among
the highest of the 35 cities measured in the Arrestee Drug Abuse
Monitoring program. Emergency room cases involving cocaine
and heroin mirror other large metropolitan areas and indicate a
high degree of street-drug institutionalization (see DAWN 1996).
Neighborhoods in which drug markets thrive have all the ear-
marks of deprivation and decay. Abandoned buildings pock-
mark the landscape. Litter fills the streets. Bullet-sprayed walls
greet visitors and residents alike. Graffiti disclose the most recent
Methods 9

victims of urban violence. Misfits young and old collect on the

street corner, drinking fortified alcoholic beverages (Cisco, Thun-
derbird, Night Train), smoking blunts (hollowed out cigars filled
with marijuana),looking for action, and more generally, just wait-
ing for something to happen.

DATA COLLECTION

Recruitment

Data from this study were drawn from in-depth qualitative in-
terviews with active drug robbers. Qualitative methods are in-
tegral for exploring the conduct of ”hidden popu1ations”-
groups difficult to reach by virtue of the stigmatizing and / or il-
legal behaviors its members participate in and actively conceal
from outside view (see Spreen 1992). Through such methods, a
range of conduct norms, beliefs, and interaction patterns can be
documented (information that usually cannot be obtained from
official sources). Qualitative methods allow researchers to de-
code the manner in which subjects (in this case, active criminals)
think and act in real-life circumstances, and to describe a body
of knowledge or cognition not easily understood by lay persons
(Adler 1985; Agar 1973; Johnson et al. 1997).Such methods pro-
vide insight into the ways in which offenders interpret, assess,
organize, perceive, and classify their social worlds (see Lex
1990:393). A richer understanding of causal relationships per-
taining to all facets of experience and process results (Fleisher
1995:21, 104). Finally, qualitative methods document emergent
processes- especially vital when those being explored lie at the
”forefront of broader trends” that require real-time identifica-
tion if effective social policy is to be formulated (see Golub and
Johnson 1999:1737).
Studying active offenders is difficult precisely because their ac-
tivity is criminal. Most find it necessary to lead secret lives. This
makes them hard to locate. Once located, they are typically reti-
cent to provide valid and reliable information about what it is they
do (Irwin 1972:117). Such reluctance should not be surprising.
10 Researching Drug Robbery

There are real consequences for indiscretion. Exposure could

mean hard time; the more illegal the conduct, the more offenders
have to lose if found out. Unremarkably criminal ethnographers
typically are perceived to be undercover agents seeking to obtain
damaging evidence for juridical purposes. Indeed, one of the
most common suspicions criminals have about field researchers
is that they are covert operatives of some sort. As Sluka (1990:115)
notes, ”It is difficult to find an [ethnographer]who has done field-
work who has not encountered this suspicion.”This belief is per-
haps stronger in street-drug markets than in any other setting, as
it is a ”basic cultural rule . . . to treat everyone as a snitch or the
man [police] until proven otherwise” (Agar 1973:26).
Though interviewing institutionalized offenders might be eas-
ier, safer, and more efficient, it is not the best way to obtain valid
data. Through the ages, criminologists have ”suspected that of-
fenders do not behave naturally” in criminal justice settings
(Wright and Decker 1994:5). Sutherland and Cressey (1970:68)
point out that those who have had ”intimate contacts with crim-
inals ’in the open’ know that criminals are not ’natural’ in police
stations, courts, and prisons and that they must be studied in
their everyday life outside of institutions if they are to be under-
stood.” Polsky (1967:123) is even more emphatic, warning that,
”we can [not] afford the convenient fiction that in studying crim-
inals in their natural habitat, we . . . discover nothing really im-
portant that [cannot] be discovered from criminals behind bars.
What is true for studying the gorilla of zoology is likely to be even
truer for studying the gorilla of criminology.” Incarcerated crim-
inals may not be representative of the general offender popula-
tion. Criminologists justifiably assert that those who have been
arrested constitute unsuccessful criminals, likely to be different
from their uncaught counterparts in some central and / or sys-
tematic way (Wright and Decker 1994).Failing to account for this
fact can have grave implications for the data one collects and ul-
timately reports.
Collecting data from predatory offenders, particularly active
ones, is likely to be difficult and dangerous unless one can con-
struct friendships within the particular subculture targeted for in-
quiry. This is arduous, but not impossible. The process can be
Data Collection 11

jumpstarted-which is precisely what we2 did. Initial respon-

dents were located through the efforts of two street-basedAfrican-
American field recruiters who had ongoing contacts with our
research team. Each recruiter was himself an active member of the
criminal underworld. Each also had extensive connections to net-
works of street offenders and, within those networks, enjoyed a
solid reputation for integrity and trustworthiness. As Walker and
Lidz (1977:115) remind us, when access to secret worlds is need-
ed, ”the individual who will establish the [researcher’s]creden-
tials must be well thought of by the other participants in the
system.” Without the properly located ”gatekeeper,” research of
the type undertaken here has virtually no chance of success.
Trading on their trust, the field recruiters began by approach-
ing relatives, friends, and acquaintances whom they knew to be
active drug robbers. They explained our research objectives and
told prospective interviewees that they would be paid $50 for
participation. It is a cardinal rule of street life that one should nev-
er do anything for nothing. Although $50 may seem to be a sub-
stantial sum, it is important to remember that most of these
offenders could have earned much more through crime. And,
from their perspective, crime may have appeared to be less risky
than talking to strangers about their formidable law-breaking.
Once the field recruiters’ initial source of active drug robbers was
exhausted, they turned to referrals provided by earlier intervie-
wees to expand the sample further. This ”snowball sampling”
technique continued until 293 drug robbers had been recruited
(see also Biernacki and Waldorf 1981 on chain referral).
Perhaps the greatest difficulty encountered by the field re-
cruiters was verifying that potential interviewees met the eligi-
bility requirements for project participation. To be considered
an active drug robber, an offender theoretically had to have
(1)robbed at least one drug dealer in the last three months, and
(2) committed at least three such robberies in the previous year.
In practice, however, these criteria sometimes were difficult to ap-
ply. Some offenders, whether because of heavy drug consump-
tion, alcohol use, or circumspection, were initially unable or
unwilling to recall the necessary information. Careful and sensi-
tive questioning usually overcame this problem but by that time,
12 Researching Drug Robbery

the offenders were sitting in front of us; those few who fell slight-
ly outside the inclusion criteria could not safely be sent away
empty-handed, so we interviewed them anyway. From our per-
spective, this decision made perfect sense. Why turn away poten-
tially valuable informants-individuals who regard themselves
as active drug robbers and who are recognized by other offenders
as active drug robbers-for the sake of adhering to what were,
after all, somewhat arbitrary inclusion criteria in the first place?
The field recruiters at times presented us with problems of their
own. The fact that they were being paid a $50 bounty instead of
a salary kept them under pressure to generate additional inter-
views in a context where new subject recruitment was difficult
and time-consuming. This, in turn, created a temptation for the
field recruiters to try to deceive us. Early on, one of them brought
in a potential interviewee who looked remarkably similar to
someone we already had spoken to, claiming he was an identical
twin (whichhe was not). We sent both home with appropriate ad-
monitions. The other recruiter also tried to pass off a former in-
terviewee as a new respondent-crudely bandaging the person’s
head, darkening his left eye with mascara, and claiming the indi-
vidual had been beaten up during a drug robbery. The field
recruiter initially denied involvement in this amateurish dissim-
ulation, but later owned up to his role, admitting that he had
needed money badly that day and had been unable to find a fresh
respondent.
Far from undermining our faith in the field recruiters, such in-
cidents bolstered our confidence that we had chosen them wise-
ly. We hired these individuals because they were known criminals
with a history of exploiting friends and strangers; it would have
been suspicious had they not tried to deceive us. The trick was
not to let them outsmart us by remaining vigilant and approach-
ing each new interviewee with a healthy-if well-hidden-dose
of skepticism.
Beyond trying to deceive us, the field recruiters also attempted
to take advantage of the interviewees by skimming off a portion
of their $50 participation fee. Sometimes they did this openly,
stating that, as agents, they were entitled to a percentage of their
clients’ earnings. Other times they tried to resort to subterfuge,
Data Collection 13

asking us not to pay interviewees directly so that they could ne-

gotiate a lower fee with them and pocket the difference. We re-
fused to endorse or participate in these schemes, but this did not
prevent us from being drawn into disputes. In handling them, we
maintained a firm and consistent line; each party was to receive
$50 for their services and that was what we were going to pay
them. This protected us from charges of favoritism, but it did lit-
tle to resolve the disputes themselves. We know through the
grapevine, for example, that some of the verbal altercations that
erupted in our presence degenerated into fistfights once the dis-
putants were on their own again.
Money is the lifeblood of the streets and, as with any precious
commodity, disagreements about how available funds should be
distributed are to be expected. It would be naive, however, to con-
clude that these disagreements had no impact on the process of
recruiting potential interviewees. Participants who felt they had
been cheated were unlikely to recommend the experience to their
associates. We frequently reminded the field recruiters of this fact
and, for varying lengths of time, this proved effective in stifling
their desire to shortchange interviewees. Inevitably, though, they
drifted back into bad habits, especially during periods of finan-
cial hardship. This is very much in keeping with the general ethos
of streetlife, where everybody is looking for a way to capitalize
on someone else’s good fortune.

Interviews

The interviews, which typically lasted about an hour, were

semistructured, conducted in an informal manner, tape-recorded
(with respondents’ permission), and transcribed verbatim. Ques-
tions focused on the offenders’ most recent drug robbery, but al-
lowed for sufficient expansion to gauge whether this offense was
executed in typical fashion. If it was not, additional questions
were asked to determine the offenders’ usual modus operandi.
Interviewees were allowed to respond freely and to introduce
their own concepts and categories. This strategy has been used
successfully to generate ”thick description” with a wide variety
14 Researching Drug Robbery

of active criminals, including residential burglars (Wright and

Decker 1994), street robbers (Jacobs and Wright 1999) and crack
dealers (Jacobs 1999a).
In questioning the offenders, we disaggregated their offenses
into a series of closely linked sequential actions: motivation, tar-
get selection, enactment, and retaliatory threat management. The
value of this basic operational scheme has been demonstrated in
previous work; it permits the exploration of objective and sub-
jective aspects of situations that influence offender decision mak-
ing immediately before, during, and after their crimes (see Wright
and Decker 1994).
In the area of motivation, the interview schedule contained
questions about the situational and interactional factors that lay
behind the decision to commit drug robbery. The role of drug / al-
cohol use, peer association, and weapon availability was preem-
inent in this regard. We also explored whether alternative courses
of action were pondered. This led to questions intended to iden-
tify the unique appeal of drug robbery. Why, we asked, commit
this offense as opposed to some other realistically available
crime? What are the specific advantages and disadvantages of
drug robbery? What makes drug dealers good targets? What role
do perceptions of sanction risks play-both formal and, espe-
cially, informal-in the decision-making process? Recall that a
major allure of robbing drug dealers is that they cannot go to the
police, but why should offenders who are rational enough to wor-
ry about the risk of arrest be willing to run the much greater dan-
ger of injury or death that goes hand in hand with preying on
fellow criminals? What is it about these offenders, or the situa-
tions in which they find themselves, that makes them amenable
to accepting this risk?
Turning to the issue of target selection, the interview schedule
contained questions to disclose how and why particular drug
dealers were singled out for victirnization. What, for example,
makes for an attractive victim? Where are they located? How are
they found? Which targets are better, solitary ones or those in
groups? Is it wise to rob dealers one knows? Why or why not? Are
targeted dealers armed? How is this information obtained? Are
there other forms of defensibility that mediate target attractive-
ness? How do temporal issues figure into the selection process?
Data Collection 15

Physical locations in which dealers ply their trade also play an

important role in causing them to be targeted. Thus, we asked of-
fenders about the role of geography in target selection. What, for
instance, is the best place to rob a dealer? What features make for
an attractive offense site? Are certain areas avoided? Why? What
is the relationship between local activity patterns and the selec-
tion of drug robbery locations? How does the role of natural sur-
veillance influence the selection process?
In the realm of enactment, we asked offenders directly about
the strategies they employed to commit their crimes. How are ap-
proaches made without ”tipping one’s hand” too early? How is
compliance generated? How is it made to last the duration of the
offense? What happens when such efforts fail? How are non-
compliant victims managed? Does the likelihood of recalcitrance
vary by the enactment site? If co-offenders are involved, how are
their roles defined and delegated? What steps are taken during
the offense to avoid identification and to minimize the subse-
quent possibility of retaliation?
Questions such as these lead naturally to consideration of the
aftermath of drug robberies and in particular, about reprisal.
How do offenders cognitively and practically handle this threat?
Do their movements and activities change? How so? For how
long? Does the perceived risk of retaliation decrease over time?
Do attempts made to avoid retaliation make offenders more sus-
ceptible to formal sanction threats? If so, what makes the trade-
off worth it? Despite a good deal of speculation that violence in
high-crime urban communities is often retaliatory in nature-
representing a rough-and-ready form of street justice-answers
to such questions remain obscure.

Validity

Considerable effort was made to question every offender about

every issue. Unfortunately open-ended qualitative interviewing
mitigates against universal coverage. Topics frequently emerge
later in the process that may not have been anticipated early on
(see Henslin 1972:52). Responses did become repetitious, however,
which suggested that we were saturating the categories specified
16 Researching Drug Robbery

in the research protocol. Admittedly, however, such saturation

could have been an artifact of the sampling design itself. Even if
real, such a flaw need not be damning; imperfections are an un-
avoidable part of the ethnographic enterprise. As Van Maanen
(1988:56-57) reminds us, absent evidence of fallibility, the field-
worker may ”appear too perfect and thus strain the reader’s good
faith” (see also Wright and Decker 1994:23).
The drug robbers in the sample ranged in age from 15 to 46; the
mean age was 28.86. All of them were African-American; all but
five were male. On average, respondents had completed the 11th
grade. Most were unemployed and unmarried at the time they
were interviewed. Most claimed to have no particular place of
residence. As urban nomads, they roamed from house to house-
”crashing” with kin, friends, and sexual partners as the mood
struck them. There is no way of knowing how well this sample
represents the total population of active drug robbers, but it con-
fidently can be said to over-represent African-American offend-
ers. No doubt the racial composition of our sample reflects the
social chasm that exists between African-Americans and whites
in the St. Louis criminal underworld. These offender-groups dis-
play a marked tendency to ”stick to their own kind,” seldom par-
ticipating in overlapping criminal networks. The fact that both of
our field recruiters were African-American meant that they had
few realistic opportunities to establish bonds of trust with white
offenders; they simply had little day-to-day contact with them.
This raises larger questions about external validity. As Maher
(1997:29) notes, the ”positivist nightmare that research partici-
pants, individually or collectively, may not be ’representative’or
worse still, that they may be exceptional or idiosyncratic, runs
deep.” Sampson and Raudenbush (1999:607)elevate this concern
to stratospheric heights, claiming it to be a ”fundamental cleavage
of sociological criminology.” The representativeness of a sample
drawn from drug robbers at large in the community can never be
determined conclusively because the parameters of the total pop-
ulation are unknown (Glassner and Carpenter 1985). Context-
specific characteristics of drug markets are likely to vary and,
accordingly so will the motivations, target selection, enactment,
and retaliatory threat-management strategies drug robbers use
Data Collection 17

and report. At the same time, readers recognize that traditional

methods-such as surveys sent to homes-would not be able to
obtain such data; they are inefficient, ill-targeted, and unable to
produce respondents in reliable numbers (Heckathorn 1997:174).
Yet even if the present sample cannot be generalized to the total
population of drug robbers, it can nonetheless broaden our un-
derstanding of how such offenders operate in real-life settings
and circumstances. The research site-St. Louis-would also
seem to provide data relevant to a number of cities of similar type,
size, and location. This is important. St. Louis is not like Miami,
Los Angeles, Chicago, or New York-the loci of so much street
drug / crime research-but those cities are themselves unlike
many others across the nation.
Concerns about internal validity are perhaps more pressing.
Here we were butting into the lives of persons engaged in violent
felonies for which they could suffer severe sanctions, both formal
and informal. How could we know they were telling the truth?
Was it not in their best interest to be mendacious, especially since
the possibility of exposure threatened their future success as
criminals? A number of respondents were admittedly leery at
first, but most relaxed and opened up soon after discussion be-
gan. Solid rapport was developed in the vast majority of sessions;
interviewees often became lively and quite conversational (see
Berk and Adams 1970 on generating rapport with subjects).Many
seemed to enjoy speaking with someone ”straight” about their
lives, as it was a rare opportunity to impart their own brand of
street wisdom to putative squares supposedly smarter than them,
at least in terms of formal education. Offenders often find this
process liberating. As Wright and Decker (1994:26)note, ”The se-
crecy inherent in criminal work means that offenders have few
[chances] to discuss their activities with anyone besides associ-
ates, a matter which many find frustrating” (see also Letkemann
1973). Offenders almost inevitably have skills and knowledge
that researchers lack, and this may empower them to talk more
freely about a larger number of issues. Insofar as they see some-
thing in the research that benefits them, or define it as an oppor-
tunity to correct inaccurate perceptions of what they believe or
how they behave, candid replies are correspondingly facilitated.
18 Researching Drug Robbery

We attempted to minimize lying and distortion in every way

possible. We promised the interviewees complete anonymity and
never asked for their real names.4 We assured them that what
they told us would be held in the strictest confidence. We made
specific inquiries designed to screen out those who may have
been less than forthright. We monitored the truthfulness of their
responses by checking for and questioning inconsistent answers.
We emphasized the importance of being sincere at every turn;
their comments would end up in a book-which impressed
many and motivated more to ”get it right.” We underscored our
solid relationship with the field recruiters who referred them; if
they said it was safe to disclose privileged information, we hoped
that it would be believed.
Drawing from a sample of active street criminals similar to the
one included here, Wright and Decker (1994) compared offend-
ers’ self reports of arrest to official arrest records. They conclud-
ed that previous arrests were not underreported (also, see West
and Farrington, 1977).Drug robberies seldom are reported to the
police, so we could not check arrest records. That said, numerous
opportunities arose during our research to verify that intervie-
wees really were drug robbers and that what they said about their
crimes was true. Six of them told us that they had been shot dur-
ing one of their robberies and backed up this claim by showing
us their bullet wounds, some of which were in private places not
normally visible to nonintimates. At least two of the offenders
brought pistols to their interviews. On several occasions we in-
terviewed two or more offenders who had taken part in the same
robbery. Although they were interviewed separately, often weeks
apart, their descriptions closely matched.
We also asked one of the field recruiters to sit in on several in-
terviews relating to incidents of which he had direct knowledge.
He said little during these interviews, although, on occasion, an
interviewee asked him for help in recalling a precise location or
exact address-something that we all have done in conversations
with acquaintances. After the interviews, we debriefed the field
recruiter to gauge the truthfulness of the drug robbers’ accounts;
in every case, he assured us that the interviewee had given us a
broadly faithful description of the offense.
Data Collection 19

It could be argued that the field recruiters, in an effort to provide

criminal acquaintances with easy cash, had somehow coached
them to respond in a manner consistent with the goals of the pro-
ject. In retrospect, this seems highly unlikely. First and foremost,
the specific substance of the very detailed interview questionnaire
was never described to recruiters. Nor were the stated empirical
goals of the study. As such, they had no way of instructing inter-
viewees how to respond "appropriately." One also would assume
that such coaching would have had to take our inclusion criteria
into account (i.e., the recruiters would instruct potential respon-
dents to lie about their eligibility). Yet a small number of respon-
dents freely admitted falling outside these criteria, suggesting
that they were not attempting to tailor their responses to our
needs. Moreover, if preinterview rehearsal was occurring, we
would expect to obtain a rather homogeneous set of responses
and descriptions. This was not the case. Respondents described a
variety of settings, locations, strategies, and circumstances, pro-
viding a diverse array of information not consistent with pre-
made scripts.
Interviewing the victims of drug robbery, to corroborate the
drug robbers' claims made here, would have been ideal but was
beyond the scope of the present study for practical and logistical
reasons. In a forthcoming paper, however, Topalli and Wright
(2000) report significant overlap between the two parties' ac-
counts (of both the offenses and the retaliatory aftermath). Im-
portantly the drug-seller victims they interviewed were recruited
from the same St. Louis neighborhoods at roughly the same time
that the present research was conducted, using the same re-
cruiters-thereby minimizing the confounding effects of ecology,
period, and microstructure.
The validity and reliability of offender self-report data have
been carefully assessed by a number of researchers, all of whom
conclude that semistructured interviews represent one of the best
ways to obtain information about crime (see, for example, Ball
1967; Huizinga & Elliott, 1986).Indeed, the most accurate of such
data are said to come from face-to-face interviews-the strategy
used here-as opposed to surveys administered by way of phone
or mail. This is not to say that offender self-reports are bereft of
20 Researching Drug Robbery

”exaggerations, intentional distortions, lies, self-serving rational-

izations, or drug-induced forgetfulness” (Fleisher 1995:80), but
rather, that they may not be as vulnerable to such pitfalls as so
many widely presume. Admittedly, in the absence of actually see-
ing the offenders do what it is they talk about (not an option here
for obvious practical and ethical reasons), we can never know
how truthful they are being. Nonetheless, we believe that unde-
tected cases of distortion were sufficiently rare as to not under-
mine the overall validity of the data.
The book makes extensive use of quoted material from the in-
terview transcripts. Needless to say, such excerpts comprise but
a small part of what offenders actually said. As Wright and Deck-
er (1997:31)observe, ”Selectivity is an unavoidable problem in the
textual representation of any aspect of social life-criminal or
otherwise-and it would be naive to claim that this cannot dis-
tort the resulting manuscript.” Also unavoidable is drawing dis-
proportionately from the observations of some respondents. In
any project, certain informants will be more helpful, informed,
candid, articulate, or knowledgeable about a particular topic or
process than others (see also Prus 1984:253).Reliance on them is
necessary to get the story ”right.” Quotes have been appropriat-
ed to capture the essence of the particular theme under investi-
gation, and every effort has been made to represent a wide array
of offenders.
Anecdotes have been edited to meet the textual demands of a
manuscript of this nature. But colorful, sometimes profane lan-
guage has not been removed; the intention is to provide readers
a better feel for the flavor and jargon of street talk, a vibrant com-
bination of Black English, slang, and drug lexicon (see also Ma-
her 1997:224). Periodically, words or phrases in brackets will
appear. These indicate an attempt on my part to explain and/or
amplify something a respondent has said. The text also is supple-
mented at times with insights gained during the course of several
years of field research on the consumption, sale, and interdiction
of street drugs-preceding and including the study period-
from individuals and settings relevant to the present topic (cf.
Mieczkowski 1986).Such insights are crucial in providing a more
precise understanding of the broader context in which drug rob-
Data Collection 21

bers perform their crimes. In qualitative research, the researcher

is the research instrument and his or her experiences contextual-
ize the work in important ways (Wright and Stein 1996).
The book is arranged sequentially consistent with the analytic
framework used to anchor and organize the data. Chapter 2 ex-
plores the forces that energize the decision to commit drug rob-
bery. Chapter 3 examines the tactics drug robbers use to identify
and select suitable targets. Chapter 4 investigates the enactment
process-how approaches are made, compliance is generated,
and goods transferred. Chapter 5 explores strategies used to man-
age the threat of retaliation after the offense has been completed.
Chapter 6 examines the conceptual implications of drug robbery
for order and violence beyond the law.

NOTES

[Link] study design, sampling protocol, data collection techniques, and

justifications driving their use are similar to those used and discussed
by the author and his colleagues in previous work (Jacobs 1998:165,
166-67; Jacobs 1999a:8-13,22-25; Jacobs 1999b3557-59; Jacobs and
Miller 1998:553-55; Jacobs and Wright 1999:151-53; Jacobs, Topalli,
and Wright 2000: 173-77). The following methods section draws from
that material, with portions reprinted with permission from North-
eastern University Press and Criminology (please see "Acknowledg-
ments" for more specific citation information).
2. Volkan Topalli, an NSF National Consortium on Violence Research
Postdoctoral Fellow, assisted in the data collection process.
3. Actually we interviewed thirty but one looked so similar to a previ-
ous respondent (he reportedly was his older brother) that we merged
the two transcripts into one. Though I have very good reason to be-
lieve they were indeed separate persons, I could never prove it.
4. Street names, however, were taken and are used throughout the
monograph. These names are sufficiently common so as to not jeop-
ardize the anonymity of the respondent to whom they refer. To pro-
tect further against possible exposure, proper names of persons that
respondents mention in their transcripts have been changed; this is
especially important when the individuals concerned are past vic-
tims, who may be unaware of the identity of their victimizers (yet be
familiar with their street names).
This page intentionally left blank
 CHAPTER TWO

Motivation

R
OBBERY IS ALL ABOUT material gain and few offenses rival
the riches promised by drug robbery. Cash seizures can
easure in the thousands of dollars, drug hauls in ounces
rather than grams. Luxury accessory items (for example, cars,
jewelry) are frequently side benefits of heists. The mandates of
drug selling require that vendors have large cash and drug re-
serves on hand. Inventory must be maintained and restocked, lest
one lose business in a highly competitive marketplace. This re-
quires liquid currency that cannot be banked without attracting
suspicion. One outcome is that sellers regularly end up blowing
disposable income on personal, nonessential consumption items.
On the streets, the ”material trappings of success” (Shover 1996)
create the impression of wealth by which everyone is judged.
High-yield crimes are critical for those who burn money as fast
as they make it. Drug robbers do precisely that. Theirs is a life
driven by the open-ended pursuit of illicit street action. Illegal
drug use figures most prominently in their ”life as party” (Shover
1996),with the vast majority consuming mind-altering substances
in significant quantities at tremendous cost. The urge to use drugs
was in many ways beyond their ability to control (Wright and

23
24 Motivation

Decker 1994:40). Indeed, the quest for intoxication was a basic

drive-much like hunger, thirst, and sex are for ordinary citizens
(see Siege1 1989:lO).No amount ever really seemed enough to sa-
tiate them. ”I got to get high, I got to get high,” J Rock pro-
nounced. ”That’s what I got to do. I got to get high. . . . Nothing
to me but getting high, time to get high, time to get high, got to
get high.” June Bug claimed that $800, an amount which could
buy nearly an ounce of crack (about 150 $20 rocks after retail
markup) ”ain’t no money. What is $800 . . . ? You can run through
$800 in 45 minutes [using crack].” Others expressed similar sen-
timents:

Messing with drugs, you chasing a dream. . . . Fourteen $20

rocks, I did 14, $20 rocks in a pipe last night. . . . Stones I did
last night, it’s over with, it’s history. . . . I want to get me 14
more today and I’m gonna do them today.-Slim
The more [crack] you smoke the more you want. You don’t
never get enough and you don’t never get no high but it’s just
the taste. You just taste it and you just want to keep getting
that, they call it chasing the ghost, that’s all you doing, you
ain’t gonna get no high but it makes you want to keep smok-
ing it. You sit down, you smoke up a fucking pack of ciga-
rettes in about 30 minutes and you ain’t got nothing else to
smoke you know and you find people looking on the floor.
They ain’t dropped nothing, what you looking for? He ain’t
dropped nothing. I don’t never know anybody that dropped
some. Then he start thinking about where he gonna get some
more from.-Jay

Lack of cash meant an end to the party, and an end to the party
threatened substantial pain. Shortfalls were especially intolerable
for those addicted to heroin, a significant portion of the sample.
Unlike crack-which foments psychological dependence-hero-
in quickly becomes necessary to one’s physical well-being. With-
drawal is perceived to be acutely traumatic and something to be
avoided at all costs. ”Once you got a [heroin] habit, man,” Curly
Motivation 25

implored, ”you need dope [heroin]all day and everyday. . . that

one shot ain’t gonna get it.. . . You need dope all day long, 24
hours a day dope, man. You need dope to get up with, you need
dope to go to bed with. You can’t use the toilet, man, without
dope . . . you just fucked up, man. You can’t even concentrate
right without dope. . . . Your body aches without dope.” Getting
”fixed” becomes a daily obsession:

When you constantly get high, you want to get high, high,
high, high, high. Your body get immune to it so you want
more, more, more.-Do-dirty

There is perhaps no better way to relieve intense, immediate, and

costly pharmacological cravings than through drug robbery.
Widely available, readily accessible, and possessing the precise
goods respondents want most, drug sellers represent obvious tar-
gets. ”I’m a dope fiend,” Do-dirty explained. ”They got the mon-
ey and the dope. That’s a high, you see what I’m saying. If you
got the money and you got the dope, Do-dirty gonna get his.”
Curly concurred:

You ain’t got no money, you need a fix. You got a pistol. It’s
some dope in the street. You don’t have to make your mind
up, your mind already made. You need some dope and the
quickest mark you can get. . . .

As funding sources, nondealers simply could not measure up.

”What you gonna rob somebody else for?” Baby Doll grumbled.
”They could have maybe $10 or $20, that’s not much you know.
. . . [With drug dealers] you get money, you get the dope, you get
jewelry . . . take off with the car, sell the car, sell everything.”
Blackwell agreed: ”Why go rob some old lady when you can just
rob a drug dealer and you’ll get more?”l Even currency-laden re-
tail outlets were perceived to offer an inferior take:
26 Motivation

I ain’t gonna rob no store. . . . Why would I rob them for and
get they little two or three hundred dollars, probably not
even that much when I can go hit this dope man for about
$5,500, an ounce or something,big birds [kilosJ or something,
you know, stuff like that, nice big Rolexes and nice big neck-
laces and diamond rings and all that type of stuff. Why
would I go rob a little 7-11 for? They ain’t making no money
for real, that ain’t no money to me, three or four hundred dol-
lars, that ain’t no money to me. I like grands, I like big dol-
lars. That little dollars, that ain’t nothing, I’ll blow that in 30
minutes or something. . . . I like that big money. I like to catch
them big ballers with all the dope.-Smoke Dog

Loot seized from drug dealers offered the best of possible worlds.
As YoYo put it, ”You got your dope, you got something to smoke
and then you also got some way you can make your money back
and keep your stuff going on and on”-implying that she would
use at least part of her drug haul to generate additional revenues.
Indeed, the ease with which illicit drugs could be converted into
cash made the offense enormously enticing (see also Reidel
1993:152); drugs also could serve as currency in their own right.
This is to say nothing of the rapidity with which seizures could
be made and, as anyone who has ever stumbled upon a $20 bill
in the street can attest, rewards earned quickly with little effort
often seem larger than they really are. ”You are only talking about
maybe 90 seconds,” Buck mused. ”You ain’t talking about no
time.” June Bug said that, ”three minutes [and] it’s over. It’s just
[easy]. . . .” Smoke Dog declared that he could ”make $300 in ten
minutes.’’ K-red explained that ”you don’t have to do nothing but
rob and run.” Ray Ray claimed he could ”pull a [drug ] robbery
so quick you never know you been robbed.” Or, as Crazy Jack
remarked:

I could rob somebody in less than a minute. Once I pull a gun

out . . . it be so quick and easy they never know, they think-
ing they scared I’m gonna do it and I already did it. ”Are you
ready?”I’m like ”it’s already done,’’ I already robbed and I’m
gone, I already got ’em.
Mo t ivation 27

Unlike traditional offenses such as burglary and shoplifting,

there were no intermediate steps required to convert stolen goods
into currency. The time and effort required to do so is prohibitive
for those who want rewards now (see also Feeney 1986; Wright
and Decker 1997; Maher 1997:116; Koester and Schwartz 1993).
”What’s the sense of [stealinghome electronics]?”Ray Ray asked.
”I don’t feel like walking around trying to sell no TV or VCR,
none of that stuff. I want strictly cash money in my hand.” Do-
dirty agreed: ”Man, I ain’t gonna be trying to break in no house,
ain’t gonna be trying to sell no stuff. I’m gonna go where the
money at.” Ray Dog and Slim echoed similar sentiments:

Burglary, its not what I want. One thing about the burglary,
you got to wait, get it, then you got to find someplace to sell
it. Robbing a dope dealer, you ain’t got to worry about sell-
ing, going and finding a place to sell it. You just go out and
get the money, get the dope. . . . I’m cool on robbing, I love it
man; they sweet, they sweet, man; I’m telling you, they
sweet. . . .
I don’t do burglaries, I don’t do no shoplifting, too big of a
cause. Why would I go in the store trying to pick up maybe
four, five, six items that maybe cost $150 apiece that I might
come out here on the streets and I might sell them for $75
apiece? . . . All I got to do is catch this little boy [dealer] over
here and do what I got to do and get easy money.2

Securing funds through lawful employment obviously was not

an option. Most respondents lacked the education, skills, and so-
cial capital necessary to obtain legitimate work at a level suffi-
cient to sustain their cash-intensive lifestyle. The jobs open to
them were menial and poorly remunerated. Most offenders re-
jected them out of hand. ”I ain’t working for no punk ass $5.50
an hour, man,” Smoke Dog proclaimed. ”That ain’t shit.” Slim
concurred: ”Why would I go into a job at $5.15 an hour, $5.25 an
hour? Bust my ass from 7:OO in the morning all the way to around
2:OO or 3:OO [in the afternoon]. Why would I do that there when
I go out here and it take me about a day and I can knock off about
28 Motivation

$600, $700, $800 right there?” Working also meant waiting for a
paycheck-intolerable for those accustomed to instant gratifica-
tion. ”Forty [hours] get paid every two weeks, check. You work
all that motherfucking time [and then have to wait] for a
check[?]” Spanky asked incredulously. As all of us know, the
more remote the future reward, the ”lower its present value and
. . . the less likely [it will] be chosen among current alternatives”
(Kirby et al. 1999:78). For street offenders, this was as presup-
posed as it was a creed to live by.
Jobs severely cramped the offenders’ lifestyle as well-requir-
ing them to show up sober and alert, obey authority, and do a pre-
specified set of tasks for a defined period of time. Lost freedom
and foregone opportunities are unacceptable for those whose
lives are premised on “going with the flow” (see also Jacobs
1999a; Wright and Decker 1997). Indeed, legal work represents
the ”antithesis of the bohemian lifestyle [most offenders prefer to
live,] with its strict regime, rules, rigidity, constant surveillance,
privations and general authoritarianism” (Gabor et al. 1987:76).
For many, the decision not to work became rather easy:

[When I worked,] I was always wanting to go on the streets

with my friends, wanting to do things. We gonna go do this
or we gonna go over to some gal’s house or we got some
money set up, we can go rob this nigger for $500, $600.
”Damn, I got to go to work.” ”Come on, let’s go rob ’em.’’
Stuff like that. My partners put me up on licks [robberies],
big money and I had to go to work. I’m like, well I don’t get
paid today. They ain’t paying me today at work. Take off, go
make these licks.-Ray Ray

SANCTION THREATS

Rewards-be they financial, pharmacological, or cognitive-

are only half of the equation. Crime benefits cannot be considered
in the absence of crime risks. And the risks of drug robbery are
appealingly small, particularly as they pertain to formal sanction
threats. As noted previously, illicit contexts render law unavail-
Sanction Threats 29

able as a matter of course. Participants in black-market enterprise

cannot be ”victims” and as such, can be exploited with relative
impunity. ”What he [dealer] gonna do,” Slim observed confi-
dently ”call the police and tell [them]I took his drugs from him?”
”You can never report a drug-related robbery,” Darnell declared.
”You [can’t] go to the police and say ’he took $1,300 from me in
cash and 50 pills [of heroin, worth $5001.’” ”Come on,” J Rock
echoed, ”get real, fuck that.” Even if a police report is made, au-
thorities typically write it off or officiously remark that the victim
in question got what he d e ~ e r v e dBystanders
.~ are reticent to in-
tervene and also reluctant to come forward as witnesses; on the
streets, the ability to mind one’s own business is vital (Jacobs
1999a). Disastrous consequences await those who snitch. Thus,
people ”see but don’t see” (Anderson 1999:133; see also Liska and
Warner 1991 on how the fear of crime constrains reporting).
Immunity of this nature does not accompany more ordinary of-
fenses. Not only are structural barriers against reporting absent,
there is a much higher risk of third-party intervention. ”People
can hear you breaking into they car,” Lewis revealed, ”burglar
alarms go off, dogs barking, you see what I’m saying? . . .You got
a better chance [with drug robbery], better chance to run off but
if you breaking into a car you gonna hear the dog barking, peo-
ples turn the lights on.” The threat of official detection is com-
mensurately higher:

Police come real quick for [burglarizing] people . . . That’s

how you get caught up . . . walking in people houses.. . .
People got alarms, you all know that.-K-red
You rob [burglarize] a house, you caught by the police. You
shoplift out of a store, you gonna wind up being caught.
-Snap

Insulation from official consequences comes at a price, however.

Resistance and retribution are part-and-parcel of many offenses,
especially those perpetrated against persons who themselves are
involved in crime. The threat of victim-retaliation is widely as-
sumed in discussions of drug robbery. Vendors are depicted to be
30 Motivation

armed, dangerous, and primed to react (see, for example, Bour-

gois, 1995). Conventional wisdom holds that such persons will
not stay in business, or stay in business for long, if they allow
themselves to be victimized (Maher and Daly 1996;Johnson et al.
1985).The message that one cannot be trifled with must be com-
municated with stark clarity (see also Anderson 1999).
It was somewhat surprising to learn, therefore, that ”soft” deal-
ers-those disinclined to resist or retaliate-reportedly dominat-
ed the street scene. A reflection of drug market circumstances
unique to St. Louis or of the particular stereotypes of these re-
spondents, such reports highlight an important perception that
guided their actions. ”[Dlope dealers out here right now today
man,” Ray Dog insisted, ”[they] are straight up chumps. . . . They
are punks. . . .They are the weakest.” Do-dirty declared that dope
dealers are ”the most punk-ass niggers in the world.” Ray Ray re-
marked that he robbed ”bitches, bitch-ass fools that ain’t gonna
do nothing . . . dudes that’s weak, that’s soft. . . that’s real scary
that . . . ain’t gonna do nothing [and there are a lot of them].”
As a general rule, streetcorner dealers were perceived to be
softer than those who sold from houses. They tended to be
younger and less likely to be armed-presumably to avoid the
double sanction of drug and weapons possession (a considerable
risk on the open streets). ”They don’t believe in carrying no
guns,” Do-dirty reported. ”If he get caught he got possession and
CCW [carrying a concealed weapon]. So he gonna . . . stash his
pistol [away from his body].” Darnell concurred: ”Why you have
a gun out there? You already gonna catch a dope case, you know
what I’m saying? So why catch a concealed weapon [case also]?”
Or, as June Bug put it:

Five out of ten, a drug dealer out there selling drugs ain’t got
no pistol . . . ’cause he’s worried about the police riding on
him. See, he can throw the drugs away but it’s hard to throw
a pistol away ’cause they [police]can go get that pistol.

Though guns could have theoretically been placed somewhere in

the surrounding area, they would not be available at the time they
Sanction Threats 31

were needed most. Off-person hiding also made firearms prone

to discovery and theft by covert observers, clearly an undesirable
outcome.
In an analysis of Drug Use Forecasting (DUF)data, Decker and
Pennell(l995) found that exceedingly small percentages of street-
based offenders reported carrying a gun all or most of the time.
Firearm possession did tend to be higher among drug sellers, but
rates still were quite low. Lizotte et al. (1997),by contrast, found
that between one-third and one-half of all juvenile drug sellers re-
ported carrying a gun regularly. It may be the case that, for non-
carriers, the threat of arrest outstrips that of being robbed-a
testament to more vigorous policing, harsher weapons laws, or
simply an underestimation of the real threat of drug robbery. This
is, of course, speculative; more research is needed to specify the
contingencies that mediate firearm possession within this high-
risk group.
Guns aside, we know from the literature that curbside drug
dealers typically lack the organizational wherewithal required
for even mundane retaliatory action. Their freelance, individual-
istic orientation is not conducive to focused payback (see, for ex-
ample, Decker and Van Winkle, 1996; Jacobs, 1999a). This is
especially true for those who deal on high-volume, competitive
sets-on which many of our offenders committed their drug rob-
beries. Time spent seeking retaliation can better be spent making
money and for many, the opportunity cost of lost sales was too
high to justify the effort. ”Money, money, they can get that again,”
Goldie professed. ”Ain’t got to worry about it. They can make
that money back probably in one night.” Jay agreed: ”What [tlhe
[victim loses isn’t] really no loss to him because of the way he
make the money fast. . . . It’s a waste of time [to pursue me].” Or
as Blackwell observed, ”I don’t think I’m . . . gonna get retaliated
back on by them ’cause they want to go back on they corner and
sell drugs. That’s what they do, sell drugs.”
Indeed, a number of offenders developed a degree of self-
assuredness they conspicuously lacked for seemingly less dan-
gerous offenses. Do-dirty, for example (one of the most ruthless
members of the sample), claimed he was afraid to shoplift. ”I’m
scared to steal,” he confessed. ”I tried it once, you dig? . . . Man,
32 Motivation

I got out of the store, they rushed me right over. I can’t steal. I’m
not no thief.” Blackwell made a similar admission. ”I wouldn’t
want to shoplift,” he conceded. ”[I] never stole nothing a day in
my life. . . . I would rather buy what I want out of the store.”
With drug robbery, offenders knew what they were getting
into. Experience and familiarity engendered a certain sense of
confidence. Threats were apparent and prone to being managed.
Skills had been honed from repetition. Offending scripts reduced
ambiguity (see also Forgas 1979).When outcomes are predictable,
sanction risks seem smaller or less ominous than they really are.
The fear of the unknown, by contrast, can be too much to handle:

I used to steal, I used to rob people. I mean just rob people

houses, break into houses, take jewelry whatever. I done
snatched purses. I done snatched shit off of people’s neck
you know.. . . That’s too risky because you ain’t really
preparing yourself for something, you’re just there and see it
and snatch. One day you could snatch the wrong person’s
shit. ’Cause like I said, when you’re in a certain environment
you don’t know who got a gun with them and who don’t.
You would be surprised how many people out here on the
street, just walking up and down the street looking normal
got a gun on them. Some of them not with intent to do crime
but intent to protect they self because of where they have to
go.--fay

All these factors taken together make drug robbery appear to be

the best, most rapid, and most reliable solution to the offenders’
pressing material needs (see also Wright and Decker 1997).

MORALISTIC ACTION?

The allure of drug robbery transcended utilitarian notions of

risk and reward. A number of offenders waxed philosophical
about their motivations, claiming such offenses were activated, at
Moralistic Action? 33

least in part, by moralistic concerns. The notion of ”crime as so-

cial control” is nothing new (Black 1983). Since time immemori-
al, people have taken the law into their own hands to right
perceived wrongs. In virtually every society, individuals perceive
”the right to inflict pain or deprivations on others . . . under spec-
ified conditions” (Tedeschi and Felson 1994:216). Indeed, vigi-
lantism was once the modal form of conflict resolution; formal
social control arose primarily to limit it.
For some offenders, drug robbery constituted prosocial behav-
ior designed to sanction dealers who had committed some per-
ceived violation. The nature of such violations varied. A number
of offenders couched them in broad terms, alleging that drug rob-
bery represented righteous retribution for the destruction dealers
wrought on persons and entire communities by hawking their evil
wares. The devastating impact of crack, heroin, and other hard
drugs on urban life has been well-chronicled (see, for example,
Bourgois 1995).As self-anointed purveyors of street justice, drug
robbers were going to make dealers pay the consequences. ”If
you selling dope [you] messing up the community,” Low Down
illustrates, ”you know what I’m saying? You gonna have to get
got [robbed] because you [a] person up here killing people.”
Loony Ass Nigga agreed: ”That dope killing people,” he de-
clared, ”truly it is. They [dealers] got people looking bad, they
don’t feel sorry for nobody, why should I pity them? . . . They ain’t
showing no love, I ain’t showing none.” Drug robbers emerged
as agents on a quasipoliticalmission to rectify what they believed
to be a great social wrong:

Anybody’s that selling drugs to us, they killing us. Like I feel
for the kids, like a mother that’s smoking crack and every-
thing. They stop taking care of they kids because they want
crack. . . . They send they kids on (inaudible) and everything
and I look at it like they supposed to take care of they kids
and everything. When they get they welfare checks and all
that, they take straight money. They using crack, the ones
that got kids, they supposed to be eating, they supposed to
be clothing and all that and them hustlers, they just want
they money-Blackwell
34 Motivation

Some respondents went so far as to claim they were doing users

a favor (by robbing their suppliers). ”If I take it, they can’t buy it”
was the sentiment typically expressed. A small number had even
managed to convince themselves that they were providing a ser-
vice to their victims. ”It’s better for me to get [them] than it is for
the police,” Do-dirty illustrates. ”See, the police get him, he got
to make bond and then he gonna lose out.” Three Eyes rational-
ized similarly: ”[I’m doing my victims] a favor. Better me than the
police, you know, you get locked up, kept in a cage . . . money
gone.. . . I’m just taking your money [but] you still out on the
streets.” Such intellectualizationsare common among those who
wish to make harmful conduct seem respectable, and who seek
to reduce personal responsibility for it in the process (Bandura
1999:195)
It would be folly, however, to suggest that the offenders were
motivated solely by social altruism, or that the altruistic motives
they expressed were genuine. In most cases, retributive motives
appeared to be grounded in some need to right a perceived per-
sonal wrong. The nature of such wrongs varied, from blows to
self-esteem, to transactional ”insults,” to affronts to personal dig-
nity. All, however, shared the common theme of an unbalanced
state of reciprocity-wherein slighted individuals felt the need to
reclaim a perceived loss of social standing. Social psychologists
tell us that whenever people find their desired identities im-
pugned, remedial action must be taken to ”protect, maintain, and
reestablish” them (Tedeschi and Felson 1994:256; Goffman 1971;
see also Baumeister and Campbell 1999 on ”threatened ego-
tism”). Drug robbery represented a powerful way to do this.
As hard-drug addicts, respondents were especially sensitive
about how their status was perceived by others-particularly
those who supplied them. Dealers were known to have ”big
heads,” talking down to their customers and treating them in dis-
paraging ways. ”Once they start selling drugs they get a big
head,” Lewis illustrates. ”They talk to you like you a kid, you
know, and tell you how to spend your money this way and that
way.” On the streets, this cannot be tolerated; ”esteem is so pre-
carious that it can be taken away with just a word” (Anderson
1999:75,95).Indeed, affronts that casual observers might consider
Moralistic Action? 35

trivial were imbued with profound meaning here. The wide-

spread acceptance of the word ”trivial” by middle-class ”out-
siders” betrays their utter inability ”to interpret and make sense
of the semiotic significance of opaque social events” (Campbell
1986:122). Seemingly innocuous encounters might very well re-
sult in conflicts fraught with reputational-and retributional-
meaning:

When I seen [this dealer] I said, “Hey, what’s up Tony, how

you doing?” ”All right man, just chilling and stuff like that.”
”Oh man, you looking bad, you still on drugs and stuff like
that?” ”Yeah, you know.” So I kind of take that personal, you
know what I’m saying?Why do you look down on me when
you probably doing things wrong? . . . I just sit down and
think about, OK, so he got all this [money]and then he gonna
talk down on me like that? . . . I was like, I’m gonna get this
dude.-Low Down
I robbed him ’cause he was talking shit, he pissed me off.
Otherwise I just don’t do that to people.-Kilo
He didn’t know how to talk to peoples. . . like he feel like that
[he didn’t owe nobody] shit and he could talk to you any
kind of way. . . . I didn’t like him. . . . We had a few words. . .
so I figured that one of these days I would get him.-Lewis

Condescension was a sure-fire way for dealers to trigger animos-

ity, particularly given the synergistic relationship they had with
their customers:

These cats [crack dealers] man because they think they bet-
ter than the next motherfucker, man. . . . Them little cats dis-
criminate the motherfuckers that smoke crack. ”Oh he just an
old crackhead motherfucker,” you see what I’m saying’ you
know. But what the motherfucker fails to realize is, man, you
know, we make you, you don’t make us. Without us your
crack ain’t shit ’cause you will still be stuck with that shit,
36 Motivation

you know. So I prefer to get the crack dealers because the ma-
jority of them be cats, you know, they don’t have no respect
for the older dudes, you know. Because, you know, I’m not
begging you for anything; I’m buying what I want from you
but I still got to be a crackhead motherfucker to you.-June
Bug (see also Wills 1981on ”downward comparison”)

Offenders relished the opportunity to put violators in their prop-

er place, restoring their own status by lowering that of those who
impugned them. ”When you can get [a] dude [like that], man,”
Curly beamed, ”it’s like a trophy. You can say, ’Man, I got that
motherfucker, man. I really got him. He’s been fucking me over
. . . and I got [him],’ and it makes you feel good.” Baby Doll
agreed: ”They be looking at us like we really crack fiends, they
look down on us so when I got that gun on them, they looking
down at this gun. They look how we be looking when we need
that crack.” June Bug was equally emphatic:

Man, you know this little nigger, (inaudible) this old punk-
ass nigger, he called me a motherfucking goddamn crack-
head. [ThenI] hit him in the head and bust his motherfucking
head with a pistol. Get high . . . get high and sit back and
think about him.. . . [He was saying,] ”motherfucker god-
damn it please don’t kill me,” see what I’m saying? But I’m
just another crackhead to his motherfucking ass but he got
the nerve to beg for his motherfucking life, you see what I’m
saying? So it‘s fun to me.

For some, taking such action seemed to be almost as reinforcing

as the drugs to which they were addicted. ”It’s like an adrenaline
rush,” Loony Ass Nigga proclaimed. ”Some people go bungee
jumping, some people go sky diving, I . . . kick [drug] houses
in.. . . It’s the same thing, no joke.” ”I get a kick out of robbing
drug dealers,” exulted Blackwell. ”It’s fun . . . real fun . . . it’s just
something that I really enjoy. . . . It’s just like if a crackhead smoke
crack and they get that feeling that high, that rush; I feel the same
Moralistic Act ion ? 37

way as a crackhead when they get that pipe when I rob one of
these drug dealers out here.” Or as Lady Bug put it, ”I mean it just
give you this supernatural feeling that you can be in control. . . .
When I put a gun up to they head I feel good. . . . It make you just
be in control and then just to see them frightened, it can give you
more energy.” “I. . .feel so powerful,” Snap remarked. ”Just take
control. . . . I love that, man . . . that’s a [rush].” As the offenders
insinuate, such feelings are not limited to robberies committed
out of vengeance. However, the satisfaction obtained at these
times undoubtedly is sweeter than at any other (see also Feather
1996).
Often, dealer insults were transactional in nature-grounded
in conduct specific to some purchase attempt. Lewis, for exam-
ple, recalled trying to buy $50 worth of heroin for $45-a com-
mon tactic on the streets where users try to stretch their money as
far as possible. The dealer, however, ”took my money and balled
it up and threw it in my face, threw it back to me. . . . He wanted
to talk to [me] like [I was] a drug addict. . . and I felt he couldn’t
talk to me that kind of way. . . . I said to myself, ’That’s ok . . . I’ll
be back tonight . . . I’m gonna stalk you.”’
Similar encounters were reported by others:

Like if you get a rock from them, they tell you you got to pay
$50 for one rock. That’s an insult . . . A rock isn’t nothing but
$20. They gonna charge you $50 for a rock?--f Rock
You can go there with your last $20 and they want to give you
something real, real small. That will make you mad. He
needs to be got [robbed], you know.-Baby Doll

Dealers who refused to front drugs or give credit, especially to

longtime customers who had proven their brand-loyalty, were
perceived to be especially insolent. ”Free” drugs typically are re-
quested when users are most desperate, usually after all other
means of income-generation have been exhausted. Broke and
under pressure to keep the party going, denials can generate
nothing short of a full-blown crisis. Violence emerges reflexively
38 Motivation

to deal with it, aggression ignited by a volatile combination of

vengeance and need:

Like I ask them for something and they don’t give it to me.
A guy on the street, he selling rock and I told him like this,
”Man, look, I’m hurting, I need my motherfucking medicine
and I need it right now. . . . I asked for something and you
wouldn’t give me nothing so now I want it all.” . . . He say,
”what you talking about?” ”I want your motherfucking
crack.” ”I ain’t giving you shit.” I upped on him, ”Give it
here,” and he give it to me. . . . ”You think I’m bullshitting?
. . . Give me all your dope and all your money now. . . . You
think I’m bullshitting?”I’ll rob his ass.-] Rock
I’m down and out and I ain’t got nothing coming i n . . . and
I come to you and you can’t do nothing for me. So what the
hell am I gonna do? What you think I’m gonna do? I’m gonna
rob you, that’s all.-Ray Dog
I’m broke and I tried to talk to him about fronting me some-
thing. . . so I can get back on my feet. . . he was just in there
counting his money and his dope. . . . I done thought about
it, man; I could take this.. . . It just came to me, I just went
crazy man.-Smoke Dog

Being ripped off or shorted was an equally powerful catalyst.

When purchasing illicit drugs, every transaction represents an ex-
pensive and, to some degree, irretrievable investment. Writing off
resources that might have taken significant time and effort to ac-
cumulate, often at considerable risk, is not an option; the ”sunk
costs” are too substantial and generate too much cognitive dis-
sonance (Arkes and Ayton 1999). K-red, for example, reportedly
revenge-robbed a dealer of $600 in cash and a gram of heroin (val-
ued at about $250) after being sold just $10 worth of fake heroin.
Bacca, trying to collect on a larger drug debt, was told by the
debtor that he had ”nothing” and to ”get out of his face.” He
promptly went home, loaded his pistol, and returned to rob the
seller. Likewise, Jay recounted an incident in which he helped a
dealer-associate rehabilitate a house, who tried to ”get over” by
Moralistic Action? 39

paying him in crack rather than cash. Drugs are not considered
payment in kind, and Jay perceived this to be demeaning of his
essential character (by implying that he was a stigmatized ”crack-
head” whose existence revolved solely around securing the
drug). He turned to drug robbery to collect what was perceived
to be properly owed to him:

I do rehabbing on houses. . . and I had did some work on one

of his apartments for him, some drywall and stuff and he
didn’t ever finish giving me all the money ’cause me hang-
ing around, you know, he would give me a little dope here a
little dope there to compensate and I told him ”I didn’t ask
you for that shit. . . . I wasn’t working for crack, I was work-
ing for money,” and he felt like he didn’t have to give me no
money ’cause he had gave me some crack. . . . He owed me
$100 at that point. The rest of it he had paid me, but he still
owed me $100. I wanted him to give me $100. He didn’t want
to give me $100 ’cause he said he gave me some crack. Then
he tried to give me some more crack and I told him I wasn’t
working for no fucking crack. . . . I said, ”I want my money.”
He said, ”I don’t owe you no motherfucking money.” He
said, ”Man, I gave you the crack.’’ I said, ”Man, I don’t
work for no fucking crack, man.” I said I was working for
money. . . . “I want my motherfucking money.” He said, ”I
ain’t gonna give you no money man, ’cause I done gave
you too much crack.’’ I turned off like I was gonna walk off.
I just went in my [pants] and pulled my gun out. Told him he
was gonna give me my money. I took about $400. . .from him
that day.

Perceived insults are one thing; advances against one’s very per-
sonhood, or ”form,” as they say on the streets, are quite another.
Indeed, threats to one’s personal autonomy represented arguably
the most serious instance of negative reciprocity. After a drug-
market associate snitched to the police on J Rock, he felt irre-
sistibly compelled to take matters into his own hands. ”A friend
will never tell on nobody,” he insisted. ”He tell, he rat on me. . . .
Three years of my life [in prison] and everything [all the crime] I
40 Motivation

do I ain’t never get caught and that nigger get me caught.. . .

That’s why I did what I had to do.” Lady Bug robbed a dealer for
being too sexually forward with her cousin; their relationship
was apparently close enough to transform the incident into a per-
sonal vendetta that would end only after vengeance. (The subse-
quent robbery resulted in the shooting of three of the dealer’s
associates.) Baby Doll fleeced a dealer in retaliation for her own
rape a few months prior:

. . . this guy. He had did something to me, he had raped

me. . . . So I had set it in my mind that I had wanted to get
him. So I set him up. I told him that somebody wanted to get
kind of like an 8 ball or something like that. So. . . I took him
on the set to get him robbed.

One may justifiably wonder why respondents turned to robbery

as the means to exact revenge. Why not assault or burglarize vic-
tims, or deface their property? Why not seek the ultimate payback
and kill them? Perhaps drug robbery represents the best combi-
nation of financial harm, physical threat, and mental intimida-
tion. Assaults are too simple; black eyes and busted lips heal.
Defaced property can be fixed or replaced. Theft without contact
is not personal or humiliating enough. Murder generates bodies,
and bodies bring heat (something drug robbers dearly want to
avoid). Drug robbery mixes the most hurtful elements of proper-
ty and violent crime, and is perhaps the best way to exact blood-
less revenge. Most importantly, offenders can secure exactly what
they want-and need-to keep the party going.
Importantly, such revenge need not be directed against the ac-
tual person or persons responsible for the activating affront. Im-
perfect retaliation-drug robberies motivated by the actions of
one person but enacted against others-were commonly report-
ed. Respondents often had sold drugs in the past, creating the
”necessary and sufficient” conditions for the motive to form.
”When somebody robbed me,” Do-dirty illustrates, ”I robbed an-
other motherfucker. I got mine back. . . . What happen to me I can
Moralistic Action? 41

do it to [some other guy] . . . it’s a chain of robbing.” Lewis

claimed he really wasn’t interested in drug robbery until he was
robbed himself. ”That made me want to start sticking up [oth-
ers].” Similarly, Darnell used his own victimization experience as
motivation to prey on others:

Yeah. They messed me up pretty bad. So therefore I couldn’t

regain the clientele that I had on the street before. . . . [No one
would] pay me any attention, didn’t want to help me out. So
that’s when the nines [9 mm’s] come off the shelf. . . . I’m
gonna take it all.

Even those who may have been initially dead-set against stealing
the property of others came to realize that turnabout-no matter
how indirect-is fair-play. The norm of reciprocity dictates that
every action must be met with an equal and opposite reaction.
Deficits-be they cognitive, psychological, or material-must be
made up as rapidly as possible. This is especially important in
street culture, where inaction symbolizes weakness, and weak-
ness signals vulnerability. (See Takahashi 2000 on the principle of
”generalized exchange.”)

DISCUSSION

From no other work category, licit or illicit, can one earn the
sums offered by drug robbery with so little effort. Even tiny re-
wards can look large when earned in such fashion, and the
bounties seized here are seldom tiny. Moreover, they come in
the precise form offenders desire, permitting party pursuits to
continue uninterrupted. Formal sanction risks are perceptibly
small and informal ones (i.e., victim retaliation) are manage-
able. This makes anticipated rewards that much more attrac-
tive. Such offenses also take but seconds to complete, which
makes the risk ”quick” and seem smaller / less threatening than
it really is (Felson 1987).
42 Motivation

Material deficits are relieved, but only fleetingly, since money

and drugs typically are burned as fast as they are obtained. Of-
fenders thereby create the conditions that drive them to their next
crime (see Wright and Decker 1997).To the degree that drug rob-
bery promises a reliable solution to their problems, the cycle of
deficit to surplus and back to deficit will become ceaselessly in-
tense. Ano-holds-barred mentality may be cultivated in which of-
fenders believe they can drug themselves into oblivion and never
be without. Robberies, like the drug use that inspires them, may
well become habitual (see also Gabor et al. 1987; McSweeney and
Swindelll999).
Seemingly irrational to outsiders, such behavior makes perfect
sense in the circumscribed world of the streets. Here, status is a
function of the totality with which one can slough off the mun-
dane concerns that plague others and embrace instead a life shot
through with action (see Katz 1991:297).Burning money is func-
tional, the ”cost of raising or maintaining one’s status” (Wright
and Decker 1994:45). Coolness is king. To be cool, one must do
what one wants to do, when one wants to do it. Coolness means
maintaining control over one’s own destiny and refusing ”to
allow others to determine or influence one’s life” (Campbell
1986:120).Coolness means showing contempt for everything that
conventional society deems correct and appropriate (Fleisher
1998:138). Coolness ”means remaining a free spirit in a world
which persistently seeks to tame” and crush that spirit (Campbell
1986:120).To live conventionally is to live the life of the square-
a life of rationality and restraint, sublimation and self-control,
boredom and repetition. It is a life of false consciousness and
failed self-actualization, a life these offenders want no part of.
The looking glass of the streets is especially strong, and its glare
is felt by those who can’t measure up with sustained intensity. In-
deed, those unable to keep the action going face an immediate
threat to their social standing (Wright and Decker 1994:201).They
must not only stare failure full in the face, but suffer social de-
valuation in a world where legitimate means of status attainment
have largely ceased to exist.
The psychic benefits of drug robbery should not be underesti-
mated either. Recall that the lives of these offenders are very
Discussion 43

much spinning out of control. Desperation shadows them like a

pulp fiction detective. Uncertainty is the only constant. In the mo-
ment of the offense, the world stands still. Offenders enjoy a
momentary opportunity to impose order on chaos. They can ex-
ert control in a bubble of self-contained action, locking into the
brute being that lies at the core of their self (see also Adler 1985).
They can revel in the serenity of dominance, testing and display-
ing primal capacities that cannot be tested or displayed elsewhere
(cf. Heimer 1988). They can embrace fatality to ”manifest tran-
scendent powers of control” (Katz 1988:220). For those whose
self-worth is so existentially grounded, such an experience may
be matched by few others.
It would be unwise to overemphasize the self-help or ”secret
social control” function of drug robbery (see also Peterson 1999).
The offense is committed first and foremost for material gain. Of-
fenders want drugs and cash, they want as much of them as they
can get, and they want them now. Compliance-not harm-is the
goal; violence is incidental, often disfavored, and tends to happen
only if ”forced” by the victim (Reidel 1993:159; see also Felson
and Messner 1996).This is not to suggest that depriving victims
of property is not harming them but rather, that the harm is not
truly injurious. Vengeance-crimes, by contrast, are predicated on
angry-rather than instrumental-aggression, assault not pre-
dation (Felson and Messner 1996;but see Black 1983).Revenge is
tangential to drug robbery, important, but an added bonus.
Talk of drug robbery as moralistic action may therefore be just
that. Techniques of neutralization are commonly used by de-
viants to make bad deeds look more honorable than they really
are (Sykes and Matza 1957).As Mills (1940) reminds us, the rea-
sons people give for their actions are not themselves without
reasons. This is particularly true when offenders can convince
themselves that their reputation is at stake, or when audiences are
middle-class researchers whom offenders may perceive to be
passing judgment. In such instances, harmful conduct is invest-
ed with ”high moral purpose,” which not only ”eliminates self-
censure but. . .engages self-approvalin the service of destructive
exploits. What was once morally condemnable becomes a source
of self-valuation” (Bandura 1999:196).
44 Motivation

Yet how ”condemnable” a deed is drug robbery? More to the

point, how ”good” can such a bad deed be? In the culture of the
badass, few offenses communicate a more powerful message
about one’s essential character. The streets are a stage. They are a
place where dignity, honor, and respect are won and lost on a dai-
ly basis. Talking about how tough, poised, or resourceful one
might be is not enough. One must prove it through action. Jam-
ming a gun in someone’s face and seizing their valuables does
this in the most emphatic way possible. Doing so against anoth-
er criminal puts the perpetrator on a whole different level. Repu-
tation is currency, and the resultant riches can match the material
ones the offense promises. As Macleod (1987:26) insists:

To be “bad” is literally to be good. . . . [It] is inextricably

bound up with the premium put on masculinity, physical
toughness, and street wisdom. . . . To be bad is the main cri-
terion for status [on the streets]; its primacy cannot be
overemphasized.

In the final analysis, it is not just a question of keeping the party

going but how one is able to do it. Readers must keep in mind that
motivation is an embedded construct operating in the foreground
of offenders’ lives. To ignore this is to ignore the larger phenom-
enological context in which all decisions to offend are activated
(see also Groves and Lynch, 1990; Katz, 1988).The victims in this
case just happen to be ”tarnished” people (Shover 1975),who sell
outlawed goods, and who may or may not have behaved in dis-
respectful ways. Those intent on robbing them couldn’t ask for a
better justification.

NOTES

1. Such claims take on special resonance in the present era, one in which
record numbers of Americans are forsaking currency for the con-
venience and safety of plastic. This ”revolution” in cash-avoidance
Notes 45

behavior amassed nearly $1trillion of credit debt in 1999 alone (CBS

News 2000; see also Felson 1997).
2. This is not to say that respondents will fail to exercise versality when
the occasion calls for it. Rather, it is to suggest that drug robbery is the
preferred crime, one they report turning to first.
3. Apparently, some dealers actually call the authorities, under the pre-
text that their ”insurance money” or ”job check” had been stolen. Po-
lice typically reject such claims as bogus.
This page intentionally left blank
 CHAPTER THREE

Target S e Zect ion

T
HE STUDY OF target selection is part and parcel of a more
generalized concern with the chemistry of crime-the fac-
tors necessary and sufficient for any offense to occur (Fel-
son 1987). Interacting dynamically with motivation, suitable
targets shape the opportunity structure for, and trajectory of, crim-
inal events in discrete contexts. Obviously, the best drug robbery
targets are the most visible, valuable, accessible, and perceptibly
easiest to take. This makes perfect sense. Drug robbers are utili-
tarians. They want to score as much as they can as quickly as pos-
sible, and to encounter minimum resistance in the process. The
harder the target and the less it is worth, the lower its marginal
utility. The harder the target and the more time required to "take
it," the greater the risk of intervention, both formal and informal.
Insofar as drug robbers are rational decision makers, the selec-
tion process will be a prudent one. Contingencies will be ap-
praised, costs and benefits evaluated, and outcome probabilities
assigned particular weights. Only after a thoroughgoing assess-
ment will the optimal course of action be revealed, and acted upon.
Most drug robbers, however, are not nearly so calculating.
They maintain a rationality that is limited at best (Bennett and

47
48 Target Selection

Wright 1984).Immediate needs, blunted judgment, and pressing

information-processingdemands mandate that decisions be made
rapidly, often on the basis of limited data. This creates a dilemma,
as drug robbers confront ”two seemingly conflicting demands,
one calling for action, the other counseling [deliberation]”(Wright
and Decker 1994:62).The present chapter explores this dynamic
tension, and how it shapes the form and content of drug robbers’
decisi0ns.l

THE PROCESS

At the most basic level, target-selection is about operating

when settings are most likely to be victim-rich. The greater the
dealer density, the wider the range of options from which drug
robbers could pick. The more options, the better their chance of
choosing the most lucrative target (see also Pirolli and Card 1999).
High-density sets also provide the opportunity to pick the ”soft-
est” victim, one whose retaliatory potential is perceived to be es-
pecially poor relative to expected rewards. Extravagant heists,
after all, can be enjoyed to their fullest only if they are seized with-
out suffering grave injury or death.
Dealer density hinges on a multiplicity factors, but consumer
demand is principally implicated. Demand, in turn, largely is a
function of time. Like other street crime, the vast majority of drug
sales occur after nightfall. ”Usually dark hours is when [dealers]
. . . are out,” Jay explained. ”They ain’t gonna be out too much
like a time like this [early afternoon]. . . . Most dealers sleep in the
daytime. They be working all night. . . . Anywhere from 8 at night
to 6 or 7 in the morning.” Friday- and weekend-nights were es-
pecially busy. Due largely to employment periodicities, cus-
tomers’ discretionary time and disposable income tend to be
higher during these periods than at any other. Drug income
comes fast and furiously, and sellers cannot afford to forego
promised windfalls. Greater drug and cash reserves are needed
to service this demand, increasing the number and attractiveness
of would-be targets. ”[It’s] fat . . . on Friday nights,” Buck pro-
The Process 49

claimed. “Most of the time dope dealers carry a lot of dope on Fri-
days, they sell a lot on Fridays.”
On or near the first of the month was perhaps the best time for
drug robbers to troll. This period marked the disbursement of
public transfer payments-Social Security, Aid to Families with
Dependent Children (AFDC), and disability checks. Such pay-
ments were in the several-hundred dollar range, and sellers
reportedly could expect to pocket a significant portion from cus-
tomers who received them. ”The beginning of the month . . .
that’s when the most money out,” Loony Ass Nigga observed.
”Everybody get they check, social security checks come out. . . .
That’s a couple of G’s (thousands of dollars) right there. . . . I’m
talking about these people have big time money [and they spend
it on drugs].” J Rock concurred: ”The first of the month where the
money at,” he insisted. ”That’s where the money at. . . . The bills
[checks]be out, boom, boom, got all that shit out there. . . . [I’ll be
out there too].” As Bourgois et al. (1997:162-63) point out, the il-
licit economy is facilitated and energized by the very institutions
of government that seek to suppress drug use. Though recent
welfare reform legislation is intended to address this problem (by
reducing the amount of public transfer money and changing its
form so as to make it less liquid; Jacobs 1999a:47),the effects have
apparently not been felt on the streets. Drug robbers responded
accordingly.
It stands to reason, however, that targeting drug sellers during
their most active periods may bring undue risk. Police enforce-
ment typically peaks with transactional activity; the more active
the drug market, the more intensely it tends to be interdicted.
Though drug robbery is attractive because it lacks official sanc-
tion threats, police can stumble on such offenses just as easily as
any other enacted on the open street. The net of social control is
wide and democratic, imperiling all who do wrong. Armed and
skulking the streets, drug robbers faced very real consequences
in the event they were ”flagged” by a passing cop:

. . . carry a gun. . . get flagged with a gun, look what you got
now. You got a CCW. State gonna drop it, Feds gonna pick it
up then you go in the Federal joint.-Slim
50 Target Selection

Owing to pressing needs, the vast majority of respondents did

not appear to be fazed. Quite the contrary; the ”hotter” the cor-
ner, the more attractive, paradoxically, it seemed to become. Ven-
dors subject to constant police scrutiny were wholly unlikely to
be armed, even less so than normal. This created the perfect vic-
tim, one flush with cash and / or drugs yet defenseless. ”Most cor-
ners that I [target] dudes on,” Curly reasoned, ”are called hot
spots.. . . [Dealers] can’t stand on this corner . . . with no gun,
man, because the police might pull over any time and make
everybody get against the wall and I’m just saying that stuff’s
common. . . Do-dirty agreed:
”

Because when the police riding around it’s enough they out
there selling drugs on the street. So if the police ride down
here, you know what I’m saying, they got a pistol and it’s . . .
sticking out. Well then they going to jail for dealing drugs
and a CCW. And you don’t know if these police gonna shoot
you if you just try to take your gun out and lay it on the
ground. They might shoot you. They think you trying to
shoot them. So I catch the street dealers.

Precise information was needed to identify exactly which of the

many potential targets justified specific attention. Failure to pre-
qualify victims risks selecting someone who either is not worth
one’s while, or who presents too grave a threat relative to the ex-
pected bounty (see also Lejeune 1977). Why chance injury or
death to secure an unknown and perhaps meager take? As Kilo
declared, ”If you gonna do it, you might as well go for the big
money, a large sum. . . . You got to make it worth while.” (On bal-
ancing risk and reward in robbery, see Cook 1976.)
With these criteria in mind, it was not surprising to learn that
house dealers were the preferred quarry. Dedicated locations pro-
vide protection from police scrutiny and a place to get high. This
attracts substantial business, often repeated over a short period
of time. Cash is made hand over fist, so sizable drug reserves
must be maintained to meet consumer demand. ”I only go to
dope dealer houses,” Three Eyes insisted, ”the ones that got mon-
ey . . . $30,000 or $40,000.. . . You can’t get much . . . on the
The Process 51

streets.” Spanky recognized that he ”could . . . just [rob] a cat

around the corner or something but I know they probably
wouldn’t have had nothing but maybe $1,000 theyself. They
[don’t] have no money.” Others made similar declarations:

The big boys is the best boys because those boys you never
can tell, you might go their house and get $20,000 or $30,000
out of there, you dig? You might go in there and get $150,000
’cause they be having safes in they houses. You might go in
there and get like 30 or 40 keys [kilos]out of there.-Ray Dog
Forget them . . . little dope dealers. I like the big dope deal-
ers, the ones that got the money, cars, Lexus and all that,
Volvos and stuff like that. They the ones with the money. . . .
Them the ones with the scroll [cash].-Smoke Dog

Some came to this realization over time, graduating to house rob-

beries after realizing that curbside vendors could not offer ”real
money: ”

I don’t do no petty [drug] robberies like I used to, you know,

when I was little, well not little, but you know, a few years
ago. I would just do petty robberies, $10 or $20 for nothing.
But now, it’s like I got to get me a couple of G’s. I want some
grand before I, you know, that’s worth it, you know what
I’m saying. Kick in, get you a couple of G’s, but a couple of
hundred, I wouldn’t do it for a couple of hundred when I do
it. If it ain’t over $1,000 I ain’t messing with it.-Loony Ass
Nigga

The paradox is that large rewards come at high risk. House sell-
ers lack the ”softness” of their curbside counterparts. Most are
heavily armed and unafraid to use deadly force. Observers often
are present, increasing the likelihood of resistance (in part, due to
its greater reputational importance; see Felson 1982).Approach-
ing predators can be more easily spotted and intercepted. Even if
entry is successful, offenders will be hard-pressed to know what
52 Target Selection

they will face beyond the door. Multiple parties must be rapidly
accounted for and subdued. Unfamiliar environs render out-
comes less predictable. Chaos clouds judgment, leading to mis-
takes with possibly fatal consequences.
For Blackwell, the perceived lack of control was too much to
handle. ”I would have a problem robbing [one],” he confessed.
”You go busting in somebody house or you go up to somebody
door talking about it’s a robbery, shit . . . you better believe he
gonna have his gun setting right here beside him . . . your ass
gonna get blasted then. . . . So I figure I catch the street dealer. . . .
See, you already know the street dealers ain’t got no pistol on
them.” Shot during a previous house robbery attempt, J Rock
simply didn’t ”trust that . . . shit no more”-implying a prefer-
ence for less fearsome, though less lucrative, streetcorner prey.
Many echoed similar sentiments, but recognized that the com-
paratively inferior take offered by street dealers required specif-
ic measures to ensure that those selected indeed were worth it. A
number of methods were devised to obtain such proof. One in-
volved a rather direct tactic of approaching prospective victims
under the guise of wanting to make a purchase. Admittedly bold,
such a strategy is not as risky as it sounds. Many curbside drug
sales are initiated precisely in this fashion, and vendors must be
amenable lest they sacrifice precious business, especially on com-
petitive sets. Feigning interest, drug robbers would determine
whether or not proposed victims were viable:

Talk to ’em. ”Like, what’s you copping?” [he’ll say]. Like, I’ll
probably say . . . ”I can get an ounce of cocaine,” but I ain’t
got the money for an ounce, and he say, ”Well, I got
[ounces].” Bam, you just told on yourself that you deal in
ounces of cocaine. I’m gonna get you, like that.-Crazy Jack
I’ll get close to ’em [by making drug buys] just to see what
type of person they are, what quality of drugs they have, how
much money, how much drugs they have.-Bacca

Physical ploys were also effective in bringing this information to

the surface, ploys ”widely appreciated by street robbers as [a use-
The Process 53

ful way to] show where and how much. . . victim[s are] carrying”
(Katz 1988:174):

Like if I go with a $100 bill, then if he come out with all this
money in his pocket, then he got a bag full of heroin, a bag
full of rocks. Then I’ll say, ”O.K., that’s my pick.” He set his
self up to be robbed.-Lewis
I showed him a $10 bill and maybe 15 ones under the bottom
[to him, it looked like a lot of cash]. I wanted to let him know
I wanted to get a gram [of heroin, about $2001. . . . The roll
looked nice and big like I had a couple hundred bucks
there. . . . He pulled [this] whole roll of money out of his
pocket [and that’s when I knew he was a good guy to select].
-Blackwell

In most cases, however, offenders needed some way to justify their

initial presence. Manufacturing affiliation artifically through a
”cold buy” is possible, but not always easy; lacking social histo-
ry, buyers might well be perceived to have ulterior motives, and
be rejected outright. Though cold buys generally will succeed
among more indiscreet / desperate traffickers, their usefulness for
prudent vendors is questionable. And prudent vendors are pre-
cisely the ones drug robbers want most to target: desperate sell-
ers tend to be poor, and poor sellers tend not to make good
victims. ”You can’t go up to the person and say ’Let me cop from
you,”’ YoYo explained, ”because that person does not know you
and therefore they be like, you might be five-0 [police] or what-
ever, you know.” ”The person that don’t know you,” Ray Dog
continued, ”see you coming and burn out real quick. . . . The per-
son that know gonna sit there, gonna wait on you because he
know you.” Slim agreed. ”You got to make yourself known first,”
he insisted, ”you got to let people know who you is because . . .
ain’t no way you gonna let me [get close to you otherwise].”
Being introduced by a middleman represented an effective so-
lution to this problem. Network researchers tell us that transitiv-
ity is a hallmark of tie-generation, regardless of social context:
54 Target Selection

Person A knows person B, person B knows person C, person B in-

troduces person A to C. In drug markets, transitivity is particu-
larly crucial: Multiple weak ties generate contacts that lead to an
expansive web of potential targets. The more connected one is,
the richer one’s opportunity structure (cf. Granovetter 1973):

How do I find dealers to target? Through someone else,

someone that knows that person. . . . Like, if me and you
friends, you know people that I don’t know and I know peo-
ple that you don’t know, but me and you are close [sowe find
out targets from each other].-Bacca
. . . if you don’t know them, they ain’t gonna deal with you’
no way. You got to know somebody that know them real per-
sonally, ’cause if you can’t call their name they won’t fuck
with you. This guy knew him [and that was my point of en-
try].-Jay
[You] have to get with the person that knows that person in
order to get with you all. So once you get introduced to that
person and everything seems to be ok, then that person start
dealing with you they self. . . .I just couldn’t go and do it my-
self, I had to have someone to do it for me, and then once we
got to know one another, then I can go and do it myself.
-YoYo

FAMILIAR TARGETS?

Such comments imply that the easiest dealers to target are

those with whom one already is familiar-a person one knows
and associates with. Why wait for introductions, a significant has-
sle for those with pressing needs, when easier prey is available
and ready to exploit? Routine activity patterns imply overlap-
ping networks and modes of activity. Run-ins are frequent, search
time minimal. Defensibility and reward information tend to be
known as a matter of course. There also is an intuitive under-
standing of how such persons are likely to react during the of-
fense. Contingencies can be identified with greater precision,
Familiar Targets? 55

increasing the likely success of the crime. Not surprisingly, the

vast majority of victims of predatory crimes (drug robberies noth-
withstanding) involve perpetrators and targets who know one
another, often intimately (see, for example, Wolfgang 1958).
Yet most drug robbers insisted that targeting those one knows
was foolhardy. Acquaintanceships increased the odds of recogni-
tion and hence, retribution. At first glance, this would seem to
contradict their earlier claims, but only if readers fail to grasp the
distinction between knowing someone and knowing of them. On
the streets, to ”know of” denotes a kind of superficial familiarity,
a tie that is weak but one which involves mutual awareness and
reciprocal recognition. To ”know someone,” by contrast, is to
know them in the true sense of the word. The tie involves signif-
icant reciprocality, shared social history, and experiential knowl-
edge. Targeting someone one knows ofneed not, and usually did
not, result in retribution-particularly in light of specific mea-
sures designed by drug robbers to thwart that possibility (see
Chapter 5). This was not the case with the latter. ”You rob some-
body you know [my emphasis],” Crazy Jack explained, ”they
might kill you. They know where you at, they know where you
hanging at.” No matter how easy or substantial the score, the
greater perceived certainty of consequences simply was not
worth it (but see Katz 1988:174-75):

I ain’t gonna rob nobody [I know]. If I rob [him], I’m pretty

sure [he] would know my voice. . . . If I be growing up with
you all your life and I robbed you, I would be on the run. . . .
[You gonna be knowing me] since we was like this
[younger]. . . .If I rob [an associate]1/11have to kill him ’cause
he will know me and he’ll be looking for me. . . . Then I be-
ing having to watch my back. . . . I’m not gonna come back
and make like it never happened.

Three Eyes and Slim agreed, respectively:

Like, say for instance,you are my friend. You are a drug deal-
er and I want to rob you but we been knowing each other
56 Target Selection

about two or three years so I can’t personally do it. If I do it

I would actually have to kill you, see what I’m saying? . . .Be-
cause he know me.
If he’s a regular and he stay on that block or whatever, then
in that area it’s a taboo. . . . But if it’s a new guy on the block
and you ain’t never seen him and you want to know who he
is and he trying to get a fresh start out here, go on and get
him. . . . Someone strange, I got to have him. . . . I don’t rob
my friends, I do not do that. That’s where that taboo comes
in at. You don’t rob your friends. Someone strange, I got to
have him.

Ray Dog insisted that the whole idea of robbing a friend was
ridiculous, not because it violated basic loyalties-which are sur-
prisingly weak (by middle-class standards) to begin with-but
because of its sheer impracticality. Identification was all but cer-
tain, even if one were to don a disguise (a common practice dur-
ing the enactment phase). ”I rob strangers better,” he proclaimed,
”because they don’t know me. See friends know me, they know
your voice, they know how you walk, how you talk, they know
everything. . . . [Even with a ski mask,] you can’t. . . go up there
tell him, ’Look nigger, up it.’ ’Oh man, Ray, that you, man,’ you
know.”
This is not to suggest that known dealers were never targeted.
Desperation could drive even the most reluctant of offenders to
rob his friends. ”If push came to shove, yeah, I probably would
rob my best friend if I needed to during those times,” Darnell con-
fessed. Curly claimed he would grant an acquaintance the op-
portunity to ”gift” him some dope first. ”I give you an option,
man,” he explained. ”I ask you to give me some of that dope and
I won’t take all of it. . . . If he hesitate, [I’ll take it all].” More often
than not, however, drug robbers would resolve the dilemma by
enlisting an accomplice unknown to the mark to commit the rob-
bery in their place. Having accurate information of the target’s
movements, defensibility, support, and goods, the contracting of-
fender would relay the intelligence to their ”hit men,” who then
performed the job (see also Reidel1993:151 on ”leaksmen”):
Familiar Targets? 57

If I know this person and he know me I set him up, have

somebody else to rob him so he might, oh well, this nigger
right here robbed me and I know where he live. I’ll just have
him set up, have somebody else to rob him and the person
that robbed him, we just split it ’cause I put him on the lick
and plus it was my lick so we’ll just split it.-Ray Ray

Low Down and Blackwell recall situations in which they played

this role for a friend:

I have a couple of friends that, like, ”OK, I know this dude

over here, he got this right here.” I went to school with this
[one] guy. We pretty cool. He was like, “I know this dude
name of Anthony [pseudonym]you know, he making all pa-
per [lots of money].” He, like, ”Yeah, and he hustles too.” . . .
So what happened, the guy [Anthony] don’t know me but
my friend know me. So what happened, he [my friend] said,
”Hey man, [he’s got a] half an ounce.” That’s cocaine, that’s
like $500 worth of cocaine. . . . See, [you]could make at least
about $1,200 if you rock it up. So I went over to rob him, you
know, he [my friend] set it up.-Low Down
”I know where a sweet robbery at,” he [friend] said, ”very
sweet.” I say, ”What’s the price?” He say, ”he got $4,000 and
some [more] in his pocket. He been making it all morning.”
[Asked why this friend called Blackwell and not someone
else, Blackwell replied that this has happened before, where
he] jumped down on crack dealers and dope [heroin] deal-
ers right on the spot.--Blackwell

Though such ventures took time and effort, the benefits out-
weighed the costs: Inside information produced a guaranteed, of-
ten considerable take that the two offenders could split-entirely
acceptable in relationships built on ”symbiotic greed” (DEA
1997).Meanwhile, the proxy who committed the offense ensured
continued anonymity for the offender who organized the scheme.
Even if consequences were to befall the former, it wasn’t the or-
ganizer’s prerogative to worry about it. As Jay observed, ”It
58 Target Selection

might come back at him, that’s on him. He got to take care of his
self. I got to take care of myself, you know.”
There were important lessons to learn from those who failed to
take familiarity into account. Low Down witnessed the brutal
demise of a partner who had robbed one familiar dealer too many.
He ultimately was killed after two prior retaliation attempts. ”I
stayed away from him,” Low Down recalled. ”I could have been
riding with him and they [enemies] seen me and thought I had
something to do with it.” Robbing a stranger-dealer more than
once was misguided in a similar sense; anonymity could no longer
be maintained or taken for granted. ”You never go back and strike
the same [victim],” Do-dirty warned. ”Never do that.. . . [Ylou
rob a person one time then you go back a second time and try to
rob them, they gonna be recognizing you.” This, according to
Lewis, would most assuredly result in a ”gun-down.”2
Familiarity, or the lack thereof, was important in a geographic
sense as well. The majority of offenders refused to prey on vic-
tims in or around the neighborhood where they spent most of
their time. To do so risked certain exposure (see also Feeney
1986:62;for an opposing view, see Brantingham and Brantingham
1981).As Slim asked, ”Why would I rob somebody where I rest
my head [sleep] at? Why would I bring heat where I rest my head
at, where I stay at? That don’t make sense.” YoYo concurred: ”If I
gonna do some dirt I don’t want [nobody] to know where I stay.”
Baby Doll put these sentiments into perspective:

They [victims] know where you stay at, know where you
hang out. . . . [Doing a drug robbery in your ”home neigh-
borhood”] that’s like putting your life on the line, you know
what I’m saying? They can go on up and kill you. . . . I try to
have a safe place to live, lay my head. When I go home I know
I’m safe there, I ain’t got to worry about nobody kicking my
door in or chasing me, chasing me down, something like
that, you know.

Drug robbers plotted their activities accordingly. Buck, for exam-

ple, limited his offenses to East St. Louis, Illinois, several miles
Familiar Targets ? 59

from his north St. Louis, Missouri, neighborhood and separated

by the Mississippi River. ”It’s easier for me to commit a robbery
over there than come into St. Louis. . . . They don’t know me that
well [over there]. . . . I won’t have that much of a chance of them
walking up on me in the street.” Slim, likewise, restricted his of-
fenses to St. Louis City, staying in objectively close but percep-
tually distant St. Louis County (the two are geographically
separate entities). ”If I come out of this county and go down there
and do my dirt down there I ain’t bringing no dirt out here. Plus
nobody don’t know where I staying out here.” Smoke Dog did
the same, committing his robberies in the city and retiring to the
safety of his ”granny’s” house in the county afterward:

[Pleople riding around in the city looking for me, I’m out
here chilling, . . .They ain’t gonna find me. . . .You won’t find
that house unless I bring you to it and show you how to get
there. We got so many ways to get to my house, we cool; you
ain’t gonna find it no type of way unless I show you. . . .You
wouldn’t believe, some of the guys down there [in the city],
they don’t even know where [the county] is, man; they nev-
er even been out of the projects, man, for real.

The bottom line is that the offenders realized the importance of

not ”working” where they slept. Using one or more safe zones as
a base of operation, they sought to establish separation between
grounds intended for ”hunting” and those geared toward habi-
tation. As Brantingham and Brantingham (1981:37) note, areas
that may be objectivezy available to would-be offenders may, at the
same time, be perceptually off-limits. Merry (1981) conceptualizes
this through the notion of cognitive mapping, ”subjective repre-
sentations imposed on the physical realities of space” that assess
the relative safety of some geographically mediated course of ac-
tion (see also Wright and Decker 1994:87-88). By choosing distal
venues, drug robbers generated an added layer of protection:
Even if their anonymity somehow was blown, the likelihood of
victims finding them remained small.
60 Target Selection

SURVEYING TARGETS

Given the microstructural and geographic constraints under

which the drug robbers operated, the importance of surveillance
and focused observation becomes self-evident. Targets needed to
be cultivated on an ongoing basis to have any hope of consistent
success. Every day could be meaningful, but only with effort. At-
tentiveness might yield an immediate victim or one to be exploit-
ed later. Having a repository of future victims was essential for
generating steady income-especially important when times got
tough. Pirolli and Card’ s (1999:670) analogy of the web-building
spider is instructive here, organisms who are able to process (eat)
one insect while ”queuing up” others (in the web) to eat later. In
uncertain environments, such tactics are critical to survival.
Surveillance is understandably fretful for impulsive offend-
ers with pressing needs, but it need not be difficult or time-
consuming. The neighborhoods within which drug robbers op-
erated were saturated with activity. Though not always blatant,
sellers could be observed easily-particularly during the tar-
get-rich times in which drug robbers preferred to operate.
Prowling through alleys or lurking behind foliage, substantial
information could be secured rapidly, at relatively low risk. In-
formation pertaining to defensibility, activity patterns, and nat-
ural surveillance was especially sought-after:

Just observe everything. . . because I just see the type of [be-

haviors] he have, see if he poking [for a gun] anywhere in the
front or in the back [of his pants] anywhere, see how many
times he go in the little gangway where he go get his drugs.
See when his friends ain’t being around him.-Blackwell
I stalk my vantage point late at night, I pick the peoples that
I want to rob, you know, and I observe them and I watch
them. . . . Watch him go home at night, watch him where he
stay at, watch him where he comes, the dudes [hehang with].
Sit back in the alleys, sit back in the bushes or in the gang-
way you know, getting ready to make my move. . . do what
I have to do.-Lewis
Surveying Targets 61

Expected rewards, however, tended to be foremost in the offend-

ers’ minds, so all else being equal, the ”right mark” typically was
the busiest. Income is directly correlated with sales activity, so the
more active the seller, the more bounty for the taking. Do-dirty
claimed this to be a characteristic of solitary vendors, at least
among those operating on the streets. (See Jacobs and Potenza
1991on the ”representativenessheuristic.”)

You choose. . . the one that always do it alone. . . . That’s the

one have all the money and all the dope, the loner.. . . You
choose the niggers, ones that you find, you know, you always
finding the scariest one, the one that always do it alone. . . .
That’s the one have all the money and all the dope, the loner.
. . . Because the loner is the people that, his stones is bigger
than the rest of the [peoples’]stones. He got . . . people that
come to him . . . then look at his pockets. His pockets be
standing out like this here. He normally folds his money up
and just sticks it in his pocket. He never put it all together.
He always just ball it up and throw it in his pocket. Then he
goes to count his money and he usually puts it in his mouth.
That is when you know his pockets full. And if he been out
there all day long he gonna make between $1,500 and
$2,000.--Da-dirty

As much as offenders would like it to be otherwise, past experi-

ence is not a guarantee of future outcomes. The stakes simply are
too high to forego scrutiny, so typifications needed to be con-
firmed. ”I [gotta] . . . peep them out first,” Lil’ Player insisted. ”I
got to know what they got.” Darnell would ”sit back and ana-
lyze. . . . I know if he running like that, like, he done a lot of busi-
ness. . . . You have to observe, be smart about it.” As Slim put it,
”I watches my peoples. I sit back and observe for awhile . . . see
how he getting it and how long he sell it. . . . [If] he’s trying to get
that last dollar on the streets, I’ll be at him.” The importance of,
and patience for, focused observation rises in direct proportion to
the perceived magnitude of the expected score:
62 Target Selection

It may take a week, it may take only two days, you know, but
. . . if you really want ’em you gonna watch ’em. If you got to
stake out all night you will do that ’cause you, like, d a m ,
that’s a lot of money. That’s a lot of paper. You plot on it.
-Loony ASSNigga

The best of targets might be hidden in plain sight, so attention to

detail was critical. Bacca, for instance, came to learn that a small
grocery store was actually a front for a large dealing operation.
Such fronts are commonplace in street drug markets; illicit trans-
actions are integrated into licit contexts, thereby camouflaging
the fact that illegal behavior is indeed going on (see Hamid 1998).
Sifting through past observations, Bacca put ”two and two to-
gether” to identify a virtual treasure trove of riches (see also Pirol-
li and Card 1999:646 on information filtering):

You could see the big drug dealers, they drive in, go around
the back and they’ll come, they’ll be in for a minute, they’ll
leave. . . . I have a cousin that lives on the north side that was
also going over there. I used to see him going over there but
when I see his car I used to think he was just going to the store
but I just thinking, why was he going around the back? And
I know he’s a big drug dealer and everybody saying this
Arab’s [store owner] a big drug dealer.. . . Now he sells
drugs to big drug dealers and he was keeping his drugs, his
dope in the store. He had powder, he had marijuana, he had
everything, I mean everything.

OPPORTUNISTIC ROBBERIES

All of this implies an invariably rational orientation to the se-

lection process, in which offenders observe, assess, survey, and
stalk their prey, and act only after extensive prequalification.
Most assuredly, this was not the case. The frequency with which
drug robbers simply ”ran into” prospective victims should not be
discounted. At times, targets seemed to materialize almost mag-
Opportunistic Robberies 63

ically-crossing paths with respondents at the right (or wrong,

depending on one’s viewpoint) place and time. Such encounters
should not be surprising. Street life is fluid. Relations are ”open-
ended and interlocking” (Katz 1991:297), creating a ”powerful
tendency to bring offenders face to face” (Wright and Decker
1997:62). Isomorphic lifestyles enhance conditions that lead to
run-ins. The public arena in which drug sellers operate makes
them vulnerable as a matter of course.
Opportunistic robberies are ”spur-of-the-moment”affairs that
involve little in the way of advance planning or ”casing” of tar-
gets (Katz 1991:286; see also Dietz 1983; Feeney 1986). The
offender ”sees a vulnerable target from which to gain some im-
mediate reward, and does not preplan considerations of attack.”
(Pettiway 1982:263). Target selection and enactment are merged
into one continuous process. Motivation, in the ”pure” sense of
the term, need not be present; serendipity provides all the moti-
vation necessary-given the drug robbers’ insatiable thirst for
cash and drugs.
”I wasn’t even thinking about robbing nobody,” Smoke Dog il-
lustrates-recalling an incident where he chanced upon a crack
dealer waiting on line at Popeye’s Chicken. ”No, I’m cool for real.
I wasn’t thinking trying to take nobody’s stuff.” When the would-
be mark broached the idea of a sale (to occur later, at the dealer’s
residence), Smoke Dog’s mind quickly changed:

I’m thinking to myself, why should I buy this and he a punk

anyway I’ll just take it. So I took it from him. Give me all this,
I want everything. And he gave me all the dope [about 5 oz.
worth of crack, valued at about $5,000 wholesale].I smacked
him in the face with it. You know, when you hit somebody
too hard and like bust they head, you know they gonna grab
they face, so he grabbed his face and he just laid on the
ground. I guess he thought I was gonna go on and kill him
or whatever but I walked on out of the house.

Driving around, Blackwell likewise happened on an opportunity

too good to pass up. ”One of these young guys come up to my car
asking me if I wanted to buy some drugs,” he explained. ”So I told
64 Target Selection

him yes, I would like to buy some drugs . . . got out of the car and
I took my pistol and just put it up against his head.” V-0 de-
scribed a similar encounter:

Yeah, me and my brother, we was just riding in his car and

stuff and we were riding around and then this dude, he
walked up to my brother. . . . We just out riding and then we
stopped at a red light and he walked upon us talking about
did you want to buy something. . . . He was about to sell [my
brother some weed] and my brother just got out of the car
and put the gun on him [and we robbed him].

YoYo unexpectedly came across a mark on a random visit to an

associate’s house. ”Didn’t even know the dude,” she spoke of the
individual she ultimately beat up and robbed. ”Only thing we
knew was he had [cashed] a paycheck, he was smoking dope and
we was gonna [take both].” Likewise, J Rock ambled down the
street one evening, only to find two persons in a parked car pack-
aging a substantial amount of marijuana. Target selection became
a ”no-brainer”:

I just walking down the street one night . . . and I seen two
boys that they was in the car with weed, all weed and I
looked and I looked. I know that’s for me, yeah, it’s right
there in my face. . . . I seen them on the car there bagging the
weed up. They had about two pounds of weed and money
. . . and everything. . . . I . . . g[o]t the shit.

For Do-dirty, choosing targets was a simple matter of trolling un-

til the right one fell into his lap-opportunism with an added
measure of intent:

I cruise around neighborhoods mostly every day like that to

find out where the dope dealers are [to rob], you know. . . . I
OpportunisticRobberies 65

left out of JVL. I'm coming up from Dr. Luther King going to-
ward Kingshighway.I make a left on [Link], first
I started in JVL looking. Couldn't find nobody in JVL so I go
over on Evans. See, I know these little cats on Evans, they
usually be out. I didn't see them. So I say, OK., it was about
12:OO [midnight].I'm gonna find somebody, you know. I go
up on Kingshighway and Page that dude standing out flag-
ging, you know.-Do-dirty

Capitalizing on serendipity meant attending to dramaturgical

cues as well. Drug sellers are widely known to present a public
persona at odds with discretion. This is only to be [Link]
income is valued first and foremost as a means to project status.
Dealers crave it like the addictive drugs they sell. Status flows
from respect, respect from reputation, and reputation from a con-
spicuous presence. In violent social worlds, people must prove
who they are now; with the end always near, there is no time to
waste (see also Bourgois 1995; Hamid 1998).Personal /nonessen-
tial consumption, flashy demeanor, and stylized posing become
the means to this end (Wright and Decker 1997:40; see also An-
derson 1999:29).The problem for drug sellers is that they cannot
pick and choose to whom this message is sent. Status is commu-
nicated democratically, attracting the "player haters" they most
want to avoid:

He was flossing, put it like that.. . . He was showing too

much. He was representing, like, "I got a lot of money, I got
a lot of this" . . . showing his stuff off. . . . "I got this, some
nigger don't got that." . . . Trying to show it off, like, yeah,
"You ain't got this but look how much. . . I got." So I had to
get him.-Crazy Jack

To have wealth is one thing; to flaunt it in the face of those with

less is another. Deprivation permeates street culture. Those who
floss make its relative nature painfully apparent, sparking envy
and hate (see Duffy and Shaw 2000). Street status, after all, is a
66 Target Selection

zero-sum game: ”If you have something and exhibit it, it means
I’m less. Who do you think you are by doing that?” (Anderson
1999:95).The brazen display of wealth therefore becomes a ”per-
sonal affront that [cannot] go unpunished” (Wright and Decker
1997:141). Esteem is restored only by lashing out (Parrot and
Smith 1993):

Flashing they little money in front of the little gals, counting

they money, you know. They holler at they friends. I mean,
”You show, partner, I show me about a quarter over today.
O.K., quarter over. What about you, partner?” . . . That’s a
mark. You riding down the street, ain’t got no money but you
got a pistol, and these niggers standing outside counting
they money. [I’m gonna get him.]-Do-dirty
Little dude walked past with jewelry on and stuff, pocket full
of money. I was standing on the corner where the [transit]
bus run through the little thing and he was walking up the
street by a little park right there and I saw him. . . . I don’t
know him; I know of him.. . . I seen him come around, he
driving his little peoples in the car over there riding
around. . . . Yeah, I seen him riding in [nice] cars and shit,
jewelry, talking to the little girls over there, saw him chill-
ing. . . . That was the person, I was at that place at that right
time I guess-Lil’ Player
He was a . . . type of guy because he had more than every-
body and the way he was talking to my best friend, this and
that, I got this and I got that. . . . I just got fucking tired of him
talking about all this shit. He gonna show us all this money,
this, that, and the other. So there go the ego talking. . . . ”You
get this nigger, you’ll be alright.”-Darnell
[Target was] talking shit, . . . like he was on top of the world,
. . . [got] an arrogant way about him. Kind of sassy and floss
and shit, you know.-Buck

Of course, not everyone who talks big, wears fly clothes, or flash-
es cash is a drug dealer. The widespread adoption of such be-
Opportunistic Robberies 67

havior by nondealers seeking to mimic the look of players may

confound accurate identification. To be sure, such persons would
occasionally find themselves under the gun. But this did not ap-
pear to be frequent. Extensive experience on the streets furnished
drug robbers with a finely tuned ”perceptual shorthand” (Skol-
nick 1966). Most had supreme confidence in their ability to dis-
tinguish the real from those perpetrating. ”You know your dope
dealers,” Loony Ass Nigga illustrates. ”You can tell, I can be cer-
tain about 99.9 percent, everybody that walking down my street,
I can tell you if they selling dope or what just by looking at the
expressions on they faces, . . . watching them move.” Such iden-
tification was crucial, since drug dealers were targeted for very
specific reason^.^
The seductive appeal of opportunistic robberies is obvious.
They require no real effort; essentially, targets select themselves.
Rewards may be unknown, but this makes no matter. The ease of
the heist is what counts. (Rewards earned unexpectedly are the
sweetest of all; the pleasure of ”winning” always is most intense
when the outcome is surprising: Mellers et al. 1999:336.)The of-
fenders’ unstructured, street-focused lifestyle places them in
prime position. to capitalize. Most had nothing or no one to tie
them down. Life was unscheduled and freeflowing, their day-to-
day existence being governed by a volatile mixture of despera-
tion and whims of the moment. Drug robbers were hustlers in the
true sense of the term, freed from the constraints of daily obliga-
tions and persistently on the lookout for every opportunity to
make fast cash (Gould 1967; see also Fields and Walters 1985;
Goldstein 1981; Shover 1996).Since the vast majority insisted on
never hitting the streets without a firearm, action was a foregone
conclusion-provided the right set of circumstances appeared. ”I
always got a gun so it don’t make no difference [what comes my
way],” Buck pronounced. ”When an opportunity presents itself
and I’m ready, I [fly].”As Snap put it, ”You don’t know when the
opportunity gonna jump, [so you always have to be prepared].”
“When you got a gun in your hand,” Smoke Dog added, ”you can
get whatever you want. Always remember that. You got a gun in
your hand you can get whatever you want.” He continued:
68 Target Selection

I’m gonna tell you like this man. If I leave out of the house
today and I see some man with a bird [kilo] . . . and I can get
him, I’ll get him today. I’ll do it today again. It don’t make me
any day, any time, it don’t make me no difference.

Serendipity may be seductive, but over-reliance on it is unwise.

Luck is unpredictable. Payoffs and risks are unknown. Victims
might end up being ”hard targets,” something discovered only
after the offense is well under way and thus too late. In commit-
ting such offenses, drug robbers are ”flying blind”-driven more
by faith, greed, and inertia than anything else.

DISCUSSION

Criminologists suggest that targeting strategies are effective

indicators of the degree of calculation offenders bring to any
crime sequence. Calculation is a function of expertise, expertise a
function of accumulated experience in offending. Experts select
targets more systematically than their less-experienced counter-
parts. They demonstrate more advanced intuitive abilities and as-
sess risks and rewards with greater precision (see Khatri and Ng
2000; Kleinmutz 1990; Prietula and Simon 1989). They identify
outcome probabilities more accurately and map out contingen-
cies in advance of their occurrence. Generally speaking, expertise
is associated with professionalism and professionalism with suc-
cess (see, for example, Weaver and Carroll 1985).
Drug robbers specialize, and some indeed could be called ”ex-
perts,” but most are far from being the cool, rational profession-
als their accounts at times imply. Cash-intensive, drug-focused
living is not conducive to the consistent application of reason (see
Cromwell et al. 1991). Planning may be a good idea in theory,
but exigencies of the moment often make it prohibitive. (See, for
example, Feeney 1986 on the ”casual approach’’ taken by many
armed robbers.) Immediate needs dictate that crude choices be
made, often on the basis of limited information. Deadlines-be
they real or imagined-exist and must be met. Risks may be down-
Discussion 69

played or dismissed altogether (see Bennett and Wright 1984).Or,

rewards may be distorted upward to justify taking greater risks.
Rational-choice researchers (see Simon 1979) refer to this as
”bounded rationality,” a necessary but simplifying reaction to
complex decision-making demands under time pressure (see also
Cornish and Clarke 1986):a ”few aspects of a few alternatives are
considered and the rest ignored” (Johnson and Payne, 1986:173).
Whom one targets becomes less important than choosing someone;
“aspiration level[s are] set for the selection criteria being used,
and the search for alternatives is stopped as soon as the aspira-
tion is met” (Todd 2000:950; see also Simon 1990).
Bounded rationality is not necessarily bad. Shortcuts and rules
of thumb can be both expedient and effective, especially in “high-
velocity,” time-constrained, uncertain environments (Eisenhardt
1989; Khatri and Ng 2000). When strict limits are placed on the
relevant factors one can realistically attend to, vital cognitive
space is freed up. Psychic loads lighten and focus improves (Cor-
nish and Clarke 1986:ll). Information is processed less exten-
sively but with greater accuracy (Eisenhardt 1989). Cognitive
economies permit decision makers to ignore irrelevant informa-
tion and focus squarely on the cues that count (Isenberg 1984;
Kirschenbaum 1992; Khatri and Ng 2000; Prietula and Simon
1989).Selection strategies are less comprehensive, but more pre-
cise (see Arkes and Ayton 1999:599 on the ”fast and frugal”
heuristic).Fears and anxieties are more readily shunted from con-
sciousness. This facilitates moments of clarity. And free-flowing
decisions lead to a greater likelihood of success; it is not neces-
sarily the quantity of information, but the quality and efficiency
with which it is processed that generate desired outcomes (see
also Bennett and Wright 1984).
The drug robbers’ reported refusal to target dealers they know
(and know them) is nevertheless intriguing. It identifies a thresh-
old of risk that all but the most immediate of needs won’t allow
them to breach. It underscores a capacity for longer-term think-
ing among those whose lives are driven by instant gratification.
It suggests a reluctance to create such acute deficits that bound-
ed rationality is abandoned altogether, or that even in the face of
such deficits, some degree of rationality still is possible. It implies
70 Target Selection

that alternative target choices are sufficiently available so as

not to force such a choice in the first place. Most important, it
highlights the deterrent power of informal sanction threats (i.e.,
retaliation) in influencing selection decisions. Certain but unpre-
dictable risks are arguably the most powerful obstacle to intend-
ed behavior; one knows they are coming, but never when (see
also Maher 1997). No amount of hypervigilance can forestall
them indefinitely. Besides, worrying is emotionally draining and
maintainable at a certain level only for so long.
Until targets become so categorically hardened or inaccessible
that quick rewards at low risk can no longer be secured, familiar
targets will continue to be avoided, and preparatory work (in the
selection process) will remain necessary. Recent anecdotal evi-
dence suggests that this day may be coming sooner than most
drug robbers might expect. Emerging studies indicate that street-
level dealers are exercising increasing amounts of discretion in
both their presentational and distributional styles. Flossing is be-
coming less extensive and more limited to controlled settings
(see, for example, Fleisher 1998:103).Flash is not as vital as it used
to be, conspicuous consumption no longer so fetishized a pursuit.
The devastating impact of predation on friends, family, and as-
sociates has taught many dealers a valuable lesson. ”Where drug
dealers in the 1980sadvertised their success through the purchase
of consumer display items, dealers [increasingly are preferring]
an understated style, making them, in many respects, indistin-
guishable from [their nondealing] peers” (Curtis 1999:19). The
meaning of high living also has changed drastically in the past
few years-in both the type and amount of resources required to
support it (Johnson et al. 1990). Dealers are finding it difficult to
live up to the material expectations set by prior cohorts, resulting
in additional pressures toward discretion.
Changes in distributional styles reduce dealers’ vulnerability
further still. The threat of arrest and predation is compelling
many to restrict sales to a smaller cadre of repeat customers. 0th-
ers are using beepers to meet clients at predesignated times in
public places, high in natural surveillance (for example, grocery
stores and gas stations). Yet more are toting only enough contra-
Discussion 71

band to complete sales, keeping excess inventory and other seiz-

able contraband off their person.
Of course, dealers can only go so far. As long as legitimate
means of status attainment continue to be blocked off, personal
nonessential consumption items will be important proxy indica-
tors. Style and social worth is a connection likely to die hard, if it
does at all. As for drug market structure, it has been, and in all
likelihood will continue to be, freelance in nature: vendors sell for
their own individual profit in competition with similarly posi-
tioned others for a finite pool of resources. In such a system, in-
terdependence is rare. Sellers are not cohesive enough to establish
formal or lasting role structures. Group distribution tends to be
haphazard, unstable, and fleeting. Since organization is really the
only way to ensure long-term security (Johnsonet al. 1992),their
prospects do not look good. Individual responses are inherently
limited; in fragmentary and competitive markets, accessibility is
the sine qua non of success. Sellers must be available when cus-
tomers want to do business. New customers must be cultivated
and existing ones lured from other sellers to solidify one’s com-
petitive position (Jacobs 1999a). Both involve considerable risk.
And high-demand periods requiring large inventories inevitably
will persist, resulting in exorbitant losses in the event one is
fleeced. Firearm possession is not an option (at least for street
dealers), given the steep threat of official sanctions. The opportu-
nity structure for drug robbery does not appear as if it will sour
any time soon.

NOTES

[Link] from this analysis are targets chosen specifically to punish

some past personal affront who, for reasons specified in Chapter 2, se-
lect themselves.
2. Compare this to burglary, where offenders prefer to ransack the same
target repeatedly (Wright and Decker 1994). Greater familiarity with
the dwelling and preexisting knowledge of when victims are likely to
be away make them “easy pickings.” Theft without contact obvious-
72 Target Selection

ly brings little if any risk of retaliation later, as long as one’s identity

can be kept secret.
3. This is not to suggest that nondealers would be bypassed if needs
were sufficiently pressing, rewards were perceptibly ample, and the
moment felt ”right” but rather, that such action reportedly was nei-
ther desired nor necessary.
 CHAPTER FOUR

Enactment

D RUG ROBBERIES ARE multifaceted enterprises possessing

"problematic outcome[s] and potentially serious conse-
quences" (Shover 1991:103). The stakes are high. The
moment is heated. Judgment is circumscribed by desperation,
emotion, time pressure, and uncertainty. Decisions are split-second
and irrevocable. Neither party knows for sure how the other will
react. Every move has fateful implications. Critical misreading
threaten outcomes that neither party intends or welcomes. The
encounter is interaction in its most primitive form, a Hobbesian
stand-off where fear reigns and brute force is the medium of com-
munication.
Success requires that drug robbers marshal and dispense coer-
cive power sufficient to secure cooperation that is both rapid and
lasting. This is not easy. Robbery victims are prone to noncom-
pliance-especially drug dealers whose reputations and finan-
cial survival hinge on recalcitrance. Losses can be extensive and
irretrievable; insofar as the time and effort necessary to recoup
them is prohibitive, resistance becomes a foregone conclusion
(see Cook 1976).And surrendering without a fight shows weak-
ness in a world where only the strong survive. Reputationally,
there are few worse fates.

73
74 Enactment

Force is essential to securing compliance, but using too much

can be as bad as using too little. Punitive resources must be man-
aged judiciously lest one undermine the integrity of the offense
(see Luckenbill1981:43).Victims, for instance, might perceive the
attack to represent something far more ominous than a robbery
or be too stunned to react desirably (Wright and Decker 1997).Ei-
ther way, the tenability of the robbery frame will be jeopardized.
Success, of course, is about much more than the use of force. The
overriding issue is control. Each phase of the offense-from ap-
proach to announcement to goods transfer-must establish it if
drug robberies are to have any chance of success.

APPROACH

Invariably, drug robbers must get close to victims without

alerting them that predation is in the offing. At this juncture, sur-
prise is more important than anything else. The conventional na-
ture of the setting must be preserved until the precise moment
drug robbers are ready to pounce. To do otherwise is to tip one’s
hand before any advantage can be secured-creating an unin-
tended state of alert in would-be victims that terminates the of-
fense before it can even begin (see Luckenbilll981;see also Reidel
1993:148).
Copresence is easy to establish among indiscreet sellers, for
many of the reasons specified in Chapter 3, but their skittish
counterparts require a good deal more care. ”Creeping” was one
popular response. The urban topography of St. Louis is saturat-
ed with so-called cuts, publicly accessible places that neverthe-
less remain off the beaten path. Alleys, gangways, dense foliage,
and vacant lots provided drug robbers the conduits they needed
to sneak up on sellers undetected. They also afforded nooks and
crannies into which drug robbers could slip and wait unrevealed
for their prey-emerging ”out of nowhere’’ only when ready to
strike (see also Wright and Decker 1997:98). Dealers sometimes
used the same locales for protection (from the police as well as
from predators), which ironically helped to seal the very fate they
were trying to avoid:
Approach 75

I hit the alley, came through the alley, I hopped someone’s

fence, came through the alley and hit his yard, ’cause he
stands in the gangway when he selling his drugs.. . . So I
walked up to him. . . I walked up to him and [initiated the
robbery].-Bacca

Even more hardened targets such as houses could on occasion be

made vulnerable by using such measures. Crouching in ground-
cover adjacent to a main doorway, Three Eyes lunged at his vic-
tim only after he returned home. ”[Catch] them going in,” he
explained. ”Jump up out of the bush, ’Open your door and let’s
go in.”’ Indeed, the smallest of breaches could become full-blown
gaps if exploited rapidly enough. ”When they open that door,”
Smoke Dog illustrates, ”my gun already gonna be aiming. . .aim-
ing at everything. . . . You stick that barrel to they forehead, bing,
walk on in the house.” Surprise is critical for placing victims in a
position from which they could not recover. Stunned, victims are
too startled to react, much less resist.
One would expect those at such a high risk of predation (as
drug dealers) to be wise to lurking predators and to prepare ac-
cordingly. Awareness, however, need not translate into immu-
nity. Constant exposure to danger causes it to be routinized-as
any participant in high-risk enterprise can tell you. (See Mc-
Sweeney and Swindell 1999:437 on ”habituation.”) Vigilance is
cognitively taxing and sustainable for only so long; the degree of
psychic energy required is one that most find impossible to main-
tain (Lejeune and Alex 1973:276). Inasmuch as would-be victims
have been able to avoid negative outcomes in the past, they may
become even more desensitized to risk. ”Most guys [dealers],
man, are so [complacent],”Curly claimed, ”it makes them an easy
target. They so settled . . . they easy to get, man.”
Of course, even complacent sellers can transition to a full state
of readiness if alerted in time. The threat of natural surveillance
was therefore a major source of concern. In general, the streets are
bustling with activity. Bystanders regularly mill about, engaging
in a wide range of social behavior inclusive and exclusive of drug
market participation. Most keep a wary eye on their surroundings,
76 Enactment

recognizing the volatile world in which their movements take

place. Drug robbers could never really be sure what they might
see, how they might react, or if these reactions might tip off those
they were targeting.
Most offenders thus insisted on creeping only after dark (see
also van Koppen and Jansen 1999). Nightfall provided a natural
cloak with which to absorb a stray but incisive gaze, even one that
penetrated a cut. Covered in dark clothing, drug robbers could
prowl all but undetected. “Night-time . . . that’s when I can
creep,” Goldie asserted, ”you know, feel safe.” ”Never do no rob-
bery in broad daylight,” Lewis insisted. ”Too many peoples will
see you. . . . The best time is at night.” ”Wear camouflage,” Lewis
continued, ”like military stuff. . . . [Nobody can] see you if you
hide in the bushes or you come through the gangway with a black
ski mask on.”l
As a general rule, the later the hour, the more secure drug rob-
bers seemed to feel. Collateral activity declined as a matter of
course, providing a more controlled environment in which to op-
erate. ”The best times are like 10:30 [PM],11:00, or 12:00,” June Bug
remarked, ”when traffic kind of slow down.” Slim agreed: ”[I
wait until] about 1O:OO or 11:OO at night,” he said, ”[that’s when]
things start settling down. Kids [and others] go on in the house,
you go and get it off like you want to then . . . ain’t got to worry
about [no one seeing you].”
Creeping after dark was important for thwarting official de-
tection as well. Though police tend to ride most intensely after
dark, offenders seemed to focus more on the ease of being seen
than the probability. ”I don’t want to take a chance of doing it dur-
ing the day,” Spanky insisted. ”If you’re doing it during the day-
time you . . . try to get from one spot to another and the police . . .
there.. . . I didn’t want the chance of getting [stopped]. . . . At
night-time it’s like you got a better chance of making it to the spot
where you’re going.” Not satisfied with just the cover of dark-
ness, Curly took the additional step of creating a diversion:

Set something up three blocks away, create a confusion . . .

like bust a window or create a disturbance, draw the police
Approach 77

over there. They come and investigate it, so that means they
ain’t coming up this street here for maybe half an hour, 45
minutes [so I do my thing].

Crazy Jack, meanwhile, became a chameleon of sorts-manipu-

lating his apparel to throw off the authorities in the event he were
to come under scrutiny:

I’ll probably have like a white tee shirt on under a black shirt
or a green shirt on top, take this shirt off and I’ll probably
have, like, some basketball shorts on under some regular
shorts and take all my clothes off, put some old clothes on
top that I don’t wear, and then after I hit it [rob the dealer],
bang, just throw that stuff away and keep on what I got on.

It would be misleading, however, to suggest that all or even most

of the drug robbers were so concerned about formal detection.
The majority seemed to dismiss the prospect, believing arrest to
be a ”remote and improbable contingency” (Shover 1996:102).
Drug-focused, cash-intensive lifestyles are not conducive to pro-
longed worrying. Needs are pressing and require rapid redress.
Failure to act when the moment calls for it can result in lost op-
portunities. The risk of drug robbery is quick anyway, making the
threat of official detection perceptibly insignificant. Personal ex-
perience with punishment avoidance only fueled a sense of in-
vulnerability felt by many:

That’s [thepossibility of arrest is] so freakish. I mean, it’s nev-

er happened to me.-&&
Ain’t no police around when you robbing no dope dealer.
Ain’t no police around. They don’t ever be around. When
you’re robbing somebody, when you’re getting robbed, they
don’t ever be around.-Smoke Dog
78 Enactment

BUYS-TURNED-AMBUSH

A second popular approach tactic was to purchase from would-

be victims on one or more occasions prior to robbing them. The
idea was to lull dealers into believing subsequent approaches
represented nothing more than additional buy-attempts. Sud-
denly and without warning, drug robbers would transform the
encounter into an ambush. ”[He thinks I’m gonna buy, but] my
mind is another way,” Curly declared. ”I’m gonna get him” (see
also Lejeune and Alex 1973).
As Wright and Decker (1997:98) note, one of the most impor-
tant prerequisites of any successful street robbery is to ”fit into the
social setting such that the intended victim perceives the would-
be attacker’s presence as normal and nonthreatening, thereby
allowing [him] to get close enough for a surprise attack.” The es-
tablished customer turned robber presents an unsolvable dilem-
ma. The role of buyer provides an accepted means of establishing
copresence, concealing (or at least delaying) exposure of their
true intentions. There is little opportunity for dealers to recognize
the danger and mount some sort of preemptive strike (Jacobs
1999a:77;Wright and Decker 1997:102-3). It is the classic, perhaps
indefensible case of the wolf dressed in sheep’s clothing.
”If you, like, go up to them,” Crazy Jack explained, ”I’m buy-
ing from you all, you spending money, you all gonna think I’m a
cool guy right? I’m spending money. I’m not out to get over and
rob you. . . .The more you keep spending money . . . [the easier it
is] to rob ’em.” Buck agreed: ”You get somebody’s confidence,
you know, people be comfortable with you coming,” he ex-
plained. “Then you catch them with they drawers down and you
get ’em. . . . Most of the time that’s how I get people.” ”Make them
feel comfortable,” Snap continued, ”they won’t get leery, you
know.. . . You got to trip their mind, get into they brain, you
know.” Or, as Curly emphasized, ”Only peoples that really can
get you, man, are peoples [that get close to you] ’cause you keep
your guard down on them. . . . You [researchers] couldn’t get me
because you a stranger to me, so I’m watching.” Disguises, how-
ever, could not be worn using this modus operandi, and this
Buys- Turned-Ambush 79

was a significant drawback. Other techniques for managing

retaliation had to be developed accordingly, tactics discussed in
Chapter 5.
As noted in the previous chapter, ”set-up buys” might be used
to gauge a prospective target’s viability-from both a reward and
defensibility standpoint. If this information already was known
(for example, from observation or inside information), if victims
were sufficiently vulnerable, or if drug robbers desired an imme-
diate score, prefatory buys might be bypassed altogether. The fre-
quency with which drug robbers approached victims and
attacked them outright suggests that set-up buys, though helpful,
were not altogether necessary:

Crack, he had some dope. They was some 50s [$50 rocks,
about one-half gram retail] and stuff like that, though. So I
went up to him, I was like, “Let me get a bopper or some-
thing.” A bopper, that’s a $100 pack. He brought it, he was
showing me the $100 pack. . . .We was in the gangway. So we
was talking. I’m like, ”Man, let me get three of them [rocks],”
so he brought out three of them. I put the gun up to his head
and took it. -Smoke Dog
I had went over there to pretend like I was trying to, the word
is ”cop,” from her. She asked me what did I need. . . . Told her
meet me, this was around the corner. So she met me around
the corner, so I walked around there and I told her I wanted
to get 20. I asked her how big are her stones are and she let
me see them. I said, ”Well, damn, why don’t you just go
ahead on and let me get them all,” and I pulled my .22 and
put it up to her head and . . . told her I want everything she
got.- YoYo

Victims were often high or drunk, facilitating their exploitation.

Historically, the opportunity to party while one ”works” has been
one of the primary attractions of selling illegal substances (see In-
ciardi et al. 1993); drug robbers made it a distinct liability. ”Why
are they easy?” Lewis asked rhetorically. ”Because half the time
80 Enactment

you can catch them blunted out, they done smoked so many
blunts [marijuana-filledcigars] and you can walk up and want to
purchase something from them and . . . put your pistol to they hip
and tell them to come on . . . give me what you got [they ain’t
gonna do nothing].” Greed only enhanced this vulnerability.
Dealers may understand the increased risk that goes hand-in-
hand with out-competing other vendors for a finite pool of cus-
tomers, but most are extraordinarily confident about their ability
to avoid consequences. As we all know, awareness of risk need
not inspire behavior to avoid it:

They so money hungry, they have the intention to run to cars,

understand what I’m saying? They don’t have the patience
to wait until a person get out of the car or sit around they
friends so that you be secure.-Blackwell
On the streets because you have, they will come to you, you
see what I’m saying, like if you pull up or something like that
in a car or something like that, they will come to the car to
you and will stick their heads up in the window of your
car. . . . Once he stick his head in the car. . . you can drive off
with him in the motherfucker with half his body hanging up
out of there.-]une Bug

Drive-thru service is a marketing innovation developed during

the crack epidemic’s expansion phase (circa 1990 in St. Louis; see
Hamid 1992 on developmental cycles of drug epidemics). The
idea is to raise the volume of available customers, increase the fre-
quency of sales (since buyers with vehicles will tend to have
greater financial resources and thus are more likely to come back
to buy again), expedite the flow of customers through a selling
area, and attract users from outlying venues where hard drugs
may be difficult to obtain. Such benefits notwithstanding, drive-
thru sales increase sellers’ susceptibility in a number of ways.
”Protected by locked doors and shatter-resistant windows, buy-
ers [are able to] exploit a clear power asymmetry in the spatial
proxemics of the exchange;” they can control their exposure-
Buys-Turned-Ambush 81

”raising and lowering windows, braking and accelerating as they

choose” (Jacobs1999a:71).Body language can be more easily cov-
ered, firearms effectively concealed and produced. Sellers, more-
over, might actually enter a customer’s vehicle in the paradoxical
search for protection (from police observation). Needless to say,
such a move is anything but protective:

This little dude . . . flagged me down.. . . He said, ”Hey

brother, what’s up, you looking?”I told him, ”Yeah, I’m look-
ing.” He said, ”What you looking for?’’ Told him, ”I’m look-
ing for some Boy [heroin] and some rock.” He said, ”All
right, look, check this here out. You don’t mind if I get in your
car?’’ I told him, ”No, come on, get on in there.’’ He said,
”Drive around the corner.’’ I take him around the corner; in-
stead of going right around the corner . . . jump right on
Kingshighway, jump on Highway 70 [so I could rob him].
-Do-dirty

Even cautious street vendors could be lured into copresence, so

long as drug robbers signaled interest in subculturally ”safe”
ways:

Keep riding around in circles . . . keep on circling the block.

Like . . . ride around the block three times . . . ride around,
like, three times and then . . . circle around . . . [study] the
thing ’cause [they]get scared when [they] see somebody rid-
ing around real slow ’cause [they]think it’s like a drive-by or
something so they’ll hide and then the second time we’ll pick
up the speed and the man [dealer] will be out and he’ll see
us and definitely like to buy something, act like [we]want to
buy something. . . . You don’t ride up on somebody looking
suspicious ’cause if you ride on somebody like that then
they’ll think something going down and they leave.-V-0

Establishing copresence among house dealers obviously is

more difficult. Insofar as participating vendors are insular-
82 Enactment

access to them requires familiarity, prefatory buys are not possi-

ble, or targeted establishments are too difficult to penetrate-
alternative means must be developed. Creeping was one option.
Enlisting co-offenders was another. Persons known to, and suffi-
ciently trusted by, would-be victims would be asked to approach
the door in a decoy capacity, gain entry, and create a breach. Those
lying in wait would then rush the house in a blur of force and
threat, establishing copresence and compliance all at once (see
also Dietz 1983:58 and Wright and Decker 1997:lOO):

When [decoy]open the door. . . when I come up to the door,

it’s open . . . they [targets]told him to lock the door [but he]
don’t lock the door.-Curly
[Decoy would go up], he would shut the door but the door
be open [unlocked]. . . . Don’t be wide open, just be shut.
-Goldie
It’s a rush thing. Like if somebody says there is a bomb in the
building and everybody runs. That’s how it is, it’s a rush
thing. You got to rush ’em ’cause if you don’t you gonna get
popped and you got to rush ’em. Either you do or you don’t.
It’s up to you if you want to live.-Lady Bug
Ran in the house, we got our guns and bust in the house, the
front and back of it, bust in, put everybody on the floor.
-Loony Ass Nigga

Decoys need not be mandatory, as some of the above anecdotes

imply; drug robbers could rush the establishment without them,
though entry typically is easier after establishing a beachhead. If
decoys were used, it was essential that drug robbers protect their
identities, as victims might suspect a setup. Drug robbers might
therefore treat accomplices like victims too (for example, ”steal-
ing” from them, striking and threatening them, etc.).
The more daunting the target, the more important co-offenders
became. And house targets typically are quite daunting. ”[They]
be ready,” Loony Ass Nigga declared. ”They know what’s gonna
happen ’cause it ain’t nobody in this world, well I ain’t gonna say
Buys-Turned-Ambush 83

in the world, but in the dope game, ain’t nobody just gonna sit in
no house with that much money and that much dope [and not be
ready] .” CO-offenders permit drug robbers to make the most
forceful ”announcement” possible and to deter victims from try-
ing to counterattack. For those too intimidated to go it alone, this
was extraordinarily empowering. ”You a coward when you by
yourself,” YoYo confessed. ”Once you with a crowd you get big-
ger balls.” ”I don’t ever do it by myself for real,” K-red added,
’”cause I have a funny feeling [that something might happen]. . . .
I have my boys all the time. . . . I ain’t by myself.” ”You got to have
somebody with you,” Kilo chimed in. ”I mean, somebody who
gonna back you up” (see also Cromwell et al. 1991; Lejeune 1977;
Reidel 1993:146). Teammates, moreover, allowed participants to
perform a very specific and limited set of duties, important giv-
en the boundedness of their rationality. Role specialization per-
mits focus, and focus is directly correlated with success.
Still, team approaches appeared to be the exception rather than
the rule. Much of the reason can be located in drug robbers’ deep
and fundamental distrust of would-be associates. To claim that
street-based relationships are tenuous would be an understate-
ment. Fealty, duty, and solidarity largely are foreign concepts on
the streets. One has no friends-only running partners with pre-
carious loyalty. To put one’s fate into the hands of another is as m-
wise as it is dangerous. The risk of being ”ratted on” is substantial.
As Kilo revealed, ”I never took nobody with me or nothing. Peo-
ple get to snitching and what not, you know what I’m saying?”J
Rock agreed. ”I do it by myself. People will tell on you. . . . I don’t
trust nobody . . . ain’t got no friends in this life. Who got friends
[in] this motherfucking life? I know I ain’t got no motherfucking
friends in life.” Blackwell echoed a similar sentiment: ”People you
take with you, they mostly tell on you. . . . Take a person on a rob-
bery with you.,they gonna tell on you and everything.” The threat
of information leakage was a risk too high to bear for many; if
”dirt” was to be done, they would do it themselves. ”I would
rather just be alone,” Lewis underscored, ”[then if] anything risky
happen, you can’t tell on me.” Darnell concurred: ”I move and
groove by myself,” he said. ”When push come to shove, you ain’t
gonna tell on your damn self.” Or as Ray Ray put it:
84 Enactment

I [do] it by myself ’cause if you do a robbery by yourself it’s

good, you ain’t gonna get caught up. You ain’t got to worry
about them looking for nobody else. Like if it’s two people
just did a robbery you all split up, you ain’t got to worry
about your friend gonna tell on you, seeing if he caught. He
worried about if you caught, thinking about the same thing
like is he gonna tell on me, I wonder if they catch him if he
gonna tell on me. Most of the time when you do dirt, do it by
yourself ’cause you can’t get caught up.

For June Bug, the aversion toward team drug robberies was
deeply rooted in experience:

We did a robbery, like, in ’85 and we got, like, some jewelry

and $15,000 apiece, two rings and stuff, you see what I’m say-
ing? The Bro [victim] could not identify me or nothing like
that, but the dude with me told on me and shit, so therefore
I prefer to be by myself-you see what I’m saying?-’cause
I’m not gonna go tell on myself.

As early as three decades ago, street offenders were lamenting

the breakdown of the so-called code of honor among thieves.
Shover’s (1973:512-13) offenders, for instance, claimed that the
”’solid,’ ethical career criminal” was ”giving way to the ’hustler,’
an alert opportunist who was primarily concerned . . . with per-
sonal-as opposed to collective-security.” Though there was
(and continues to be) strong ”lip service” to the code, its real-life
influence is quite weak-as modern-day drug robbers attest (cf.
Wright and Decker 1994:76).
Aside from the possibility of being tattled on, one never really
knew what an accomplice might bring-or not bring-to the
table. It goes without saying that would-be accomplices had com-
mitted a significant amount of ”dirt” exclusive of any current
undertaking. Enlisting co-offenders risked situations that drug
robbers could not prepare for or anticipate. ”I don’t know what
the next man done did [in the past],” Jay complained. ”I could
Buys-Turned-Ambusk 85

walk out of here with [him] and there might be somebody look-
ing for [him] and [I] get caught up in the crossfire and . . . [not]
even know what’s going on.” Moreover, one could never really
know how an accomplice might react during the robbery itself;
there is good reason to expect unreliable conduct (Katz 1991:288).
Someone, for example, might ”punk out” at a critical moment,
leaving teammates in grave danger. ”People can get scared of
anything,” Spanky observed. ”You know how you feel, [but] you
don’t really know how the next guy feels.” Buck’s friend report-
edly was shot during a drug robbery attempt because his partner
froze up: ”[Victim] had a gun, he had a gun, and the [victim]told
[friend’s partner] to put his down and he put it down. . . [and my
friend] got shot.” Similarly, Lady Bug’s accomplice failed to make
a sufficiently thorough search, with disastrous consequences:

[My partner] supposed [to] have went upstairs and made

sure he checked there but he didn’t check. He didn’t check
all the rooms like he said he did. The motherfucker [dealer]
came downstairs, just creep down, and just throw a pop out
[shot his gun] and I got hit in the leg. . . . My leg was fucked
up. It took me three years, three years to learn how to walk
again. I don’t even have a bone, that’s not even a bone, that’s
a rod and I got pins in there so I have to be careful. . . . They
tried to amputate this sucker but I ain’t gonna let it happen.
I was determined to walk.

Loony Ass Nigga thus insisted that would-be co-offenders pass a

crude but effective pre-offense litmus test before proceeding with
them:

Some people, they got some butterflies in they stomach, they

be scared, you know . . . by me shaking their hand, I feel who
hand sweating. My father [a violent criminal himself] hip me
to that. If you hand sweat, I feel out of us, whoever going in
there, if somebody hand sweating, we ain’t gonna do it, be-
cause I be, like, damn, I didn’t pick my people right, you
86 Enactment

know. He gonna nut up when he go in there and get us killed

or something.

Obviously, the more people involved, the more complicated

things can get. Signals must be communicated, movements
choreographed, and contingencies accounted for. This is not easy
during the heated moment of an offense, particularly for impul-
sive, me-oriented street offenders who find it difficult to follow
orders or synchronize behavior with that of associates. Personal
agendas may be followed at the expense of the team, chancing
critical miscues that negatively affect everyone involved. Insofar
as participants are worried about the possibility of this occurring,
group performance will be undermined further; anxiety causes
people to ”lose focus on achieving the group outcome” as they at-
tempt to cover their behinds by monitoring their partners’ ac-
tions. This means that only a fraction of their energies will be
directed toward achieving the group goal (Dirks 1999:448).
Finally and perhaps most importantly, team approaches re-
quired that proceeds from drug robberies be shared. For many of-
fenders, this was untenable. ”I don’t want nobody with me,” Kilo
insisted, ”that’s money to split.” ”You don’t do it with a lot of peo-
ple,” Spanky declared, “because that’s less for yourself .” Revenue
sharing typically was justified only for very large heists; dimin-
ished rewards were an acceptable tradeoff given the perceived
certainty of a greater take.2 ”We got to hit somebody that’s got
some money,” Crazy Jack declared, ”’cause I ain’t gonna split no
$200 or $300. You can go rob somebody that got . . . some Gs
[thousands of dollars] or something, got some pot or cocaine
ounces . . . [then it’s worth it].” Even then, the pitfalls of working
with others had to be confronted and dealt with.

ANNOUNCEMENT

Like all stick-ups, drug robbery is about control, about how to

secure it as rapidly and as completely as possible. Central to con-
trol is the ability to intimidate. Drug robbers must establish in no
Announcement 87

uncertain terms who is in charge and what will happen if their or-
ders are not followed. There is perhaps no more important time
to do this than when announcing the offense. Robberies are made
or broken at their inception.
In announcing the offense, drug robbers ”seek to dramatize
with unarguable [sic] clarity that the situation has been sudden-
ly and irreversibly transformed into a crime” (Katz 1988:176).
“You know what time it is”-a succinct, powerful, and immedi-
ately understood phrase-typically opens the interaction. Pro-
fanity-laced directives quickly follow to underscore the need for
immediate compliance. ”Get on the ground, don’t move or you’re
dead motherfucker!” ”You got a choice, hand it over or you’ll get
your [fucking] head blown off!” ”Bitch, whore, asshole, mother-
fucker, up it or else!” and ”You come up with anything . . . I’m
gonna kill your motherfucking ass” were reportedly voiced with
a tone so ferocious and intimidating as to leave no doubt what the
victims’ next move would be (see also Katz 1988 on the ways of
the ”badass”).Such commands are ”contingent threats”; the vic-
tim is informed ”that failure to comply. . . will bring the infliction
of [injury or death]” (Luckenbill1980:364;1981; Tedeschi and Fel-
son 1994).3
Being in the ”proper mood” was essential to communicating
such threats; speaking the words is not enough. Lines must be de-
livered with verisimilitude sufficient to inspire unmitigated co-
operation. ”You got to show them that you mean what you’re
talking about,” Bacca illustrates, ”show them that you are just out
to get what you trying to get and if you can’t get it, they got to
suffer the consequences.” Weakness is easy to spot and impossi-
ble to remedy if detected. ”You let a person know that you are
scared,” Baby Doll confessed, ”shit, they’ll get you. . . . You can’t
let nobody see.”
Not all offenders were equally adept at projecting a badass per-
sona. Some needed a jumpstart. Buck likened himself to a wolver-
ine (an animal he had seen depicted on the Discovery Channel)
who, through sheer ferocity, made all antagonists comply. ”[He]
is a notorious [sic], he is a terrible little guy. I saw him run a bear
up a tree. . . . Can you imagine the big old bear running from a lit-
tle bitty wolverine?” Lil’ Player used a method-acting technique
88 Enactment

of sorts, imagining that ”somebody had . . . killed my momma”

just prior to the offense. Most, however, turned to the facilitating
influence of alcohol and drugs. Pre-offense partying vaporized
lingering reservations. Taken in proper amounts, alcohol and
drugs disinhibit aggressive tendencies, dissipate fear, and cultivate
a capacity for ”explosive violence” (see, for example, Berkowitz
1993; see also Katz 1991:288; Lejeune 1977:129). Given the sub-
stantial number of robberies committed at the tail end of inten-
sive partying, such effects often came as a matter of course and,
indeed, facilitated the decision to do drug robberies in the first
place.
”When you are under the influence of drugs,” Darnell pro-
fessed, ”you really don’t have a sorry word, what the fuck do you
care, excuse my French but I’m on the shit, man, I’m flying, you
all got this shit so I got to get it.” Kilo agreed, claiming that ”[Get-
ting high] kind of eases the thing. Drink a little oil [alcohol] or
something. . . and just pump yourself up.” ”I [got]to get high be-
fore I go and do this,” Goldie concurred, ”so my mind just be in
another world. . . . So I don’t worry about it, you know, whatev-
er happens, happens. I just be in another world.”
Some inebriants were seen as more effective than others. But
the drug of choice varied from person to person. Crack was the
substance preferred by Baby Doll. ”When you on that crack co-
caine,’’ she mused, ”it’s just like that crack just make you just,
crack will make you do anything, you know, make you do any-
thing and have you feel like you the toughest person in the world.
I’m not afraid when I’m high off that crack.. . . It don’t matter
how big or small [you are], you think you the toughest person in
the world. . . . That’s the only time I ever do this stuff [drug rob-
bery] is when I’m high or something like that, I’m high.” For Bac-
ca, it was heroin. ”Heroin. . . makes you feel real strong like you
can do anything. . . . [Take] a pill. . . [and it makes] me want to do
it [the drug robbery] even more.” Smoke Dog spoke of the insane
mentality heroin allegedly produced, a mentality ideal for per-
petrating violence. ”[Snort] me one of them pill things,” he said,
”and . . . just [go] crazy then.”
There is, of course, a real danger of overdoing pre-offense
partying. Blunted judgment can cause risks to be dismissed or
Announcement 89

mistakes to be made. Given that drug robberies often entailed a

desperate attempt to continue wild bouts of partying, real prob-
lems might be in the offing. ”If you high or drunk,” V-0 revealed,
“then you can slip up, mess up.” Loony Ass Nigga and June Bug
were more expansive:

You can’t concentrate right. ’Cause like when you drunk it’s
careless mistakes. You got to be so careful of anything ’cause
if you don’t you may go in there, fall or something, trip over
and fall or something on your gun and shoot your partner or
let your gun fall and let somebody else get it. . . . You might
go in the house and throw up, you know what I’m saying,
and then that’s your life.
Smoking cocaine it be geeked all up, playing with your
nerves and you gotta wait till you settle, until you come
down to your right frame of mind.. . . Don’t nobody that
smoking rock cocaine be in their right frame of mind because
it’s a speed high so therefore you have to sit and wait until
you come back down because you be up there on a high level
so you got to wait until you come back down on your level
before you do anything.

Offenders typically announced the offense and brandished

firearms coterminously. There is nothing more ominous than hav-
ing a loaded gun shoved in one’s face and being ordered to com-
ply on the threat of death. Intimidation, after all, is about fear, and
few things create it more convincingly than the specter of lethal
force. Guns can kill, they can kill impersonally from a distance,
and they leave little chance for a counterattack; ”because every-
one knows that a gun has these attributes, [its] mere display . . .
communicates a highly effective threat” (Cook 1982:247).
”When you got a gun in your hand,” Smoke Dog pronounced,
”you can get whatever you want. Always remember that.’’ ”Ain’t
too much they gonna say cause they don’t want to tick you off,’’
Jay added. Kilo concurred, claiming that ”once people see the
gun, they pretty much fold, you know. . . . I mean, if I told you to
give me your watch you would probably say ’fuck you.’ If I pull
90 Enactment

a gun on you you’d probably say ’fuck you’ but [you would] give
it up.” According to Darnell, ”It’s either give [me] this shit or
die. . . . [Victims know] what time it was.” With the ”ups” on
someone else, there is nothing to do but comply:

When a person got a . . . loaded automatic in his hand. What

type of fool gonna make a mistake like that so he can get
killed for some money? So why not just go on and give the
person what the fuck he wants, let the person get the fuck
away, understand what I’m saying?-Blackwell
Pull a gun. . . and he can’t do nothing but do what [I] say un-
less [he] want to die. It’s so easy to rob. . . . It’s so easy to rob
people. Somebody pull a gun out, they ain’t gonna move
cause they don’t want to die. They gonna let you do what
they got to do, check ’em, go through they wallet, purse, any-
thing, look through the house, look for the crack, the dope.
Ain’t nobody gonna move, nobody, ’cause don’t nobody
want to die.-Crazy Jack

Minimal necessary force is perceptual, and a few drug robbers in-

sisted on toting multiple firearms. ”I always carried two guns
when I was going to do anything,” Curly explained. ”I didn’t
think one was sufficient. . . . See, two guns will scare them more
. . . put something on they mind. If you got two guns you ain’t
bullshitting.. . . He not gonna go against these pistols, he’s
caught.” June Bug and Ray Dog agreed:

I always like to have two because no telling who might run

up in that motherfucker, you see that I’m saying? 9’s [Nine
mms] shoot 18 times apiece, you see what I’m saying? That’s
a lot of shots man, you see what I’m saying? I mean, that’s
enough to keep any motherfucker off you, man.
You got two pistols . . . cocked, fully loaded . . . one in your
mouth and one in your head what you gonna say? What you
gonna do? Can’t do nothing else but do what I tell him to do.
Announcement 91

The number of firearms, however, seemed to be less important

than their type. Most respondents preferred the biggest, baddest,
and most fearsome-looking gun possible. Ugly weapons-old,
scratched, pock-marked from years of dirty work-were espe-
cially favored. The uglier and more intimidating the gun, the less
likely the drug robbers would have to use it. ”I don’t want a pret-
ty gun,” Buck illustrates, ”[I want it] big, black, and ugly. . . .
[That] keep[s] you from having to hurt somebody.” The weapon
of choice for many was a .45. ”When they see that big old .45 with
that 9-inch barrel on her,” Do-dirty exulted, ”they bags up, they
bags up.” Slim agreed:

They [.45s] big, they ugly, and they shoots good. . . . Just
pulling it out and staring down in the barrel of that pistol,
that’s enough to give you something to think about, that’s
what make it so ugly. . . . When you take it and put it up to
his mouth and let him bite down on it with his teeth and just
talk to him, he gots to [give in], you know.

Nine mms and .357 magnums followed close behind. June Bug
reveled in the sheer firepower of the nine. ”They shoot good . . .
knock their motherfucking brains against that wall, knock his
brain out of the wall.” Darnell concurred: ”A nigger see one of
those and shuts the fuck up. I shut the fuck up when I see one.”
Smoke Dog preferred his .357 magnum: ”It’s big and it kick,” he
boasted. ”I like guns that kick when I shoot ’em. They give that
little POW, like that, that kick, you know what I’m saying? That’s
my baby, I love that magnum, I swear I do, I love it.” Smoke Dog
and others talked about their weapons with all the joy and exhil-
aration of a young child on Christmas morning; their faces ”glis-
ten and brighten . . . their bodies inflate like a gas balloon. Their
backs straighten and limbs stiffen; excitement and passion over-
come them” (Fleisher 1995:57).
Not all offenders trumpeted the merits of big, powerful guns.
Some considered them too bulky and burdensome, as well as
counterproductive to approaches reliant on stealth. The bigger
92 Enactment

the weapon, the more difficult it was to hide and the more prone
it was to being exposed prematurely. ”I ain’t going nowhere with
no shotgun or no AK or nothing, [not even a] 9mm,” Crazy Jack
explained. “[I take a .32 automatic] ’cause it [is] so small and I
[can] walk with it. A little handgun you can put in your pocket
and walk and then if you have to run it ain’t that big, you can run
with it.” Placed inside the front waistband of one’s pants, covered
by a baggy shirt, small guns were virtually undetectable. ”[Can’t
walk] around with a bigass ,357 under my shirt [and] catch ’em
off guard,” Kilo admitted. ”[By contrast,] I could probably have
a .25 in my pocket now and you wouldn’t know anything.” Lady
Bug concurred:

Why would I walk down the street with a big old long gun?
They don’t need to see what I got in my hand. They don’t
know what I want. That’s how you do it. You walk up on
them. . . . When I walk, you don’t know what I got.

Reduced firepower did not necessarily make drug robbers less

potent. Small guns can produce mortal injuries nearly as easily as
their larger brethren. ”A gun is a gun,” Kilo reasoned. ”I wouldn’t
want to get shot with one. [In fact,] a lot of people say .22s and
.25s are like murder weapons because the bullet travels. You can
get shot in the knee and it end up in your gut.” Bacca agreed,
claiming that the .25 bullet would go through the victim’s whole
body, puncturing internal organs before stopping. Firearms were
firearms; it all came down to the skill of the shooter in using
them-if, indeed, shooting became necessary.

VICTIM RESPONSE

Many victims reportedly had a strong tendency to disbelieve

what was happening to them. ”What you doing, what you do-
ing?” Smoke Dog reported one dealer asking him incredulously.
”Robbing you. . . . What it [look] like I’m doing?” Jay recounted
Victim Response 93

similarly: "[Victim] told me I was tripping. . . . 'No I'm not trip-

ping, you tripping."' Or as Kilo observed: "I told him to give me
all of [his shit] and he was like, 'Man, what the fuck you doing?'
He don't think I was real at first."
Hesitation is a natural reaction to the sudden loss of autonomy
(see Brehm and Brehm 1981; Lejeune 1977; Lejeune and Alex
1973). "Momentarily shocked and disoriented, the victim [fore-
goes] routine action in order to determine whether the move
should be taken as a sign of a prank or exploitation" (Luckenbill
1981:33). Shock can provide a distinct advantage for drug rob-
bers. The greater the disorientation, the lower the risk of resis-
tance, and the more rapidly they can realize their objectives:

Man, he was like, he was so shocked that we came up to him

that he just, we took the money, he had the money and
we took it. We had ran and we took it. He just like, "damn."
-K-red

Yet surprise also can create unintended delay as victims struggle

to reorient their perceptions (see Lejeune 1977).The more time it
takes between announcement and goods transfer, the less control
drug robbers have. Delays suggest a lack of compliance that, if al-
lowed to persist, threaten to undermine the integrity of the of-
fense. Insofar as hesitation mutates into resistance, even greater
problems are in the offing.
Delays were not uncommon. Most dealers are accustomed to
the threat that goes hand-in-hand with selling illicit drugs. Many
have had violent confrontations in the past, escaping injury or
death only by being cool under fire. On the streets, recalcitrance
in the face of threat is essential; its dramaturgic value increases in
direct proportion to the threat's perceived lethality. "You got
some people like that," Jay explained. "'I'm not gonna give up
shit, I ain't giving you shit man, fuck you.' You got some people
like that. "
Hesitation typically was a stalling maneuver intended to break
the drug robbers' resolve. Victims might also use the opportunity
94 Enactment

to make threats of their own-”I’m gonna get you and this and
that, all this and that [Kilo]”-but usually they attempted to talk
aggressors out of completing the offense, either explicitly or im-
plicitly. Drug robbers needed to respond accordingly, lest they
lose the advantage they had labored so diligently to create:

He [dealer] kind of hesitated a minute. Man, this is bull-

shit. . . . He was stalling. . . . I was contemplating shooting
him but I didn’t. . . . Like, motherfucker, the more you talk to
them really, the more probably the situation will escalate into
something that you don’t want it to be. He’ll probably figure
that he can reason with you or some shit, you know what I’m
saying? You just don’t say nothing to him. Like I said, I told
him to give it up and I kept a gun in his face and I didn’t take
my eyes off of him.-Kilo
They crying, ”Please man, please man,” they kind of get on
your nerves. You might want to smack them and tell them to
shut up or something because that can mess with your head
while you doing it. Crying, ”Oh my momma,” and all this,
”Gonna miss me,” and all that, shut up, shut up, and just get
on the ground, let’s get this over with.-Loony Ass Nigga

Victims might also use the opportunity to explain (retroactively)

what they would have done had a gun not been jammed in their
face. ”You could have just asked me for some dope or money and
I would have gave it to you,” was the modal attempt. The trans-
parency of such efforts made most drug robbers bristle with
anger. ”[You]wouldn’t have gave me [nothing],”Spanky report-
edly replied in one such encounter. ”Fuck you.” Darnell retorted
similarly: ”Fuck, when I ask I don’t get it. So I have to go through
the pistol to make you niggers understand.”
Kilo insisted that one could avoid the perils of hesitation by us-
ing force proactively; he announced one offense by pistol-whip-
ping the victim:

I came up behind him. . . .Hit him, hit him with the pistol. . . .
Strike ’em. . . . Just smack him with the butt of the gun, you
Victim Response 95

know, in the back of the head somewhere. . . and told him he

had to give it all to me, I wanted it. I wasn’t gonna let him
move around. . . .He handed [the drugs] to me. . . .He didn’t
try nothing funny. I guess he [was] . . . scared.

The vast majority of offenders, however, dispensed brute force

only to reestablish control (see also Lejeune 1977). Punishment
produces pain, and pain engenders immediate compliance (on
pain cues, see Tedeschi and Felson 1994:368).”I told him this is a
robbery,” Blackwell recounted, ”he tells me ’this ain’t no robbery.
You ain’t taking nothing from me,’ so I hit him on the side of the
head, let him know I wasn’t playing.” ”I ain’t giving you noth-
ing,” Do-dirty recalled another victim telling him. ”All right, you
don’t give me nothing. OK, well here, check this here out, POW
[strikingthe victim]. Now what you gonna do?” ”If he even trip,”
Curly continued, ”smack him to let him know you ain’t bullshit-
ting. . . . Whip him with the gun. . . . Put the ouch on him, man.”
Or, as Jay put it, ”I have to hit him upside his head with the pis-
tol. After I hit him three or four times then he [know I] was all se-
rious.” Smoke Dog put it similarly: ”[Smack him] to let him know
I ain’t playing with him. That’s just to let him know. You got to
do it. You talking to somebody, you gonna mess around and
smack him with it or you gonna shoot him.”
Darnell, meanwhile, preferred to ”Sho[o]t . . . at the ground a
few times, let him know I [am] not bullshitting.” Three Eyes and
Blackwell claimed that warning shots were not enough. ”I’ll shoot
’em in the arm, leg, knee, just to let you know that I ain’t playing,”
said the former. ”[But]next time it won’t be one of them little parts
that you can survive without.” Blackwell reportedly shot his vic-
tim in the leg twice when he failed to hand over the goods in a
prompt manner. ”He shouldn’t have took that long to give it to
me,” Blackwell insisted, ”damn near a minute and a half.”
Others chose to displace their wrath onto copresent third par-
ties. Insofar as the safety of a victim’s relative or close friend is
credibly threatened, swifter responses might be in order. ”See, if
I put a pistol in a kid’s head,” June Bug pointed out, ”his mom-
ma will do anything in her power to serve me and to do whatever
96 Enactment

I want her to do you know. ’I don’t care about you killing me, just
don’t kill my son,’ you see what I’m saying? ’You let my son
live.”’ Ray Dog used this very tactic, threatening to kill a recalci-
trant victim’s infant son if he continued to disobey:

So we were asking him about where the dope at in his house,

where’s the dope at? He claims he don’t know where the
dope at. I grabbed the boy’s baby and put the pistol at the
baby head. I said, ’Where the dope at?’ Then he claimed he
don’t know where the dope at. Cocked the pistol. ’Where the
dope at, man, because you know I don’t mind killing this
baby.’ But at the same time I ain’t gonna kill his baby, man,
I’m just putting fear in his life. But that been a grown person,
yeah, a baby, a baby ain’t got nothing to do with this here be-
cause the baby don’t know what’s going on. It just there be-
cause it’s daddy there, it’s daddy and momma in the house.
So after I cocked the pistol and told him what I was gonna
do, you dig, he said, ’Over there, man, right there.’ ’Where
the money at?’ ’The money over there.’ Telling his wife, go
get the dope, go get the money. Walk through the house with
the baby like this here. You letting him know, you see what
I’m saying?The joke is over with the dude. ”I done asked you
two times where the money and dope at, you know, but you
was steady bullshitting. I’ll try to show you something, take
your pride and joy from you. I’ll kill your kid. I’ll take your
kid’s life.’’

Whether meted out against dealers or related third parties, most

drug robbers found the use of force to be intrinsically rewarding
(on intrinsic motivation, see Eisenberger et al. 1999).Domination
and control over someone else’s fate brought enormous pleasure
to those whose lives were, in many ways, spinning out of control.
”Just seeing the motherfuckers doing what you tell them to do,
you know,” Goldie beamed, ”get down, and they get down and
shake a little. They be scared that I’m gonna kill ’em or some-
thing.” Or as Jay Rock put it, ”You lay the motherfucker down on
the ground and beg for his motherfucking life [makes me feel
good].” ”I like seeing the fear,” Snap gloated. ”I like seeing people
Victim Response 97

scared, I like seeing that.” June Bug claimed that he got his ”thing
on watching motherfuckers . . . scream, crying, begging, ’Don’t
kill me!’ It’s fun to me. ’Hey man, please don’t hurt me.”’ Do-
dirty, meanwhile, loved seeing victims ”shake in they pants. I
seen a dude shit and piss on his self,” he recalled with obvious
glee. Offenders felt more secure about themselves by exposing
weakness in others. This is not surprising; status is a function of
the ability to dominate others, which permits the ”thrilling
demonstration of personal competence”-invaluable, no matter
how fleeting it may be (Katz 1988:9; see also Zimring and Zuehl
1986 and Toch 1969 on the ”recreational” nature of violence).
In nearly all cases, however, offenders endeavored to avoid
killing their victims. Lethal violence may be the best way to quell
resistance, but it is far from desired. Bodies bring heat and negate
a primary reason why these offenders rob drug dealers in the first
place: because they cannot go to the police. Underworld victims
may not truly be victims, that is, unless or until they are killed (see
Kroese and Staring 1993 on the ”moral boundaries” of violence;
see also Gabor et al. 1987:61). ”You kill somebody,” V-0 ex-
plained, ”that’s . . . 14 years of your life [in prison]. You don’t
want. . . that.” Buck agreed: ”[Drug] robbery is all about intimi-
dation. . . . We don’t really want to [kill] nobody. . . . We will but
we just coming for the money, that’s all.” The idea, then, is to es-
tablish fear in the psyche of the victim. To do so is to unnerve
them and sufficientlyweaken their propensity for resistance. This
is particularly important for the safe and efficient transfer of
goods.

GOODS-TRANSFER

Drug robbery is a sequential offense and with each step, the

consequences become increasingly irrevocable. The sequence
reaches its climax at the point where goods are transferred. At this
time more than any other, victims become unmistakably aware
that they and their valuables are about to be separated. If one
were going to resist, this would be the time to do it.
98 Enactment

Sheer proximity increased the chance that some unexpected

move might be misread by drug robbers or not detected in time,
with potentially fatal consequences. Methods of exchange had to
be devised accordingly. These methods typically varied by enact-
ment context. In house robberies, for example, offenders would
usually immobilize victims before conducting a search. Three
Eyes thus hustled his victims to the floor and forced them to lie
in a ”corpse-like state” (Katz 1988) before rifling through the
dwelling:

The ground more safer, you know what I’m saying, than
them trying to jump up off the ground and try something
with me. Hey, I’ll tag your ass on that ground real quick, you
know what I’m saying? . . . Put a gun in the motherfucker’s
face and say, get your ass on the ground.

Buck went a step further, using a loop-knotting technique he re-

portedly learned in the navy to ”rodeo wrap” his victims’ hands
and feet together. Others used power or telephone cords for the
same purpose, duct-taping their victims’ mouths so that they re-
mained both immobile and silent. The time spent doing this re-
portedly outweighed the extra threat of detection that went with
prolonged exposure at the enactment site. It facilitated escape
as well:

Dope robberies man, you see what I’m saying, the mother-
fucking people get to hollering and screaming, you know,
motherfucker get to screaming and hollering, if a mother-
fucker in a house with (inaudible), it’s gonna be all tension.
If the motherfucker trying to make it to the door get to hol-
lering, you see what I’m saying? . . . So I’m gonna put duct
tape around their mouth and around their hands and stuff
and I’m gonna walk up out of there.-June Bug

In the offenders’ favor was the fact that the goods transfer could
usually be made rapidly. Contraband often was in plain sight,
minimizing the need for search time. Offenders typically brought
Goods-Transfer 99

sacks with them. After securing compliance, it became a simple

matter of grab, bag, and run:

I was grabbing the stack of money, all the money. He had

them stacked where you could grab it. He was stacking his
money, counting it. So I just grabbed it, bing, bing, bing, put
it in my pocket. Left up out of the house I had dope in my
pocket, some pocket, dope in this pocket and money in this
pocket .-Smoke Dog
Everything we needed was right here in this one room,
everything on the table.. . . We just grabbed everything.. .
money . . . dope, weed, they straps [guns] was sitting out,
you know. So we got the straps, the money, I got to check in
they pockets, taking they jewelry off, everything. [Got over
$3,000 worth of stuff altogether].--Loony Ass Nigga

Even if hidden, stashes usually could be found in ”obvious”

places such as inside cupboards, closets, crawl spaces, under mat-
tresses, or beneath floorboards. Experience and intuition-after
all, many drug robbers were or had been dealers themselves-
taught them where to search first:

We was going in for something, you know, look in the least

expected places and you also gonna look where I would
normally and you would normally just keep some: in your
closet, up under your mattress, up under the bed, you know.
Motherfucker have a safe . . . in his closet up under some
clothes and shit like that. . .you know, the little safe that you
probably get at K-Mart or something, you know, with the lit-
tle key to it. . , . So we just grabbed it. . . . We took it to our
house and we all sat around the table and took our time try-
ing to get the motherfucker open.-Three Eyes
Well, when you come in the house there is like a closet, it’s
not a closet, it’s a water heater and where the water heater
goes up it’s a square hole in each wall, every apartment. He
kept it up there on the side; it’s like a little attic up in there.
--Bacca
100 Enactment

Up under some mattress. . .pulled up a little wood thing and

in a little box he had like stashed there. Like, he had a wood-
en floor, stashed in the wooden floor. . . . It was, like, four
ounces [of heroin] . . . [an] ounce of cocaine [and] $10,000.
--Darnell

Curbside dealers, by contrast, typically retained their drugs ”off

premises”-off their person-usually in some secret, street-
based stash spot. Such spots generally would not be more than
several feet from their owner (to allow rapid restocking) and typ-
ically in line of sight, but ensconced in such a way as to prevent
identification. Some were wrapped in paper and buried in soil
nearby, with a uniquely shaped twig, mound of earth, penny, bot-
tle, or cigarette butt placed over the top to mark it. Others were
put in soda cans and deposited in dumpsters, on top of building-
ledges, inside hollowed spaces of trees, or in bushes with paper
draped over them (Jacobs 1996b:371).Through careful observa-
tion, drug robbers could determine their location-if not precise-
ly, at least generally, which usually was good enough. ”I [may
not] know where the dope is,” Smoke Dog confessed, ”but . . .
they . . . don’t keep running back there [behind a building] for
nothing. Nobody just gonna keep running to no back way piss-
ing every three minutes or something, ain’t gonna piss that
much.. . . They got some dope back there [and I’m going to
find it].”
As Smoke Dog implies, tactical errors committed by would-be
victims facilitated the discovery of stashes. J Rock recalled a sell-
er escorting him into an alley to complete a transaction, revealing
the all-important hiding place in the process. ”That’s stupid,” he
remarked. ”That’s on him. That’s why he got got, motherfucker,
stupid motherfucker.” Selling and restocking one’s inventory in
too close proximity was an error with similar consequences:

All right. Me and one of my little partners, right, we rolled

up. I mean, I smoke weed. Let me get a sack of weed from
him, right? And so the dude gave me a sack and he had a
whole bunch of sacks in back by the trash can, up under the
Goods-Transfer 101

trash can. . . . So I went on over there and while he selling me

the sack, the weed, all the time I was gonna rob him. I ain’t
gonna buy no weed from him, I’m gonna rob him. And so I
caught him when he bent down going to his bag. He had at
least about 40-some sacks in there.. . . That’s $400 strong,
$400 strong.-Smoke Dog

Such errors also could be induced, as Smoke Dog proved by

luring his victim into a gangway under the pretext of police
surveillance:

”Why don’t you-all step in the alley, man, ’cause it’s too hot
to be standing right here. The police might ride up or some-
thing. Why don’t we go in the gangway?” That was stupid.
You don’t never supposed to show nobody where you keep
your dope at. . . . He had some dope in a brick like, you know,
them bricks, them cement bricks? . . . He had broke a brick
down so he could flip a brick over. You know how you pick
up a brick and there be a lot of bugs and all that stuff under
there? There was some rocks [crack] up under there, some
dope, he had all dope up under there. So. . . I peeped it and
I took it.

Blackwell pulled a maneuver that brought the stash to him-re-

questing a rather large purchase amount that compelled the tar-
get to return with the entire inventory, which Blackwell expressly
intended to (and did) snatch:

[Drive up,] you tell them what you want and they’ll say
”Well hold on, let me go back and get what you want, I
[don’t] got enough of it [on me].” Then they go get they
whole stash. Then they bring the whole stash to the car [and
I up the gun].

Insofar as victims were able to deposit the stash somewhere on

their person before drug robbers could seize it, problems might
102 Enactment

have arisen. Drug robbers could not really trust victims to hand
over the goods, given the opportunity this provided to make a
false move. ”[Victim]got to reach down and dig all in there to get
the money [and drugs],” YoYo remarked. ”I don’t know if she
gonna pull out a gun or the money. . . . She could be reaching for
what she want to get . . . and then therefore I got, got.” Yet con-
ducting the search oneself required that victims be constrained
and the loot secured all at once, not an easy task: The closer drug
robbers got to their victims, the more vulnerable their weapons
were to being jarred or seized. ”I didn’t want to go through his
pockets,” Lil’ Player recalled, ”’cause if I would have went
through his pockets I wouldn’t have had a good enough grip on
him. If I would have went in his pockets, he could have did some-
thing to me. He could have reversed or anything.”
Reversals did indeed happen. One of Buck’s victims suddenly
grabbed the barrel of his pistol-at which time Buck’s partner was
compelled to open fire.4Lewis, meanwhile, reportedly was forced
to flee when a victim clutched at the ski mask he was wearing,
nearly pulling if off, while shrieking for assistance at the same
time. ”I had no alternative but to run,”he lamented. Loony Ass
Nigga claimed that eye contact was the key to detecting incipient
resistance and heading it off before any damage could be done:

You really ain’t got to watch they hands, just look at them in
they eye. Just keep your eyes on his, when you see him, just
give me everything, keep your eyes on them ’cause if they
eyes get to flinching, always tell people if they get to flinch-
ing they eyes they gonna try something. They either gonna
up [pull a gun], they gonna up on you, either, or. ’Cause ain’t
nobody like being robbed, that’s too much money. They
know that’s a lot of money getting took away from them
man. They don’t like that, they’ll kill you for that if you drop
[your eyes].

Most offenders insisted on training their weapons, finger-on-trig-

ger, directly on some part of the victim’s body (preferably the
head, neck, or back) as they obliged him or her to produce the
Goods-Transfer 103

goods. Drug robbers could then ”devote their undivided at-

tention to watching for signs of danger” (Wright and Decker
1997:108). Any sudden movement would result in swift and
severe consequences. ”If you make any type of false mistake,”
Blackwell recalled telling a dealer, ”I’m gonna shoot you right on
the spot.” Do-dirty, similarly, informed his victim that if ”you
move I’m gonna pop you, I’m gonna shoot the shit out of you.”
Ray Ray claimed he might take the additional step of putting ”it
[gun] in they mouth or something. ’You think I’m bullshitting, I’ll
blow your fucking head off.’ Put it in they mouth or something,
put it in they ear or something, let ’em know you ain’t playing.”
When possible, drug robbers insisted on making their victims
strip. Though street-based victims may be disproportionately un-
armed (and thus ”soft”), taking this for granted could have dis-
astrous results. ”This . . . big old fat-ass nigger,” Darnell recalled,
”he used to hide a little Derringer [a very small pistol] in his
navel. It look like nothing and then he’ll probably pull out a gun
and pop me in my head. So I took him in the alley and made him
take off all his clothes.” The manifest function of stripping, how-
ever, was to ferret out undiscovered contraband. Underwear was
a popular on-person stash spot; dealers commonly cloistered
drugs/money inside a secret crotch-pocket located in most
brand-name briefs (Jacobs1999a).”’You got some Skippies on?”’
June Bug recalled asking a victim. ”’Turn around and let me see
if you got some money down there,’ ’cause they hide money all
in they drawers and shit.” Footwear and pants were popular 10-
cations as well. ”[Make] him strip, take his clothes,” Curly ob-
served, ”’cause he [past victim] had money in his shoes and his
socks . . . and he had money everywhere, man, all in his drawers
and shit.” Or as Darnell observed, ”[They keep] maybe $20 or $30
[in their pocket] but in his shoe he have a bundle of money.” June
Bug agreed: ”Dope dealers hide money all in their shoes. ‘Take
them Nikes off, motherfucker; I know you got some money [in
them].”’ Ray Dog, meanwhile, paid special attention to slacks:

They got they pockets sewed up, other pockets sewed up on

the inside of their clothes. They keep all types of money and
jewelry inside they clothes hid, sew pockets on the inside. So
104 Enactment

you could take a pocket like this here and turn it inside and
then down below up on here is another pocket like this here
and turn it inside and then down below up in here is anoth-
er pocket that’s been made up in there, you can’t even tell it’s
up in there. And you might hit that pocket and you might
come out of there with $3,000 or $4,000 in that pocket.

It was important, however, not to sacrifice safety for the sake of

being thorough. Insofar as thoroughness is fueled by greed, drug
robbers ran the real risk of having their attention diverted in
offense-ending ways. Time and threat, moreover, are directly cor-
related, and the marginal utility of extra rewards simply was not
enough to justify an extended stay. ”I got what I was concerned
with,” Buck recounted of a past robbery. ”You want to do i t . . .
and move on.. . . I don’t know who else might be coming.”
”That’s more time wasted,” Goldie observed. ”It’s about time. . . .
That’s too much time and it might not be no other stash.. . .”
Spanky concurred: ”I [don’t]want to be greedy. I just want. . . to
get what I [can get] and get out.. . . Never be greedy.. . [go in
to get more] and probably never come back out.” Or, as Darnell
declared, ”Greedy get you caught up. I’m just here to get what I
can get.”
Though offenders tried to choose times and places that pre-
sented the lowest possible risk, both street and house locations
are venues where activity is not stifled for long. The wisest course
of action is to seize as much as one can as rapidly as possible, and
then leave. As long as the cache is close to what one expected to
secure, there is little cognitive dissonance in leaving undiscov-
ered contraband behind. As one of Wright and Decker’s (1994:144)
burglars aptly remarked, ”You miss a lot, but it’s all gravy if you
get away.” Kilo echoed this sentiment:

I just figured, I mean I saw the [heroin]pills and I knew it was

a lot of pills, you know what I’m saying?I figured this is the
lick. I saw him when he gave me the bag and the bag was full.
It was about half the size of my fist balled up full of pills and
I knew it was a lot. I knew I did good and I just ran after
that. . . . It’s for the needy, not the greedy.
Goods-Transfer 105

Not being greedy is important for managing retaliatory risks as

well. Darnell, for example, robbed a big-time house dealer of
$10,000 in cash and several thousand dollars’ worth of drugs, but
reportedly left without taking all of the booty. This led him to
claim that he really ”didn’t hurt [the victim] ’cause if I did, I could
have gotten more out of the deal which I knew there was more
there. . . . I see the guy to this day. He might smile. . . . And to this
day, I don’t think I really hurt him.” Similarly, Ray Ray refurned a
diamond ring to a victim before leaving the scene. ”’I ain’t gonna
do you like this,’” he reportedly told the seller. ”’You can have at
least one ring back.”’ Such overtures, however, clearly were more
the exception than the rule. Nonetheless, it must be underscored
that in these communities-and in drug markets writ large-pre-
dation is so common as to be measured in degrees. Insofar as drug
robbers are able to moderate the amount they steal, victims might
be more likely to ”write off” the loss and move on. Given the
speed with which sellers (at least resourceful or well-connected
ones) can replenish lost inventory / cash, such a strategy may be
well grounded.

ENDING THE OFFENSE

Where one escaped to typically was less important than how

quickly one did it. The modal plan was to run from the scene as
fast as possible, training weapons on victims until the last avail-
able moment. Escape from house robberies required perhaps the
most vigilance, given the rapidity with which dealers might react
after gaining liberty from their attackers:

I had my partner in the car start it up. . . . I’m still looking [up
at the house]. I’m by the car with the door open. I’m just wait-
ing on him to start it up and get it off the ground. So I’m still
looking up at the house. They ain’t gonna run to the door
’cause if they do then I would have had to start shooting.
--Loony Ass Nigga
106 Enactment

The importance of clearing the house of weapons before escaping

becomes obvious:

I was trying to find a pistol because you never know once

you rob somebody in they house I guarantee they might have
a pistol come back shooting at you. . . . I got the stuff. Then I
told her ”Stand at the door,” and I kept pointing the pistol at
her until I got down the steps and once I got down the steps
we ran and jumped in the car.-Crazy Jack

Escapes typically are made with admonitions not to move, yell,

or call for help for several minutes. Such directives often are sup-
plemented by additional verbal harassment, as if to flaunt in vic-
tims’ faces that they had gotten their way and there was nothing
they could do about it. ”Punk ass nigger, fuck you all up,” illus-
trates Smoke Dog. A number of offenders insisted on communi-
cating parting words to victims that vaguely suggested future
contact. ”I’ll holler at you, man,” or ”I’ll be back for your ass in a
minute” (J Rock) were examples. On the streets, such comments
translate into, ”I’m going to rob you again,” or ”I’m going to get
you before you get me first.” They are intended to extend the il-
lusion of impending threat beyond the actual drug robbery, and
to deter retaliation by instilling lasting fear (see also Wright and
Decker 1997).Whether they succeed in doing so is another mat-
ter and beyond the scope of the present study.5

DISCUSSION

Conduct norms in predatory encounters are based on taken-

for-granted assumptions of anticipated behavior. Offenders and
victims are co-oriented, working from a common situational de-
finition that coordinates actions into a joint performance (Luck-
enbill 1981:25). Reciprocity creates mutual expectations that
permit encounters to proceed with minimal conflict (Reidel
1993:144).In many ways, stickups have an ”etiquette,” and when
Discuss ion 107

both parties enact it, offenses ”can resemble a ballet in which each
side smoothly performs a choreographed part” (Anderson 1999:
126,128).
Yet there is a ”ubiquity of suspense” that plagues the offense
from inception to completion. Victims are unsympathetic and not
inclined to comply for long. Enduring consensus comes only
through forced compliance. ”High-intensity terror” projects in-
dominability and with indominability comes sustained control
(Reidell993:155-59).
Obviously, the use of force must be measured, as victims might
”fatefully misread” the attack to represent something far more se-
rious than a robbery (Katz 1991:285; see Wright and Decker 1997).
Misattribution is a very real possibility in the face of acute dis-
tress. Time pressure and uncertainty undermine effective cogni-
tive processing (Felson 1978). If harm, for example, is predicted
no matter how one reacts, furious resistance becomes not only
logical but essential (Wright and Decker 1997:106-7; see also Katz
1988). Drug-robbery victims have a reservoir full of hostility
expectancies anyway, and may be intoxicated at the time of vic-
timization (see Dodge and Newman 1981 on the notion of expec-
tancy). Many, moreover, are willing to risk more to have a chance
of losing less, particularly when contraband is valuable and / or
difficult to replenish: The anticipated ”sunk costs” create so much
cognitive dissonance that resistance becomes the only realistic re-
sponse; no amount of indominability will deter those who per-
ceive everything to be on the line, and nothing to lose (see also
Arkes and Ayton 1999;Kahneman and Tversky 1979;Moessinger
2000; Tedeschi and Felson 1994).
The dramaturgical salience of resistance goes unstated. On the
streets, reputation is everything (Anderson 1999). Reputation
flows from competence and competence from the display of re-
calcitrance in the face of threat (Jones and Pittman 1982; Maher
and Daly 1996;Tedeschi and Felson 1994).Anything short of non-
compliance, even if merely symbolic, can be enormously damag-
ing and cycle back to create even worse outcomes in the future.
As one long-time drug seller put it, to give in is to make ”every-
body and anybody . . . [think] they [can] take something from
[you]. There ain’t no way possible for you to sell drugs and
108 Enactment

survive if [people think] they can. . .just come and rob you at will
and you not gonna do anything about it.” By responding, victims
convince predators, past and future, to displace their activity onto
softer targets more likely to give up without a fight.
Yet in the face of noncompliance, or at least its potential, drug
robbers do not have the option of abandoning the offense, even if
another target is readily available. Practically and reputationally
speaking, anything short of follow-through is unacceptable (see
also Katz 1988:190; Katz 1991:287).Their reported reluctance to
use deadly force is a bit hard to believe against this backdrop, par-
ticularly if it is grounded in formal sanction fears, as they say.
These offenders target drug dealers precisely because the police
don’t care what happens to them. Even murdered vendors are un-
likely to elicit a vigorous response; ”dirtbags” and ”shitbums”
deserve whatever fate befalls them (see, for example, Klinger
1997).Left alive, such persons bring an enormous risk of retalia-
tion. Payback is moot if aggrieved parties are eliminated; friends
and associates cannot be relied on to pick up the retributive
slack-no matter what offenders might say to the contrary.
The replaceability of targets would seem to make lethal vio-
lence all the more plausible. Scores of dealers ply their trade on a
daily basis, providing a readily available and abundantly substi-
tutable supply of victims. Contraband, moreover, can be seized
whether or not they comply-something not necessarily true in
other high-magnitude heists. Bank robberies, for example, typi-
cally require victim assistance to deactivate security codes and
open safes (see Luckenbilll980). At the time of the offense, drug
robbers typically are angry, desperate, inebriated, and under pres-
sure to make something happen. They are volatile people any-
way, with a paranoid style of attribution and a decided inability
to be empathic (see Dodge and Newman 1981; Toch 1969; Wright
and Decker 1997).The presence of accomplices (not wholly un-
common) only amplifies their predisposition to lash out; there
is an audience to impress and thus added reinforcement for vio-
lence (see Felson 1982;Zimbardo 1970).Pressing needs and murky
judgment make for a combustible mix; disinhibitors to lethal
aggression evaporate-particularly when rewards are highly
valued and perceptibly imminent (see Hull 1981; Steele and
Southwick 1985).
Notes 109

That lethal violence appears neither common nor preferred (at

least, according to the drug robbers’ reports) is therefore instruc-
tive. It suggests that their contingent threats may be up to task.
Staring down the barrel of a loaded gun can make even large
amounts of drugs and money rapidly lose their intrinsic value for
victims otherwise bent on recalcitrance. Robbery is recognized to
be what it rightly is-a cost of doing business in a high-risk
world, an occupational hazard that must be tolerated with equa-
nimity (Wright and Decker 1997). As long as sellers can posture
later in ways that make losses look petty or unconcerning, dam-
age to their reputations need not be permanent. And financial
losses can almost always be recovered, though admittedly, with
variable difficulty. Retaliation will come later, after victims have
had the opportunity to mull over the incident and ponder an ap-
propriate course of action. Revenge, as they say, is a dish best eat-
en cold. Drug robbers must respond to this threat, as Chapter 5
will attest.

NOTES

[Link] at night / wearing disguises provided the additional bene-

fit of identity concealment, critical given the risk of retaliation. Two
exceptions (times when this wasn’t important) involved robberies
motivated by revenge (in which offenders generally want victims to
know who’s robbing them) and those triggered by opportunity (in
which offenders may not have a mask available when a suitable tar-
get emerges).
2. The same could be said of robberies that suddenly cropped up while
in the presence of others, given the ease and rapidity with which re-
wards could be secured.
3. Such threats have a longer-term purpose as well, by enticing victims
to think twice about seeking payback. Lasting fear withers the drive
for retaliation.
4. Though this happened inside a dwelling, the example is provided to
illustrate the general theme.
5. The foregoing data presentation is not intended to suggest that the
drug robbers are always in control and are always successful. How-
ever, the data collection techniques used here are biased toward com-
pleted offenses.
This page intentionally left blank
 CHAPTER FIVE1

Managing
Retaliation

I
LLICIT DRUG MARKETS represent a context in which law is un-
available as a matter of course. The absence of legal redress is
a defining characteristic of all underworld enterprise. Those
who violate the law cannot be ”victims” and as such, lose the
privilege of juridical protection. If and when grievances arise,
they must be resolved informally. Retaliation emerges as the
modal response.
Referred to variously as secret social control, crime as self-help,
or coercive unilateral social control (Black 1983; Horwitz 1990),
retaliation denotes an act of harm inflicted on another in return
for being wronged oneself. At its heart, retaliation is compen-
satory action designed to correct a perceived inequity. ”Its hall-
mark is balance” (Black 1993:91) and as such, the behavior is
grounded conceptually in the norm of reciprocity. This norm
holds that persons will respond ”to others in ways and to the de-
gree that resembles that of the other person’s initial [action]”
(Craig 1999:141; Gouldner 1960). The greater the perceived im-
balance, the more likely retaliatory responses become. In mar-
ginal contexts where normative support for violence already is
strong, the desire for payback will be especially powerful (see
also Barreca 1995; Horwitz 1990; Marongiu and Newman 1987).

111
112 Managing Retaliation

Failure to avenge drug robberies can have grave long-term con-

sequences. Insofar as fleeced sellers must answer to someone else
for lost cash and drugs, the consequences of capitulation will be
grim: The wrath of higher-level suppliers is swift and severe, and
to chance it is unwise (seeJohnson et al. 1985;Maher 1997:91-92).
As one long-time drug seller remarked, ”Got to realize man, most
dudes in the city, man, they selling for somebody else out of
town. . . . [If they get ripped off,] he’s [supplier’s]in the rear also
too. . . . He got to find me to make up.” The reputational damage
borne from surrender is equally germane. On the streets, respect
is the ”coin of the social order” (Anderson 1999:33). To submit
without evening the score is to squander it. For many, this can be
a ”fate worse than death.” The chronic exploitation likely to fol-
low makes life only more unbearable (Anderson 1999:33,37,88,
97; see also Black 1983).
The importance of (1) selecting targets that are perceptually
soft, easily intimidated, interpersonally unfamiliar, and geo-
graphically distant; (2) concealing identities through the use of
masks, darkness, and camouflage; and (3) plundering satisficing
rather than rapacious amounts, already has been established.
Such strategiesmay be useful for shaping the ”supply side” of ret-
ribution, but they are inherently limited. The effects of intimida-
tion can wear off. Soft targets might enlist the services of a hit
man. Small quantities of contraband can appear large to the per-
son from whom they are pilfered. Word of a drug robber’s iden-
tity or whereabouts can leak. Anonymity might be breached by
the most innocuous of chance encounters. The more recent a rob-
bery, the more troublesome run-ins can become: Victims’ memo-
ries are fresh, their sensitivity to interpersonal cues keen, and
their thirst for revenge acute. Even with a disguise, cues such as
tattoos, jewelry, voice, demeanor, gait, size, and height remain
tell-tale signs for especially attentive victims. Masks draw only
more attention to them during the robbery: essentially, they are
the only things to attend to.
Drug robbers had to manage their post-off ense behavior accord-
ingly. First and foremost, they could not leak information, either
through actions or words, that might expose their recent mis-
deeds. Flashing the spoils from a freshly committed robbery-
Managing Retaliation 113

cash, expensive clothing, jewelry-was a sure-fire way to identify

oneself as a ”player” who needed to be a taught a lesson. Showing
off items that could be traced directly back to a specific victim was
worse still. Both actions constitute dangerous proclamations of
one’s dirty work-public affronts that cannot go unpunished
(Wright and Decker 1997).Spanky seemed to recognize this pro-
actively-refusing to seize an expensive necklace from a prior
victim for fear it would ultimately identify him:

I didn’t want no chain ’cause the kind of chain he got, he had

like a fat herringbone with a dagger on it and everybody
know that’s Tyrell’s2chain. [Tyrell]seen with a size herring-
bone that big and if anybody else have it [others] would
know it was his and they probably would have got hurt.

Since stolen items typically were fenced [sold] quickly after the
offense, or displayed only in ”safe”venues, the real exposure con-
cern was talk. On the streets, there is no such thing as discussing
a drug robbery in confidence. One never knows when, where, or
to whom a story might be repeated. Word travels fast and every-
body is into everybody else’s business. Though bragging may be
functional for enhancing one’s reputation, the risk of exposure is
a prohibitive price to pay. Post-offense silence thus became the or-
der of the day:

It don’t make no sense to brag about it because, see, you

could be bragging and ain’t no telling this [person] might be
somebody’s cousin or relative, anybody, you see what I’m
saying? So therefore you say to yourself, why start bragging
about shit? I’m not gonna get a bunch of motherfuckershere,
“I robbed this bitch you dig, and this, you dig,” and just see
what happened. Her cousin might be there, anybody’s sister,
brother, any motherfucker.- June Bug

Ray Dog agreed, remarking that ”You don’t go around telling

every motherfucker that you [did] that. That’s how you get
114 Managing Retaliation

yourself killed.” Or, as Buck observed, ”Why would I tell on

myself? . . . I go to two or three [offender] funerals every year. . . .
I don’t want to get shot.” Lewis, Slim, and Low Down concluded
similarly:

You don’t put your goodies out in the street to everybody. . . .

Everybody business ain’t everybodybusiness, you know. . . .
Just keep it to yourself, then won’t nobody know what you
did. Only thing he can say, ”Damn, somebody robbed me last
night, man!” That’s it.
There’s nothing to brag about. See, that’s information. You
don’t brag about what you do.. . . Why would I tell these
peoples about my business, what I’m doing? . . . Now, if
somebody else come up to them and tell them, ”Damn, you
know, your partner robbed me last night.” He’ll know for his
self. But telling that there (inaudible),”I knocked this fellow
off last night for about $600, $700, $800 and 15,16 rocks,” you
know. Why would I brag to you about that there?
I don’t brag about it ’cause too many people talk too
much. . . . Nine times out of ten if I keep saying [how I robbed
some dealer], [some] dude probably be like, ”Man, some
[guy] robbed me, I don’t even know who it is.” ”Oh man,”
[another person will say], I know who it is.” . . . ”Man, tell me
who it is.” Stuff like that happens. . . . He’ll probably say ”I’ll
kill your ass; I’m gonna get you.” . . . You just got to be real
careful.

Loose talk also risked having a price put on one’s head-a very
real threat in the snitch-infested world of the streets. To down-
and-out drug users, even small offers of money or drugs can
serve as powerful enticements to tattle. ”Crack dealers . . . will
pay a crackhead to tell [them],you know, where this person [drug
robber] at,” Baby Doll revealed. ”You don’t let anybody know
what you’re doing.” Three Eyes agreed: ”[You tell and] the next
person get jealous or get mad at you, turn you into the dope deal-
er for some money just for the information.”
Managing Retaliation 115

The importance of post-offense silence was rivaled only by the

need for hypervigilance-the near obsessive attention to one’s
surroundings and the behavior of others. Recall that drug robbers
and their victims inhabit the same general social world. Potential
danger lurks around every corner, and no situation-no matter
how innocuous it may seem-is immune from retaliatory signif-
icance (see Katz 1988:221). Vulnerability varies directly with in-
souciance, so it was crucial that drug robbers monitor their
interpersonal field. Many reportedly assessed their surroundings
and the behavior of others with a zeal that bordered on fixation:

You got to watch. I mean you could be inside some store, any-
body walking behind you, you got to be like this here, man.
You got to look around corners, you got to look around
everywhere, you see what I’m saying? I mean, even when I
go to my mom’s house sometimes, I got to walk around
through the back, go around to the backyard, look around in
the yard, see if anybody back there. . . . You stop coming out-
side during the day, you come out at night-time . . . because
during the day they notice you during the day. See, at night
it’s dark. They might see you in a car or something. Then you
change a lot. . . . You got to change your whole personality
towards a lot of things. You got to change your attitude.
-Ray Dog
You got to be cautious, man. It’s a job, man, all day long
wherever you be at, looking behind you. ’Cause one day,
man, some motherfucker gonna get me.. . . You take
$100,000 from a person, take it from him, you think he for-
get? Don’t get me wrong. If they caught me tripping, man, I
don’t be here. If they was able to find out where they could
actually get me or where I lay my head at night, I wouldn’t
be worth a goddamn dime.-Curly

Though such behavior might appear paranoid to the typical

middle-class observer, to drug robbers it made perfect sense.
Retaliation has a long half-life. Chance encounters are always a
possibility., and dire consequences await those who let their guard
116 Managing Retaliation

down. Lying low and altering one’s regular behavior patterns be-
came not only logical, but essential:

I normally go into a shell [after a robbery] . . .weeks at a time.

I do a lot of cooking, cleaning. . . . I’m paranoid. . . . I mean,
I’ll go to the grocery store, I might go to a movie way out in
Chesterfield [a suburb in St. Louis county] somewhere. . . . I
might go to Kansas City and shop for some clothes.. . . I
don’t venture out much. I change cars every six months. . . .
You never know [when someone’s going to come back at
you], you never know.-Buck

Most drug robbers insisted that attending to their environment

could never really be suspended. As the frequency and magni-
tude of their offenses increased, the need for sustained vigilance
rose. ”The more you rob,” Do-dirty expounded, ”you always
gonna run into [victims]because St. Louis is too small. You bound
to run into him. Ain’t no place you hide in the city of St. Louis at
all.” ”I see a lot of people that I done shit to,” Darnell added. ”I
mean I laugh on the inside [but] I always keep my eyes open. My
uncle told me, ’You know you’ve done a lot of wrong to these
guys. Now that you’re getting your life together [getting off hero-
in], you really got to keep your head up. ’Cause there is a time
when all this shit might come back on you and when you are
ready to face it, then face it.”’ YoYo claimed that such prospects
tempered the very attractiveness of drug robbery:

[You]be taking a chance with your life everyday. . . . I mean,

you walking around looking behind your back at every turn,
every move you make, it ain’t that easy, it’s not that easy.
[Drug robbery] sounds good, the money sounds good but it
ain’t that easy and that’s the God honest truth, it’s really not
that easy. When you do dirt, you got to watch your back at
all times ’cause you never know if somebody gonna get
you. . . . One day you can reap what you sow, you reap what
you sow.
Managing Retaliation 117

Decisions about whether, when, or how to return to the actual of-

fense site and contiguous areas underscored the extent to which
hypervigilance constrained the drug robbers’ post-offense move-
ment patterns. Most steered clear of these locations for several
weeks to several months. ”You give it three or four months before
you roll back through there,” Do-dirty insisted. ”And even then,
you don’t be riding in your car. . . . [Dude might see you and] he
might tell his partner, ’Man, that’s the dude that robbed me’ . . .
’That’s the dude that got you?’ And his partners come around the
corner with a pistol and when you look up, they gonna hit you.”
Blackwell claimed to wait a ”good four months” before return-
ing. By then, he argued, ”they probably ain’t worried about it.”
Baby Doll declared that she might never be able to go back to an
area in which she had done a drug robbery. Paradoxically, she rec-
ognized that her crack habit was so powerful that she might have
to go back:

If I can’t find no drugs in the area where I’m hanging out,

shit, I say, ”Oh well,” I got to creep over this way [to a set
where she had robbed]. I got to do a little creeping, you
know. . . .I’ll take a chance.

Indeed, knowing that one had to ”watch out” was not always suf-
ficient to inspire evasive conduct. Given the drug robbers’ street-
focused lifestyle and frequent consumption of hard psychoactive
drugs, their decision-making abilities often were less than sharp.
And blunted judgment is not conducive to discreet behavior.
Baby Doll recounted a revenge robbery in which she targeted a
dealer who had raped her a few months previously. The dealer-
victim sought immediate retaliation, but was not successful. ”He
rolled around looking for us [that night],” she recalled, ”and he
went and got, I guess, a couple of his partners and stuff and they
was on the streets. Shit, I had to stay off the street at least about a
good month, at least around in that area, you know.” Apparent-
ly however, she went back too early-a decision no doubt influ-
enced by her drug-induced state of intoxication:
118 Managing Retaliation

There was one particular time, I was high, tripping, I was

coming down Sarah [Street].I didn’t even think about it [the
prospect of retaliation], you know, when you’re high you
forget about these things. [Her previous victim] pulled over
and he had his little partner with him. . . . He jumped out of
the car, his friend jumped out. I just took off running. I was
running, I was running, running for dear life. . . . So one of
them was riding around and the other one was on foot. So
then his friend, they couldn’t find me, you know.. . . I hid
down in this vacant building in the basement, you know, un-
derneath the steps. . . .I don’t know, somethingjust saved me
but he didn’t catch me. . . . I waited there and it came to me,
I said, I knew it [the drug robbery] would come back on me.

The task of hypervigilance was complicated by the drug robbers’

nomadic ways. Most claimed to never ”lay their heads” in one
place or area for long, ”staying” with kin, friends, girlfriends, and
associates in small intervals of time (see Fleisher 1995:63 for the
semantic distinction between ”stay” and ”live”). ”I’m a floater,”
Slim illustrates. ”I can’t believe in just sitting there and letting
roots grow up under my feet. I like to move, I like to stay on the
go” (see also Maher 1997:41on ”couch people”). In one sense, the
offenders’ free-ranging lifestyles gave them a better chance at
avoiding payback. Mobility allowed them to avoid ”hot” areas
(for example, places where they had committed drug robberies)
and provided greater access to hiding places. To be mobile is to
be elusive in a context where evasiveness is critical to avoiding
retaliation.
Yet mobility carried significant risks of its own. In particular, it
increased the odds of chance encounters. The streets are an ”en-
capsulated social world” that interweaves participants in an ”ex-
pansive web of diffuse relations” (Jacobs 1999133568). Degrees of
separation are few; ”almost every element of the network is
somehow ’close’ to almost every other element, even those that
are perceived as likely to be far away” (Watts 1999:495).Weak ties
predominate and permit substantial bridging between otherwise
discrete social networks (Granovetter 1973).Isomorphic lifestyles
bring offenders and victims together (Lauritsen et al. 1991). The
Managing Retaliation 119

more members of a network there are, and the denser that net-
work is, the more likely run-ins become. The principle of ”ho-
mogamy” predicts that offenders will be the modal vicf im group
when they move in areas that contain a disproportionate share of
others like them (Lauritsen et al. 1991:267-77; see also Hindelang
et al. 1978:256-57). Bus stops, mini-malls, grocery stores, bars,
movie theaters, and fast-food restaurants therefore emerge as
contexts fraught with risk.
Lady Bug thus described running into a past victim at a local
White Castle (fast-food restaurant). She had disguised herself
during the offense, so was able to make a narrow escape. ”This
. . . dude ran up on me,” she recounted, ”pulled a gun, he was
like, ’I remember you!’ [You robbed me!]. I said, ’You don’t even
know me. What’s up?’ ’Oh, I’m sorry,’ [he said], ’I thought you
was this other gal.’ No, I don’t trip off these little punk-ass nig-
gers.” Smoke Dog neglected to cover his face during a previous
drug robbery, with near-disastrous consequences later. ”Dude . . .
rolled down the city, started shooting at me and I started shoot-
ing back, me and my little partner. Started shooting back.” These
gun battles apparently continued well after the robbery. ”We was
going to war,” Smoke Dog declared. ”Every time I see him he
shoot at me, it’s like that, we shoot at each other.” The ”war”
stopped only when Smoke Dog’s antagonist left town, which, of
course, he claimed credit for. ”I guess he got scared or whatever.
. . . I broke him.”
One important and widespread response to the threat of such
encounters was to carry a firearm at all times. Ever-present but
unpredictable risks require a constant state of readiness; surprise
attacks can be neutralized only if one is fully prepared (see Wright
and Rossi 1986). As Curly insisted, ”Never get caught without
[your gun], never. When I get out of the car I got it, man, I don’t
get out of the car without it. Even if I’m getting out of the car to
socialize, man, I got it, man.” Smoke Dog agreed, proclaiming
that ”I always have big magnum [.44] with me. Big magnum is al-
ways with me. . . . I ride dirty every day every day, got to. . . . I’m
strapped up, believe me, I’m strapped up. . . . That big magnum
gonna get busy. That’s a quick loader too, he gonna get busy.” Ray
Dog was more emphatic, insisting that ”You got to sleep with
120 Managing Retaliation

your pistol, you got to eat with your pistol, you got to go to the
bathroom with your pistol, you got to take a shower with your
pistol.. . . Everywhere you go, you got to take your guns with
you.”
Bolstered by the confidence that only an ever-present firearm
can provide, most offenders believed they could handle anything
that came their way:

I’m the type of dude that, when you coming at me, I’m go-
ing back at you, you know. . . . I done put a lot of people to
sleep . . . so hey, I ain’t no joke. I’ll tear a new hole in his ass
just as quick as I’ll tear one in any of these motherfuckers out
here.-Ray Dog
Come with a gun. Come with your army . . . ’cause it gonna
take an army to take me down. . . . You gonna kill me or I’m
gonna kill you. . . . I come to a fight with a big old .45 because
. . . when they see that big old .45 with a nine-inch barrel on
here, they bags up, they bags up.-Do-dirty

Offenders with violent kin and friends were emboldened further

by the knowledge that, even if they could not handle a particular
situation, the slack would be taken up by others:

I got seven brothers, seven brothers and thirteen youngsters,

all of them straight up trigger-finger crazy. . . .Anything that
happen to me, anything that goes down, I tell them where
everything is, tell them where this is, this person did it. . . .
That’s a war, you know, that’s a straight-up war.-Ray Dog
My little partners and them [get] down and dirty. . . . We’re
talking about hurt dudes.-Smoke Dog
If anybody come tripping . . . they [my partners] already
know what’s up. . . . They got my back. . . . If I have any sta-
tic, if any motherfuckers act like they gonna do something to
me, [they get] trigger happy.-YoYa
Managing Retaliation 121

To some extent, comments such as these strain credulity. Street of-

fenders hold each other in low esteem and relationships among
them-even those who call each other ”partner”-hinge on mu-
tual distrust. Solidarity in the traditional sense of the term barely
exists; remember, bonds in this world are premised on a dog-eat-
dog mentality (Dunlap 1991).Would-be avengers might talk big,
but over time nothing really happens (see Anderson 1999:139).It
makes no economic or practical sense to face death or prison to
protect those with whom one only is marginally tied (Fleisher
1998:56). Though some drug robbers seemed to recognize this,
many continued to hold onto the belief that they somehow would
be ”covered” in the event of reprisal. Talk of protection may pro-
vide all the reassurance necessary. Security comes in saying the
words (cf. Fleisher 1995).
In the final analysis, offenders could never really be sure how
effectively their retaliatory threat management strategies would
work, or if they would work at all. The streets are too chaotic and
unpredictable to eradicate the specter of payback. Most resigned
themselves to the notion that if retaliation was in their fate, they
were powerless to do anything about it. Smoke Dog thus declared
that lethal reprisal was ”not something I even worry about. . . . I
just ain’t worried. . . . Forget it.” Ladybug claimed that she ”ain’t
scared to die. . . . If they gonna kill me they gonna kill me, [but]
you better knock me hard.” Baby Doll added that sometimes she
thinks about it, but was ultimately going to accept what was in
her destiny. ”Fuck it, this [drug robbery] is what I do. Whatever
happens, happens. That’s how you got to look at it.” ”I got to die
from something,” J Rock continued. ”You [author] could die from
eating a piece of meat. The gum you [chewing], you could die of
that.” Do-dirty and K-red intellectualized in a similar fashion. ”I
might go home at night and go to sleep and might not even wake
up,” revealed the former. ”If God call me, he call me.” ”They can
kill me, but,” K-red continued, ”but we all gonna die. We all
gonna die pretty soon.. . . We don’t stay on earth forever.”
Though Ray Dog recognized that if his time was up it was up, his
self-perceived invincibility convinced him that he could rise up
Phoenix-like and do more reprising himself:
122 Managing Retaliation

If he got me, he got me. I already got it put in my mind like

that, man; I ain’t fear no death, man, see what I’m saying? I
don’t fear death, I don’t fear dying or nothing, you dig? That
would be just caught me with my pants down. He just caught
me with my pants down. Best man won, that’s all, best man
won. He got me because, hey, if I run up over there and he
talking that [shit] I’ll get him again. I’ll put it down on him
again.

Fatalistic attitudes are enormously liberating for those with so

much to fear. They permit those who express them to shift re-
sponsibility for their destiny onto forces over which they have no
control. Life is short and ”what will be will be,” so why obsess
about potentia2 consequences over which one has no jurisdiction?
(Anderson 1999:136-37; see Miller 1958). Such a stance is pro-
foundly empowering as well. Insofar as an ”I don’t care’’ men-
tality makes drug robbers better able to project fearlessness and
”true nerve”-both during offenses and long after-their repu-
tation as badasses will be enhanced (Anderson 1999). Would-be
antagonists are more likely to recognize that ”messingwith” such
persons is an action that they undertake at prohibitive peril (see
Katz 1988). Inasmuch as retaliation is subsequently inhibited,
drug robbers enjoy an added measure of protection.

DISCUSSION

Criminologists have long focused on how the threat of sanc-

tions influences the behavior of would-be criminals (for example,
Beccaria 1764 [19631; Bentham 1789 [19731). ”Informal” sanction
threats also have attracted considerable attention, with particular
emphasis placed on the role of shame and embarrassment (Black-
well et al. 1994; Grasmick and Bursik 1990; Grasmick et al. 1993;
Paternoster and Simpson 1996). Initially attractive deviant ac-
tions, it is said, become decidedly less appealing when such con-
science-linked variables are factored into the decision-making
process. Some scholarshave gone so far as to suggest that the extra-
Discussion 123

legal consequences of offending may be the ”real deterrent and

that formal punishment is important only insofar as it triggers in-
formal sanctions” (Bishop 1984:405; see also Gibbs 1989; Pater-
noster and Iovanni 1986:769; Tittle 1980:241; Williams 1985:148).
Absent from the analysis is an examination of the ways in
which the risk of victim retaliation-arguably the ultimate infor-
mal sanction-mediates offender decision making. Like shame /
embarrassment, retaliation is an outcome of both extralegal and
moralistic character. Unlike its brethren, retaliation is unique in
its ability to operate exclusively of formal sanctions. Shame and
embarrassment, by contrast, tend to be triggered only after legal
sanctions arise. As such, retaliation is capable of deterrence in its
own right; to be sure, it may be the sole sanction offenders face.
Shame and embarrassment, moreover, have a middle-class bias
that retaliation typically lacks. As affective responses, they tend
to influence only those with substantial stakes in conformity. Of-
fenders in general, and drug robbers in particular, often lack such
stakes and therefore the ”ability” to experience much of either
emotion (see, for example, Tittle 1980).
The potential for retaliation exists in every crime, though some
offenses-like drug robbery-clearly are more conducive to it
than others. The tactics designed to manage this threat are not
unike ”restrictively deterrent” behaviors offenders use to evade
formal sanction threats. The only difference lies in the intended
target (other offenders rather than the police). Perhaps this is
because retaliation as social control more resembles a formal
sanction-in its degree of threatened physical incapacitation,
permanence, and external sourcing-than an informal one. Shame
and guilt, by contrast, are emotions that deter indigeno~sly.~
Though the process of retaliation management may give the
appearance of compartmentalized behavior, it probably is not so
clear-cut. Some tactics will be used in degrees, in specific se-
quences, in concert, or in lieu of others. Others will serve as back-
stops for strategies that are not up to task. The weakest of
within-offense intimidation attempts, for example, can be ”cov-
ered” later by many of the remedial measures explored in this
chapter. If anonymity maintenance fails, hypervigilance offers a
countermeasure. Identity leakage is not nearly so damning if one
124 Managing Retaliation

can muster enough firepower to neutralize emergent threats, or

can avoid those one has robbed. It is plausible that over time, re-
taliatory threat-management tactics might even be suspended al-
together or, at least, applied with less priority. Bolstered by past
success, offenders may believe themselves to be safe from attack.
People in general believe they are unlikely to experience negative
events (Weinstein 1980; see also Horswill and McKenna 1999),
and this belief is especially strong among street criminal^.^ High-
risk situations are redefined as normal or routine (Lejeune
1977:130; see also Paternoster and Piquero 1995 on direct experi-
ences with punishment avoidance). Ultimately, this may cause
targets to be selected with less discretion, offenses to be enacted
with less precision, or hypervigilance to be exercised with less ur-
gency. Fatalism coupled with heavy drinking, hard-drug use, and
fiscal desperation only amplify these tendencies (see also Shover
1996). Given that the risk of retaliation accumulates across of-
fenses, managing retribution may subjectivezy appear less neces-
sary even as it becomes objectivezy more important.
Even if strictly adhered to, the tactics described in this chapter
clearly are not foolproof. Some have a real potential for creating
the opposite of their intended effect. Weapons, for instance, pro-
vide protection but can entice their carriers to (1)lay low for short-
er periods of time, (2) travel to areas that otherwise would be
considered off-limits, or (3) be less vigilant. Moving around in
”strange” areas ensures greater anonymity but may confound a
quick getaway in the event it becomes required (assuming escape
routes are less known). Enlisting others to watch one’s back en-
genders security but exposes one to the hazards of gossip (partic-
ularly given the precarious loyalty and shifting alliances of the
streets). Hypervigilance is functional but also is emotionally
draining. Ultimately, it may be suspended altogether in favor of a
fatalistic, “fuck it” mentality (Walters 1990) that emboldens of-
fenders to commit even more crimes, or leads them to dismiss the
importance of retaliatory threat management in favor of preemp-
tive incapacitation. (For an analogy, see Sherman 1993on the ”de-
fiance effect;” see also Brown et al. 1996 on the psychic costs of
offending.) Both function to increase the offenders’ aggregate risk.
Discussion 125

Undeniably, the retaliatory threat management tactics de-

scribed here have generic importance outside the realm of drug
robbery. They are part and parcel of a more general calculus re-
flected in all forms of victimizing behavior. Discretion and hyper-
vigilance, for example, are analogous to the behavior of any
prudent bank robber or street mugger seeking to elude those who
might seek them out. So are weapons carrying, mobility, and the
enlistment of friends as lookout^."^ The difference is that law-
abiding victims, almost by definition, are unlikely to retaliate.
Typically, they lack the knowledge, skill, and disposition to do so,
as well as the moral conviction to take the law into their own
hands (and thus break it). Formal justice exists to shoulder their
burden. Fortunately for would-be offenders, the same tactics that
discourage retaliation may also reduce the victim’s willingness to
seek official redress.
The point is that law cannot be useful if it is unavailable. Black-
market enterprise by no means monopolizes this condition; analo-
gous instances exist aplenty in the wider society. War, civil unrest,
and natural catastrophes periodically threaten a return to the
Hobbesian state of nature, where informal social control is the
only kind available (see Black 1983), or law might be present but
not granted legitimacy-such as when police are perceived to be
an occupying force, or when formal authority is judged to be
capricious, random, and inequitable (seeAnderson 1999;Sherman
1993). Law might be present but not ”usable”-perhaps because
of status differences or social distance between complainants and
offenders (Horwitz 1990). Law also can be unavailable because
it is ineffectual. We know that the vast majority of offenses go
undetected or unacted upon by police. Temporal gaps between
detection, arrest, and conviction undermine the celerity of punish-
ment. Bungled prosecutions sometimes result in the guilty going
free. As confidence in the system wanes and skepticism rises, the
perceived need to take matters into one’s own hands [Link]-
taliation becomes the only way to bring the swiftness, certainty,
and severity of punishment back into deterrence.
Recent legislative initiatives-harsh prison terms for minor of-
fenses, mandatory minimum sentences, cries for corporal pun-
126 Managing Retaliation

ishrnent (i.e., Singapore-style), and the reinvigoration of capital

punishment-testify to a widespread perception that formal
crime-control mechanisms are too weak and need to be enhanced.
Indeed, many state legislatures have gone so far as to allow or-
dinary citizens to carry concealed weapons, a policy with the
ironic, if unintended, consequence of extending the retaliatory
potential of criminal victims to law-abiding citizens. Behind such
measures lies the notion that the threat of retaliation is a power-
ful deterrent. In this sense, CCW laws may represent an attempt
to formalize informal deterrence.
It remains hard to believe, however, that victims of drug rob-
bery-in the face of tactics designed to thwart retaliation-will
summarily shrug their shoulders and move on. If unilateral sub-
mission is the untenable proposition so many scholars make it out
to be, how the wrong gets "righted" becomes the issue. We know
that violence tends to be exchanged reciprocally (Singer 1986:61).
We also know that the motive behind such exchanges is often
moralistic or normative in nature-a kind of "you got me so I
have to get you back" mentality (see Black 1983).If the tactics de-
scribed in this chapter and elsewhere work as effectively as the
drug robbers suggest, reciprocal exchanges will be stifled. The
better they work, the more unbalanced reciprocity becomes. Un-
able to exact revenge on those who robbed them and eager to
make back losses, victims might be enticed to engage in unfo-
cused retribution-predation displaced onto uninvolved third
parties (see also Sherman 1993 on "indirect defiance").
We know that favorable identities can be retrieved whether or
not vengeance is direct (Melburg and Tedeschi 1989).Researchers
refer to this as redistributivejustice, wherein aggrieved parties re-
store equity by harming someone other than those responsible for
the original injustice ("any member of a particular category [can]
be held responsible for the blameworthy action of another mem-
ber.") (Tedeschi and Felson 1994:366; see also p. 246). The crime-
saturated drug sets in which predatory offenses such as drug
robbery are performed provide testimony to its potential. Such
areas have a readily available group of would-be victims in a dis-
crete space whose lifestyle patterns render them easy and logical
targets (see Lauritsen et al. 1991).This creates ideal conditions for
violence to spiral beyond any given victim-offender dyad.
Discussion 127

The extent to which this dynamic played into the historic lev-
els of systemic instability and violence generated between 1984
and 1991-a major contemporary controversy in criminology-
remains open to [Link] the emergence of crack cocaine
seems to be the primary cause (Blumstein and Rosenfeld 1998),
unfocused "retribution" resulting from drug robberies may well
have had a concomitant effect on the diffusion process. The threat
of retaliation motivates widespread arming. Guns are acquired
by individuals peripherally involved in the conflict. Weapons are
used in an increasingly casual manner (see Blumstein and Rosen-
feld 1998).The ironic consequence is that, while retaliatory threat
management tactics are geared toward impeding violence against
drug robbers at the individual level, their implementation may
create more violence on a systemic level.
Even if we accept the notion that retaliation is more successful
than not and that predation is indeed directly reciprocal, cycles of
violence do not necessarily become less problematic. Retaliation
can very well lead to counter-retaliation,which in turn can spawn
even more violence as increasing numbers of tangentially associ-
ated individuals get drawn in to budding conflicts (see Goldstein
1985).Given that formal social control on the streets is so lacking
in effectiveness, credibility, and deterrent value (see, for example,
Paternoster 1987; Paternoster and Piquero 1995; Sherman 1993),
such diffusion is only to be expected. Indeed, street justice-once
the modal form of dispute resolution-may be especially strong
in this vestigial context because police often perceive such venues
to be undeserving of formal intervention (see Klinger 1997).The
more unstable the context, the more entrenched informal justice
becomes, and the more likely formal authorities will "look the
other way." This, in turn, engenders even greater instability, trig-
gering a self-enclosed cycle of reinforcing behavior (cf. Lemert
1953). Whether such chaos is triggered by the diffusion of vio-
lence outward from some central point of origin (for example, the
original dealer-victim/ drug robber dyad) or from microbursts of
violence exploding across random nodes in the street-level mi-
crostructure (i.e., unfocused predation) ultimately makes little
difference. Undoubtedly, both dynamics are occurring at the
same time, creating the tangled web of predation we see in so
many high-crime urban locales across the country.
128 Managing Retaliation

NOTES

[Link] chapter was adapted from Criminology, 38 (2000):171-98; por-

tions are reprinted here with permission.
2. Tyre11 is a pseudonym constructed to protect Spanky from possible
exposure.
3. Though embarrassment also is externally imposed, it means nothing
unless or until it generates an emotive response within the psyche of
the offender.
4. Langer (1975:311) refers to this as the ”illusion of control,” a phe-
nomenon in which expectancies of ”personal success . . . [are] inap-
propriately higher than the objective analysis would warrant.’’
5. Thanks go to Bob Bursik and an anonymous referee from the journal
Criminology for bringing these points to my attention.
 CHAPTER SIX

Order Beyond
the Law

S OCIAL ORDER - ITS PROBLEMS, prospects, and possibilities

in a world beyond the law-is an implicit theme running
throughout this book. Early on, it was identified as a core
concern. Early on, it also was promised that its broader implica-
tions would be explored. Now it is time to make good on that
promise.
The quest to explain social order is as old as sociology itself. No
system can survive, or survive for long, in its absence. Conven-
tional wisdom holds that order is not possible without cohesion
and there can be no cohesion without social control. Social con-
trol refers broadly to ”all of the human practices and arrange-
ments that contribute to social [stability] and . . . influence people
to conform” (Black 1993:4). Social control can be implicit or ex-
plicit, individualistic or institutional, informal or formal. Styles of
control vary, from repressive and compensatory to conciliatory
and therapeutic. The end goal, however, is invariably the same:
to neutralize deviance, settle conflict, and restore reciprocity. So-
cial stability depends on the efficient resolution of emergent
grievances (see Black 1983; Horwitz 1990; Gouldner 1960).
Law represents social control at its most advanced. Legal
systems tend to evolve in complex societies, where diverse,

129
130 Order Beyond the Law

heterogeneous populations require official methods of conflict

resolution. An intricate matrix of adjudicators, arbitrators, and
mediators develops to absorb disputes that cannot otherwise be
settled. Access to the law is widespread and reasonably democ-
ratic except, of course, for law violators. Offenders are beyond the
law and lose legal protections in times of need. Their disputes
must be resolved informally.
For them, street justice becomes the rule of the day. Retaliation
is used to right perceived wrongs. Order is predicated on violence
and its threat. All encroachments, no matter how minor, must be
reprised. Tolerance equals weakness and weakness invites future
exploitation. Even if outside authorities were available, they can-
not be enlisted. Powerful conduct norms militate against reliance
on ”the man.” Status and security come only by taking care of
one’s own business (Anderson 1999:307-8). To be labeled a snitch
is to lose all hope of respect.
In the outlaw world of the streets, respect is everything. Con-
ventional means of securing it have largely ceased to exist (Wil-
son 1996).Drastic changes in the post-World War I1 economy-
deindustrialization, the widespread loss of high-paying manu-
facturing jobs, and the out-migration of social capital-have left
vast numbers behind with little opportunity and even less hope.
For such unfortunates, respect becomes an ”almost external enti-
ty” that must be seized, protected, and maintained at all costs. Re-
spect rises by putting others down, so everyone’s ”public bearing
must send the unmistakable, if sometimes subtle, message that
one is capable of violence, and possibly mayhem, when the situ-
ation requires.” (Anderson 1999:37,72).
The image one projects is not everything, it is the only thing.
The streets are theater, a caricature of the larger cinematic society
which endorses style over substance (see Denzin 1995).Every en-
counter is fraught with reputational significance. Demeanor and
comportment are vital indicators of one’s essential self, but con-
flicts emerge as the ultimate proving ground. How one reacts un-
der fire provides unobstructed insight into his essential character.
Those who pass muster need not worry about future encroach-
ments, nor need they campaign for regard. They gain it rather by
the ”force of their manner’’ (Anderson 1999:75). True badasses
Order Beyond the Law 131

occupy the apex of street social hierarchies, feared for their ex-
ploitive capabilities yet envied for their insularity from exploita-
tion (see Katz 1988).
Obviously, order predicated on violence is inherently tenuous.
Disputes have a strong tendency to ignite ”conflict spirals”
(Lawler 1986), and conflict spirals threaten systemic breakdown
(Black 1983; Horwitz 1990:132).Each violent act spawns yet more
violence: ”Just when one side may regard the score as settled, be-
cause in its view the other’s suffering matches its own, the other
side is likely to see a huge imbalance calling for [predatory] re-
dress” (Baumeister and Campbell 1999:211).Urban drug markets
provide testimony to their potential. Though formal social con-
trol is not totally absent, its presence can paradoxically make
things worse rather than better. On the streets, the police repre-
sent an alien force with hostile intentions. They are seen as cor-
rupt and arbitrary. They use discretion for nefarious ends. They
are adversaries one wants to avoid-predators with a badge (see
also Anderson 1999;Sherman 1993).Their war mentality and per-
nicious tactics fuel social disorganization and erode informal so-
cial controls. This helps to create a ”jungle” atmosphere that
prompts ordinary people to develop their own brutal brand of
vigilantism (Miller 1996:2,102).
Enforcement strategies only make matters worse. Crackdowns,
sweeps, saturation patrol, covert operations, and the like tear up
existing crime turf and reshuffle it, which promotes additional
chaos (Tidwell 1992). Such tactics also destabilize an already
volatile climate-making drug robbery and associated forms of
predation more, not less, likely. Permit the following elaboration.
Transactional duration and arrest risk are directly related, so
sales must be as speedy as possible. The more rapid the transac-
tion, the more furtive it becomes and the less control one can ex-
ert over its outcome. Hurried dealers tend to focus, and this
chances critical mistakes. Sellers may handle themselves or their
product in less cautious ways, allow buyers to get closer than they
should, or give them unjustified latitude with the merchandise
(see Jacobs 1999a).Seeking insulation from the police, dealers en-
hance their vulnerability to predators. Dark, out-of-the-way sell-
ing locales permit predators to sneak up undetected and to
132 Order Beyond the Law

commit robberies with reduced fear of being seen. Private

dwellings, meanwhile, attract a visible flow of customers to a
dedicated location, which makes dealers easier to spot and target
(see also Jacobs and Miller 1998). Selling off a beeper may offer
greater insularity at first, but regular patterns will soon be dis-
cernible. Mobile dealers are especially unlikely to tote weapons
(for fear of arrest), enhancing their susceptibility further still.
Insofar as the risk of arrest compels sellers to retreat to their
own transactional circles, unfamiliar but needy users will require
middlemen. Hard-core street addicts known to dealers and suffi-
ciently "trusted" by would-be purchasers typically step in to per-
form this service (Furst et al. 1999). Such persons, however, are
entirely untrustworthy-shorting and ripping off those who em-
ploy them (Maher 1997).The same happens after novices fill the
distributional vacuum left by stable first-tier vendors removed by
arrest (see Maher and Dixon 1999:504;see also Curtis 1993).Burns
prompt retaliation and in worlds beyond the law, retaliation ig-
nites counter-retaliation.
Rip-offs and violence obviously are bad for business. Cus-
tomers who fear getting swindled, or getting sucked into a con-
flict spiral, are likely to purchase somewhere else, or perhaps not
at all. Stagnating demand requires sellers to cultivate new buyers
or steal existing ones from other sellers; both require tactics that
increase their likely exposure to risk. If sellers opt instead to add
more dilutant to their product (another widely used strategy to
stabilize profit margins), customers will require more cash to se-
cure the equivalent high. Income-generating crime, the main
source of drug revenue, often rises in response. As systemic in-
stability climbs, so will prices-which are enormously risk-sen-
sitive. Higher prices lure new suppliers, elevating competition
and worsening systemic violence (at least in the short term, be-
fore equilibrating factors come into play; see Riley 1998). If and
when violence spills over into nondrug market sectors, lay citi-
zens are more likely to arm themselves for self-protection;
persons inevitably react "violently to conditions that violate"
(Hamid 1998:172).Routine disputes are more prone to culminate
in lethal violence (see Smith and Uchida 1988),cycling back to in-
spire even more instability.
Order Beyond the Law 133

If we assume that both the absence and presence of law makes

things worse rather than better, and that drug-market violence
drives urban violence in general, the question of order remains.
The effectiveness of the ”code of the street” (Anderson 1999) in
quelling instability is limited at best. Despite those who believe
that the threat of violence-the heart of the code-serves as a
”kind of policing mechanism by encouraging people to trust oth-
ers with a certain respect or . . . face the consequences” (Ander-
son 1999:105), posturing and display work only for so long.
Eventually, one will have to put one’s money where one’s mouth
is. As Gould (1999:376) observes, people may ”try to prevent
[conflict] by asserting, implicitly or explicitly, that they will act
[on their threats, but] the fact is that . . . [they] have to live up to
their claims if these claims are to have any [future] value.” When
words become action, real trouble begins.
Yet how real is this trouble? The street code is ideology; real-
ity is far different. Retaliation may not be as substantial a threat
as the code makes it out to be. The majority of street offenders
are improvident hedonists who seek short-term pleasure to the
exclusion of almost everything else. Tracking down brigands is
difficult, time-consuming work with significant opportunity
costs. The lack of a retaliatory infrastructure makes reprisal a
war that many have neither the resources nor wherewithal to
declare. An appreciable fraction may well treat their victimiza-
tion as a learning experience-one worth the loss if that loss is
small, easily replenished, or if future robberies can be prevent-
ed as a result. Others might chalk the experience up to ”the
game,” recognizing that those who play with fire inevitably get
burned. Still others will diffuse retaliatory responsibility onto
unreliable others (for example, hit men), or refrain from repris-
ing out of fear-particularly if they believe that they might be
reprised first. Retribution is a two-way threat, and victims have
an equally great chance of being victimized again if they seek
revenge, or so the pursued offenders want them to believe. Ray
Dog’s story is illustrative. After robbing a dealer of $5,000 in
cash, $2,500 in jewelry, and a kilo and a half of cocaine (street
value: $30,000 to $60,000), he claimed the victim told him to call
off the dispute:
134 Order Beyond the Law

He said leave it alone because of all the spots he hang out at,
that was number one. I know where he lives at, I know where
he be at, I know what kind of cars he drive, you know, and
getting up on him ain’t no problem cause he like to go out
and party too much so getting up on him ain’t no problem. I
can meet him inside a tavern real quick [and do him before
he does me.] . . . Those guys [are] very intimidated of me be-
cause, I guess, the lifestyle: I carry and they know. . . . Bust-
ing a cat’s head wouldn’t mean shit.

Even if aggrieved parties run into perpetrators unexpectedly,

they may be unarmed, unprepared, or in a setting inappropriate
for retaliation. A small number of reprisals thwarted for any num-
ber of these reasons can prevent significant instability. Remem-
ber, extensive conflict spirals often emerge from singular
disputes. As long as one can talk tough, face need not be lost.

DRUG ROBBERY AS SOCIAL CONTROL

The extent to which drug robbery restricts the growth, expan-

sion, or mere existence of drug markets is a matter of consider-
able interest (see Wright and Decker 1997). Violence is a strong
deterrent to drug-market participation-far stronger, more cer-
tain, and without a doubt, more swift than the equivalent threat
of legal sanctions. Criminologists have indeed recognized that
the driving force behind deterrence is informal sanctions (Bishop
1984). The focus, however, has been on internal psychological
states-shame and embarrassment in particular (as noted in
Chapter 5). The role that other ofenders play in deterring crime
largely has been ignored.
Dealing drugs is attractive because it offers perceptibly high
rewards at acceptable risk. But this hedonistic calculus is fluid.
Instability can inspire offenders to seek safer, more attractive alter-
natives. Desistance and displacement inevitably occur when sys-
temic violence gets bad enough. Some dealers will be lured into
the legal economy, particularly during periods of rapid expan-
Drug Robbery as Social Control 135

sion. Others will switch to nonviolent property crime. More will

do both; the line between legal and illegal work is not a sharp
one, as offenders ”double up” on income sources or transition
between the two (Freeman 1996:14, 16). If displacement into
property crime is sufficiently widespread, surpluses in stolen
goods will induce downward price pressures on merchandise
bartered for drugs, which ultimately suppresses demand. Less
money for drugs translates into less time in risky places among
volatile people, and less opportunity for violence to feed off prop-
erty crimes-unintended, but real, benefits (see Felson 1997; also
Jacobs 1999a:126). Of course, the attraction of seizing cash and
drugs will likely rise in return, inspiring concomitant increases in
(drug) robbery. Insofar as personal and vicarious experience with
violence rises as well, desistance and decline among existing mar-
ket participants will accelerate. Would-be entrants will be in-
creasingly reticent to join the fray.
Though sellers old and new may react by making themselves
harder targets, drug robberies now are more likely to become
homicides; predators realize the best way to neutralize armed
and recalcitrant targets is to use lethal force. Less fearsome adap-
tations are not necessarily better for drug-market vitality. Carry-
ing smaller amounts of contraband on one’s person (to lower the
odds of high-magnitude heists), decreasing the quality of the
product one sells, or reducing one’s accessibility to customers
each can diminish it: Demand and search time are inversely cor-
related; use goes down when drug buying becomes a hassle (see
Moore 1977). Extended search time also translates into height-
ened exposure to formal sanction risks, raising the odds of cus-
tomer incapacitation (many of whom have outstanding arrest
warrants). If purchase attempts become more frequent (because
bulk quantities are less available), aggregate risks of incapacita-
tion will climb further still (Hamid 1998:107). Would-be buyers
will find it increasingly difficult to secure small, reliable, and in-
expensive quantities-siphoning off a potential source of future
demand (see, for example, Reuter and Kleiman 1986).Since users
often become dealers (to finance their consumption), fewer users
ultimately mean fewer dealers-introducing greater upward
price pressures on retail quantities. The smaller the market, the
136 Order Beyond the Law

more susceptible it becomes to formal social control (Rengert

1996);even the best protected and most sophisticated distributors
cannot stay insulated for long (Hamid 1998:105).Wholesale drug
market implosion may be a tipping point away.
Though possible, all of this is speculation and ignores the fact
that drug-market organization is not static. Distributors migrate
to safer areas. They become less visible and more insular. They re-
treat and come back when stability returns. They become more
organized as well. As a precondition for survival, freelancers
form loose confederationsand, ultimately, ”vertical business” op-
erations characterized by pooled interdependence, hierarchical
differentiation, and well-defined employer-employee relation-
ships (see Johnson et al. 1992).Labor is broken down into more
precise duties. Runners, steerers, holders, stashers, lookouts, and
enforcers perform functions once enacted by solitary individuals.
With organization comes control, and with control comes stabili-
ty. Increasingly, participants find methods to settle disputes that
need not involve lethal aggression (Blumstein 1995:12).Transac-
tional security rises. Markets reattain equilibrium. The flow of
lost demand is stanched. ”Professionalized” distribution may
cause markets to endure longer and in more meaningful forms
than they otherwise would (see Dorn and South 1990).
But this speculation ignores the cultural ethos of the street cor-
ner, an ethos that renders subservienceof any kind unacceptable.
Resentment of authority and external control is a hallmark trait
for those seeking to avoid emotional confinement at all costs (see
Fleisher 1998:145).Freedom from subordination and the ability to
do what one wants, when one wants to do it, are essential for
those whose lives are defined by marginalization (Jacobs 1999a).
Yes, drug selling is profitable, entry is easy, and opportunities are
abundant (Akerstrom 1985), but the real allure of ”slinging” is
autonomy (Bourgois 1995).Dealers can work as little or as much
as they want. There are no preassigned duties. There is no boss to
answer to. The only obligations one must meet are those one sets,
and even these are not requisite. Rewards can be disposed of in
whatever fashion one wishes. And selling drugs provides a sense
of personal mastery and accomplishment available in few other
realistically available vocations. Vertically organized business
Drug Robbey as Social Control 137

models threaten all of this, empowering structures at the expense

of individual agency. Interdependence may enhance security but
at a prohibitive cost for those who believe they should never be
under anyone else’s thumb. (On the role of autonomy in human
motivation, see Deci and Ryan 1985.)
Street offenders tend to believe in their own invincibility any-
way. This has a powerful tendency to undermine the (perceived)
need for protection; ”someone’s going to ’get got,’ it just won’t be
me,” the thinking goes. Even those who recognize their innate
vulnerability may not be prepared to do anything about it. A
strong sense of fatalism renders the future a matter of luck and
for them, no amount of planning or organization will stave off the
inevitable (Walters 1990). There is also the question of whether
collective organization really is safer. Hierarchical models devel-
op in later evolutionary stages of drug markets, where workers
must be recruited from the most desperate ranks of available em-
ployees. With precarious loyalty and unchecked greed, such per-
sons are prone to snitching and theft (see Denton and O’Malley
1999). Indeed, the vast majority of police informants are low-
level drug users who supplement their income by tattling (see
Collison 1995); as double agents, they take every opportunity to
skim drugs from their suppliers or run off with the money. The
only defense for dealers is ”eternal vigilance, paradoxical dis-
trust, and careful assignment” (Denton and O’Malley 1999:525)-
pitifully inadequate measures, to say the least. Hierarchization
may be a good idea in theory but may produce the opposite of its
intended effect in practice (see Miller 1996).
Relying on natural checks and the self-limiting tendencies of
drug markets is inherently unsettling for those who believe the
only way to establish control is through tough, external measures.
The billions of dollars spent on suppression, interdiction, and in-
carceration attest to the persisting notion that only officialdom
can stop the scourge of drugs. But is this notion valid? Thousands
upon thousands of drug-market participants have been incapac-
itated only to be replaced by thousands more. Scores of high-
intensity drug trafficking areas have been squashed, only to
be supplanted by new ones. Drug markets, as Dorn and Murji
(1992:170) note, are very much like a ”squishy balloon: apply
138 Order Beyond the Law

pressure to them in one place and there will be some diminution

of the problem, yet it is likely that the market will balloon out in
another place or an adjacent site, involving new and possibly
more cautious or sophisticated dealers and perhaps a different
range of drugs.” Displacement and its consequences are not un-
like ”throwing water on an oil fire” (Rengert 1996%).And when
markets are sufficiently large, they can absorb formal social con-
trol initiatives without suffering any damage: the enforcement
risk in completing any one transaction falls as police resources are
spread across numerous sites (Rengert 1996:87, 124). Strategies
such as going after ”Mr. Big”-trying to behead large-scale deal-
ing operations by going after their leaders-don’t work either.
They result in new, more complex, and more insular leadership
structures even more resistant to interdiction (see Hamid 1998;
see also DEA 1997; Rengert 1996).
The point is that drug markets and the predatory behavior they
spawn decline first and foremost from within; order inevitably
emerges not from external pressure but from an equilibrium that
obtains internally (Gasset in McWilliams 1996). Crack, whose
growing stigma has whisked demand right from beneath it, has
proved this convincingly. Declines in consumption and con-
sumption-related violence have occurred, in large measure, in-
dependently of governmental support and interference. Rather
than capitalizing on these self-moderating tendencies, policy
makers continue to institute draconian measures, ”beefing up
drug squads and incarcerating people at unprecedented rates for
increasingly petty . . . charges” (Curtis 1999:20). Though such
measures may accelerate the process of decline in the short term,
in the long run they entrench the culture of opposition that allows
drug markets to thrive. As social disorganization worsens, the de-
coupling of formal and informal social control will likely become
irreparable and the predatory street crime this helps to inspire
that much more intractable.
Lasting improvement can be achieved only if policymakers
harness the power of informal social control and use it synergis-
tically with formal methods. The challenge becomes one of ad-
justing the ”control mix so as to push [illicit] markets in the least
undesired direction” (Dorn and South 1990:186).Such a task ob-
Drug Robbey as Social Control 139

viously is easier said than done. Once the control fabric of a com-
munity has been destroyed, it becomes extraordinarilydifficult to
rejuvenate (see Sampson et al. 1997).Deterioration takes on a life
of its own, a "centrifugal force" that triggers a vicious cycle of de-
cay, marginalization, and further decay (see Sampson et al. 1999).
Joblessness, dependency, and alienation mount exponentially.
Frustration and indignation become pervasive. There is little op-
portunity and even less hope. Neighborhoods become a "stark
tableau of pathology and vice." Citizens traverse them in fear and
paranoia (Stansell1982:321;see Rengert 1996:111on the "bunker
mentality"). Street life emerges as the only realistic alternative,
street justice the only viable way to handle its vicissitudes.

CRIME BEYOND THE LAW

Drug robbery is the quintessential offense beyond the law, but

scholars often underestimate just how much normal crime actu-
ally is as well. Most disputes and conflicts never reach the formal
justice system (Black 1983). Those that do "are withdrawn or
abandoned before coming to a formal resolution" (Horwitz 1990:
99). An equivalent percentage of crimes of all types goes unde-
tected or ignored by official authorities. Some suggest that the
risk of arrest may be as low as one in 11,000, though clearly, this
varies by the crime type (see Maher and Dixon 1999). What is
clear is that apprehension is mostly a function of being at the
wrong place at the wrong time.
The police are reactive and rarely around when offenses occur.
Their response time is sufficiently slow to thwart meaningful ac-
tion when they do arrive. And offenders engage in a wide array
of tactics to inhibit the ability of authorities to detect them. The
more experienced the offender, the more skilled s/he is at doing
this (see Jacobs 1996a and b on restrictive deterrence; Weaver and
Carroll 1985).
Even if law violators are caught, incarceration is likely to
be brief. Prison is even welcomed by some as a respite from the
dog-eat-dog world of the streets (Fleisher 1995). For others, jail
140 Order Beyond the Law

functions as a crime school, offering enhanced criminal capital

and greater knowledge of how to do more crimes better once one
gets out. Growing recidivism rates spawn greater police apathy
and even lower detection rates in the future: why, police officers
say to themselves, should they risk life and limb to catch crimi-
nals who will go right back out on the streets, rested, nourished,
and with more skills than they had going in? (cf. Bowling
1999:538).
For police to be effective, they must also be called; social con-
trol agents typically do not generate their own cases (Horwitz
1990:99).Yet victims often remain silent. Vast numbers of crimes,
even index crimes, go unreported for a multitude of reasons (see
BJS 1993; Ennis 1967).Some offenses are so angering or humiliat-
ing that nothing short of personal vengeance will do. Others lack
enough evidence or are too insignificant to justify calling the au-
thorities (see Laub 1997). Still others trigger an intense need for
formal intervention that rapidly [Link] more transpire be-
tween people who know one another (see Wolfgang 1958),and it
is ”a general principle of social life . . . that one should not intro-
duce exterior power into private domains” (Horwitz 1990:104).
This proscription rises with the intimacy of disputants (Black
1983). Not surprisingly, self-help is most common in homoge-
neous cultures where relational distances are short.
Even in advanced societies, however, self-help ”flourishes and
most of it involves ordinary citizens who seemingly view their
conduct as a perfectly legitimate exercise of social control” (Black
1993:36).Though crime victims may be portrayed as ”helpless ob-
jects of [predatory] intent who have no option” except to alert for-
mal authorities (Ziegenhagen and Brosnan 1985:676), this most
assuredly is not the case. Indeed, the bulk of social control is met-
ed out informally, and many of these actions actually are criminal
in nature. Robbery, murder, theft, arson, vandalism, and even
rape are common moralistic responses designed to ”right” past
wrongs (Black 1983).Such moralism should not be surprising in
light of the existing criminal justice system, a system ostensibly
based on deterrence yet one whose deterrent power is so weak.
Policy makers have attempted an end-run around this problem
by ratcheting up the severity of punishments and by extending
Crime Beyond the Law 141

punishments to previously unsanctioned behavior, but scare tac-

tics intended to legislate conformity are doomed to fail. Certain-
ty of punishment, not severity, is the key and the certainty
remains quite low (see Tittle 1980).Uncaught, unpunished viola-
tors must be brought to justice; self-help emerges as the most log-
ical, or available, response.
And then, finally, there are the seductions of crime and street
life that contribute to persistent offending and may overcome
even potent forms of informal and formal social control. Drug
robbery has the makings of a perfect crime. Dealers are walking
banks. They are accessible, visible, plentiful, and often unarmed.
Many are targets of their own making-flossing, bragging, or
otherwise calling attention to themselves. Others are identified
through gossip or inside information. The urban topography pro-
vides numerous staging areas from which to attack them. Rob-
beries also can be melded with purchases, allowing perpetrators
to capitalize on the element of surprise. Compliance is secured
rapidly and at acceptable risk. Bystanders are reluctant to inter-
vene; on the streets, no one wants to get involved in someone
else’s troubles. The threat of retaliation is real but can be reduced
to tolerable levels. And dealers obviously cannot go to the police
to report their victimization.
Not surprisingly, most drug robbers had no plans to stop com-
mitting their crimes any time soon. Though some talked about
securing big scores and laying off, such talk seemed less than
genuine. The scores from drug robbery are big. But they are
burned almost as rapidly as they are seized. Additional robberies
provide a solution, albeit a temporary one. Freshly obtained rev-
enues facilitate further consumption, inspiring a feedback loop in
which at least some drug robbers chronically create the condi-
tions that drive them to their next crime (see also Wright and
Decker 1994; 1997).Whether these offenders do this deliberately
is open to question. The point is moot, as they are under frequent
and considerable pressure to generate funds. Drug robbery pro-
vides the most ”proximate and performable” solution to their
problem (Jacobs and Wright 1999; Lofland 1969).
Self-defeating behavior of this sort is remarkable only to the
most naive middle-class observer. The streets are a circumscribed
142 Order Beyond the Law

social world that place extraordinary emphasis on sensory stim-

ulation. The pursuit of illicit action takes precedence over every-
thing else. Hedonism is king. Money exists to be burned. There is
no honor in asceticism; delayed pleasure is for chumps. ”Ratio-
nality and long-range planning [are dismissed] . . . in favor of en-
joying the moment” (Shover and Honaker 1992:283). Living fast
and loose is more than symbolic or dramaturgical, it cuts to the
core of how identities are constructed and perceived. To be hip
and ”in,” one must prove it on a continuous basis. Those able to
keep the party going move closer to membership in the mythic
”aristocracy of the streets” (Wright and Decker 1997).Those able
to do so at someone else’s expense ascend to the loftiest of sta-
tuses, even more so when their victims are other criminals.
It is hard to imagine these offenders could ever be absorbed
meaningfully into the legitimate world. If absorption were going
to occur, it probably would have already done so. Year 2000, and
the seven years preceding it, marked a period of unprecedented
economic growth in the nation’s annals (see Stetkiewitz 1998).
America currently enjoys one of the most robust economies in the
history of modern western civilization. Unemployment is at or
near all-time lows (United States Department of Labor 1998).Real
wages are climbing. Inflation remains in check. Positions in the
legal labor market are opening at unparalleled rates. Employers
are suspending previously important eligibility requirements in
favor of filling empty posts. Persons once thought to be un-
employable are being welcomed with hesitant, but necessarily
open, arms (see also Jacobs 1999a).
Yet few of these drug robbers were, or had any intentions of,
capitalizing. Jobs, with their requisite subordination, obedience,
responsibility, and gratification delay, are antithetical to every-
thing they stand for. ”Misfits in a world that values precise sched-
ules, punctuality, and disciplined subordination to authority,
[street criminals] value the autonomy to structure life and work
as they wish” (Shover 1991:92).It is unlikely that a ”job” would
do them much long-term good anyway. Meaningful life change
can occur only after the prudent accumulation of social capital-
relationships with persons in positions of power and influence
(for example, employers, teachers, and ministers; see Coleman
Crime Beyond the Law 143

1990). ”Vertical” relationships (Reingold 1999)don’t simply hap-

pen. They must be cultivated, often in fits and starts, over peri-
ods of time. This requires effort and a good deal of patience (even
more so in the presence of chronic structural barriers), attributes
in short supply for those accustomed to going with the flow.
There is no mileage to be gained by committing to a course of ac-
tion that is likely to bring tangible, though non-immediate, re-
wards (see Shover 1996). Status is something to be seized now.
People exist to be duped and exploited, not courted. Street capi-
tal is what counts and nothing else. Intimidation, deception, and
violence are tools to secure it. To approach life any other way is
to sell out. On the streets, there are few worse fates (see Ander-
son 1999).
As another possible source of restraint, guilt had long ago
ceased to hold any sway over these offenders. ”Pangs of con-
science” rarely arose and were promptly dismissed when they
did (see also Wright and Decker 1994).Drug robbers had a job to
do and a lifestyle to maintain and moral concerns surely were not
going to get in their way. ”I ain’t gonna be feeling any bothers,”
Slim insisted. ”When you out there doing your business you can’t
be putting no feelings [into it].” ”I don’t have no pain,” Ray Dog
echoed, ”no pain, no shame, no gain, I don’t feel no pity.” Or as
Lil’ Player asked rhetorically, ”What I’m gonna do something for
and then gonna feel [bad] about it?” Most had convinced them-
selves that their victims were the real bad guys anyway, and thus
merited no sympathy. Drug dealers (the claim went) were leech-
es that sucked the lifeblood from otherwise vibrant individuals
and communities; people who do bad things deserve it when bad
things happen to them (see Bandura 1999; Feather 1992; Lupfer
and Gingrich 1999).Robbing them was justified action, a Robin
Hood-like service for the hopeless, downtrodden, and exploited.
The fact that drug robbers would turn around and consume or
sell the illicit loot for their own pleasure was a hypocrisy they
conveniently ignored, however (see also Peterson 1999).
Though a few respondents recognized that drug robbery was
not something they could do forever-some had children and
wanted to lead more stable lives, others witnessed the slaying of
associates which prompted them to recognize their own mortali-
144 Order Beyond the Law

ty-most insisted they would continue committing these crimes

indefinitely. ”I can’t be stopped,” K-red declared. ”Lay me down,
kill me, then I be stopped but as long as my heart keep on going,
I’ll keep on [doing them].” June Bug proclaimed that ”There is
nothing in the world that would stop me from doing it. I’m gonna
do this until the day I die.” Smoke Dog pronounced that robbery
was in his blood and that he was ”always gonna [do it].”
Even if alternatives were available, it is unlikely they would be
recognized. Menacing, volatile losers caught in the grips of street
life are notorious for one-track thinking. Each successive offense
brings only greater encapsulation. The focus on rewards becomes
singular; ”deactivation”is decreasingly likely (Heckhausen 2000).
Caution becomes more and more expendable and deliberation
gives way to impulsive action. The specter of resistance and re-
taliation is increasingly shunted out of mind. Objectively greater
risks are taken, even as they are dismissed as ”remote and im-
probable contingencies” (Shover, 1996:102; see also Pirolli and
Card 1999:670). The long-term prognosis for these offenders ap-
pears anything but healthy.
Policy makers will be hard-pressed to develop viable strategies
for dealing with such incorrigibles. Targeted interventions-
from intensive counseling to cognitive therapy to behavioral
modification-are not likely to be of much value. People cannot
be convinced to change because it’s in their best interest, because
they’ll derive long-term benefits, or because it’s the ”right thing
to do.” Enduring transformation comes only after the realization
that one’s life is no longer manageable (and sometimes not even
then). This requires sensitivity, awareness, and a willingness to do
things differently. Such qualities are painfully scarce for most of
the offenders in this sample.
What policy makers really are up against is a lifestyle, as en-
trenched as it is intractable, forged from a noxious combination
of low self-control, desperation, and cultural imperative. Inca-
pacitation may be the only realistic solution, but one likely to last
only as long as the jail sentence; hardened further by prison life,
offenders are likely to be only worse after they get out. The larg-
er question of how to reintegrate those who have never been in-
tegrated in the first place may, in many ways, be unanswerable.
Crime Beyond the Law 145

This is not to say that offenders are immune from policies de-
signed to influence their behavior. The robbers interviewed here
targeted drug dealers, at least in part, because the authorities had
clamped down so systematically on ”normal crime.” The point
may be moot, as a society that refuses to address the underlying
cultural and structural forces that give rise to predatory street of-
fending is doomed to perpetuate the conditions that produce fu-
ture generations of intractable criminals.
Arguably, the only sure way to eradicate drug robbery is to dry
up its opportunity structure, either by legalizing drugs (thus wip-
ing out their black-market value) or by converting wholesale to
cashless exchange (see Wright and Decker 1997 on the ”cashless
society”). Neither is likely to happen any time soon. Even if both
or either did, the incorrigible inevitably will adapt, finding new
and innovative ways to exploit others for material gain. Deviance
and social control, as Ryan (1994)notes, are dialectical processes;
each side responds to the other in an endless cycle of evolution.
Paradoxically, society may unconsciously yearn for drug dealers
to remain viable victims; their presence provides an undeniable
safety valve for the rest of us. Their functional importance is only
likely to increase as law-abiding citizens become harder, less lu-
crative targets and as the spiral of desperation in which persistent
offenders find themselves locked gets tighter and tighter.
This page intentionally left blank
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 Index

accomplices, 56-58,82-86,108,120-121 Black, D., 33,43,111,112,125,126,129,

Adams, J., 17 131,139,140
Adler, Patricia, 9/43 Blackwell, B., 122
advantages of drug robbery 23/25-26, Blumstein, A., 2,6,127,136
36-37/96-97! 135 blunts, 80
Agar, M., 9/10 bounded rationality, 47-48,69,
Akerstrom, M., 136 Bourgois, P., 30,33,49,65,136
Alex, N., 75/78/93 Bowling, B., 140
alleys, 74 Brantingham, Patricia, 58,59
Anderson, E., 1,29,30,34,65,66,107, Brantingham, Paul, 58/59
112,121,122,125,130,131,133,143 Brehm, J.W., 93
announcing the offense, 83/86-92 Brehm, S.S., 93
anonymity, 112,123,124 Brosnan, D., 140
appeal of drug dealing, 136 Brown, S., 124
approach strategies, 52-54/74-77! 79 Brownstein, H., 2,5,6
Arkes, H., 38,69,107 Bureau of Justice Statistics, 140
Ayton, P., 38,69,107 burglary, 27,40
Bursik, B. "Skippy," 122
Ball, J., 4, 19 buys-turned-ambush, 78-86
Bandura, A., 34,43,143
Barreca, R., 111 CBS News, 45
Baumeister, R., 34,131 Campbell, A., 35/42
Beccaria, C., 122 Campbell, W.K., 34,131
Bennett, T., 47/69 Card, S., 48,60,62,144
Bentham, J., 122 Carpenter, S., 16
Berk, R., 17 Carroll, J., 68,139
Berkowitz, L., 88 Cesar, 7
Biernacki, P., 11 Clarke, R., 69
Bishop, D., 123,134 code of honor, 84

163
 Index

code of the street, 133 familiar targets, 54-59

Coleman, J., 142 Farrington, D., 18
Collison, M., 137 fatalism, 121-122,137
contagions of violence, 2,4,126-127,131 Feather, N., 37,143
Cook, P., 2,50,73,89 Federal Bureau of Investigation, 8
Cornish, D., 69 Feeney, F., 2,5,27,58,63,68
Craig, K., 111 Felson, M., 41,45,47, 107,135
creeping, 74,76, Felson, R., 2,33,34,43,51,87,95,107,
Cressey, D., 10 108,126
crine as social control, 32-33,111,140 field recruiters, 11-13; 18-19
crime beyond the law, 139-145 Fields, A., 67
crime displacement, 134-135 Fleisher, M., 9,20,42,70,91, 118,121,
Cromwell, P., 68,83 136,139
Curtis, R., 6,70,132,138 flossing, 65-67,70-71
Forgas, J., 32
Daly, K., 30,107 Freeman, R., 135
Dedci, E., 137 Furst, T., 132
Decker, S., 2,3,4,5,8,10,14,16, 17, 18,
20,24,27,28,31,42,48,59,63,65, Gabor, T., 2,42,97
66,71,74,78,82,84,103,104,106, Gervitz, L. 7
107,108,109,113, 134,142,143,145 Gibbs, J., 123
decoys, 82 Gingrich, B., 143
Denton, B., 137 Glassner, B., 16
Denzin, N., 130 Goffman, E.,34
Dietz, M., 63,82 Goldstein, P., 4,5,67,127
Dirks, K.,86 Golub, A., 6,7,9
discretion, 112- 113,117 goods-transfer, 97-105
disguises, 109 nl, 112,119 Gould, L., 67
Dixon, D., 132,139 Gould, R., 133
Dodge, K., 107,108 Gouldner, A., 111,129
Dorn, N., 136,137,138 Granovetter, M., 54,118
drive-thru service, 80-81 Grasmick, H.,122
Drug Abuse Warning Network greed, 86,104-105
(DAWN), 8 Groves, W.B., 44
drugs and crime, 4-6 guilt, 143
drug dealers guns, 30-31,49-50,67,75,85,89-92,
density of, 48-49; as robbery targets, 119-120
1-2,25,47
Drug Enforcement Agency, 57,138 Hackney, S., 8
drug markets, 5-7,71,134,136,138 Hamid, A., 6,62,65,80,132,135,136,138
drug robbery as moralistic action, 32- Heckathorn, D., 17
41,43 Heckhausen, J., 144
drug robbery as social control, 134-139 Heimer, C., 43
Drug Use Forecasting (DUF), 7,31 Henslin, J., 15
Duffy, M., 65 hesitation,93-94
Dunlap, E., 121 Hindelang, M., 119
hit men, 56,
Eisenberger, R., 96 homicide, 40,97,108,109
Eisenhardt, K., 69 Honaker, D.,142
Elliot, D., 19 Horswill, M., 124
ending the offense, 105 Horwitz, A., 111,125,129, 131,139,140
Ennis, P., 140 Hughes, P., 5
Index 165

Huizinga, D., 19 Matza, D., 4/43

Hull, J.G., 108 McKenna, E, 124
hypervigilance, 115-118,124,125 McSweeney, E, 42,75
McWilliams, P., 138
immobilizing victims, 98 Melburg, V., 126
Lnciardi, J., 5,6,79 Mellers, B., 67
interviews, 13-15 Merry, S., 59
intimidation, 87-8/94! 106,112,123 Messner, S., 43
Iovanni, L., 123 Mieczkowski, T., 20
Irwin, J., 9 Mihalopoulos, A., 7
Isenberg, D., 69 Miller, Jerome, 131,137
Miller, Jody, 21,132
Jacobs, J., 61 Miller, W., 122
Jansen, R., 76 Mills, C.W., 43
Johnson, B., 5,6,7,9,30,70,112,136 mobility of drug robbers, 118-119
Johnson, E., 69 Moessinger, P., 107
Jones, E.E., 107 Moore, M., 135
Murji, K., 137
Kahneman, D., 107
Katz, J., 2,42,43,44,53,55,63,85,87,88, Newman, G., 111
97/98! 107,108,115,122,131 Newman, J.P., 107,108
Khatri, N., 68,69 Ng, H., 68
Kingery, P., 5 Nurco, D., 4
Kirby, K., 28
Kirschenbaum, S., 69 Office of National Drug Control Policy, 7
Kleiman, M., 135 O’Malley, P., 137
Kleinmutz, B., 68 opportunistic robberies, 62-68
Klinger, D., 108,127
Koester, S., 27 Parrot, W., 66
Kroese, G., 97 Paternoster, R., 122,123,124,127
Payne, J., 69
Langer, E.J., 128 Pennell, S., 31
Laub, J., 140 Peterson, E., 43,143
Lauritsen, J., 118, 119, 126 Pettiway, L., 2,63
lawful employment, 27-28,41,142 Piquero, A., 124,127
Lawler, E., 131 Pirolli, P., 48, 60, 62, 144
Lejeune, A., 50,75,78,83,88,93,95,124 Pittman, D., 107
Lemert, E., 127 planning, 68
Letkemann, P., 17 police, 49-50,74,76-77,125,131-132,
Lex, B., 9 139-140
Lidz, C., 11 Polsky, N., 10
Liska, A., 29 post-offense silence, 113-115
Lizotte, A., 31 Potenza, M., 61
Lofland, J., 141 pre-offense partying, 88-89
Luckenbill, 74,87,93,106,108 Prietula, M.J., 68,69
Lupfer, M., 143 Prus, R., 20
Lynch, M., 44
qualitative methods, 9-10
Macleod, J., 44
Maher, L., 5,6,16,20,27,30,70,107,112, rational choice theory, 3,47,54-55/61,
118,132,139 62,68-70
Marongiu, P, 111 Raudenbush, S., 16
 Index

redistributive justice, 126 surveillance, 60-62/75-76

Reidel, M., 26,43,56,74,83,106,107 Sutherland, E., 10
Reingold, D., 143 Swindell, S., 42/75
Rengert, G., 136,138,139 Sykes, G., 43
resistance, 73,102-103,107 systemic instability, 131-133,134
retaliation, 29-30,34,38-41,58,108,
109,115,123-127,130,133 tactical errors by dealer-victims, 100-
Reuter, P., 7, 135 101
Riley, J., 5,6,132 Takahashi, N., 41
risk, 75,104,124 Tedeschi, J., 2,33,34,87,95,107,126
Rosenfeld, R., 6,8,127 Tidwell, M., 131
Rossi, P., 119 Tittle, C., 123,141
Ryan, K., 145 Toch, H., 97,108
Ryan, R., 137 Todd, P., 69
Topalli, V., 19/21
Sampson, R., 16,139 Tunnell, K., 5
sanction threats, 28-32/41! 108,122, Tversky, A., 107
125-126,136,140-141
Schwartz, J., 27 Uchida, C., 132
search time, 135 United States Department of Labor,
Shaffer, J., 4 142
Shaw, J., 65
Sherman, L., 124,125,126,127,131 validity, 15-20
Shover, N., 2,5,23,44,67, 73, 77/84! 124, van Koppen, P., 76
142,143,144 Van Maanen, J., 16
Siegel, R., 24 Van Winkle, B., 31
Simon, H.A., 68/69 victim response during robbery, 92-97
Simpson, S., 122
Singer, S., 126 Waldorf, D., 11
Skolnick, J., 67 Walker, A., 11
Sluka, J., 10 Walters, G., 124,137
Smith, D., 132 Walters, J., 67
Smith, R., 66 Warner, B., 29
snitching, 83-84 Watts, D., 118
snowball sampling, 11-12 Weaver, E, 68,139
social capital, 142-143 Weinstein, N., 124
social control, 129, 131,137, 145 West, D.J., 18
social order, 129,133 Williams, E, 123
South, N., 136,138 Wills, T., 36
Southwick, L., 108 Wilson, W., 8
Spreen, M., 9 Wolfgang, M., 55,140
Stansell, C., 139 Wright, J., 119
Staring, R., 97 Wright, R., 2,3,4,5,10,14, 16,17,18, 19,
stashes, 99-103,114 20,21,23,27,28,42,48,59,63,65,
Steele, C., 108 66,69,71,74,78,82,84,103,104,
Stein, M., 21 106,107, 108,109,113,134,141,142,
Stetkiewitz, C., 142 143,145
St. Louis:
as research setting, 7-9 Ziegenhagen, E., 140
street life, 63,67,144 Zimbardo, P., 108
street status, 42,44,65,73,107-108, 109, Zimring, E, 97
130-131 Zuehl, J., 97