Word: cracking
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What the young recruits found was not what they had been promised. At the height of their empire, the Chambers gang controlled about half of Detroit's crack trade, running 200 drug houses, supplying some 500 more and raking in $3 million a week. The key to their success was the supply of green kids from Marianna, who were subjected to a regimen far more harrowing than Marine boot camp...
...young men who became runners, couriers and dealers were threatened and abused. The trick in the crack trade, police say, is to keep people in line. If the Chamberses' recruits tried to flee, the brothers knew where to find them. "A Chicago kid might be able to leave, but not a kid from Marianna," says the town's police chief, Mark Birchler...
Youths caught sampling the cocaine were roughed up. The punishment for stealing could be permanent: one Marianna boy returned with mangled fingers. To exact obedience, the brothers sometimes deliberately shorted the boys on the crack that was parceled out for them to sell. When the receipts came up short, the boys were forced to work off their shortages, which kept them in bondage for months at a time. "They ran everything on fear and intimidation," says Birchler...
Last October the Government ordered a close inspection of the upper-fuselage skin on all vintage Boeing 737s because the metal had begun to crack on several of these aircraft. Although such a connection is speculative at the moment, Aloha Airlines has temporarily grounded its other three high-time 737s...
...Rancho San Pedro Housing Project in East Los Angeles, Frog is a cocky prince of the barrio. His mane of lustrous jeri curls, his freckled nose and innocent brown eyes belie his prodigious street smarts. Frog is happy to tell you that he rakes in $200 a week selling crack, known as rock in Los Angeles. He proudly advertises his fledgling membership in an ultra-violent street gang, the Crips. And he brags that he has used his drug money to rent a Nissan Z on weekends. He has not yet learned how to use a stick shift, however...