Profile of a Drug Dealer

By: Alana B. Elias Kornfeld

 

Rob Smith*, a 20-year-old psychology major at Hofstra University, missed his first two interviews for this story.

           

At the time of the first meeting, Smith, a drug dealer, was chained to a table in jail for DWI.  After missing the second meeting, he could not be contacted because he was held up at gunpoint in his Hempstead, N.Y. home where he was robbed of his cell phone, close to $4,000 in cash and drugs and severely beaten from two pistol whips to his head.

           

 The scariest part: both events took place within one week.

 

            While college students are notoriously short of cash, some choose to work part-time jobs, enroll in work/study programs or have willing parents wire them money. Other students take a less conventional—even illegal— route to create a consistent cash-flow.

 

            The lifestyle of a drug dealer is troubling to a thoughtful and reflective Smith. With the lure of quick, voluminous cash and the need for his friends’ approval, Smith’s empire has grown to be so lucrative he is able to pay his Hofstra tuition in cash.

 

            Reconciling his hate of the capitalist system with his love for money has been a particularly difficult struggle for Smith, who swings between quitting drug dealing and risking everything he has for it.

 

            Smith was born in a small, affluent Connecticut town. Although it may not seem like a breeding ground for a young drug dealer, Smith’s signs of rebellion were detected early.

 

             “There was every sign imaginable from the time I was in kindergarten that I would get involved in bad things,” Smith said. Trouble began as early as preschool when his parents were told by his teacher that he had been aggressively touching the other children.

 

            Things did not get better.  Smith had his first encounter with the police when he was in third grade after smashing a bulldozer with a friend. “When I got home there was a cruiser sitting in my driveway. As an 8-year-old kid I was like, ‘What could it be? Who died?’ Little did I know my dad was trying to convince them not to take me down to the station and fingerprint me.”

 

            Smith started drinking alcohol in sixth grade. “I never thought about my actions; I just reacted,” he said. “I had already gone through so much stuff and heard so many times, ‘Don’t do this, don’t do that, Robert! Robert!’” he said.  “Everyone’s behavior towards me was always negative because that was how I was acting. I heard everybody coming off to me like I was a bad kid, so I believed I was a bad kid.”

 

Steven Lansky, a Credited Alcohol and Substance Abuse Counselor (CASAC), thinks peer pressure is not why children like Smith end up as drug dealers. “I often say to my clients, ‘So you had a group of ten friends growing up, for arguments sake, maybe all of you did drugs together and drank, but did they do it to the extent that they went to jail, detoxes and rehabs and destroyed relationships in their families? No.’” Lansky said. “When they give me the excuse of peer pressure it doesn’t make sense because they got into drugs further than their friends did.”

           

As Smith’s behaviors worsened—he had another encounter with the police for burning down half of a local forest—his home life deteriorated at the same rate. His parents were angry, disappointed and disgusted with him. In response, Smith was always defensive and angry, and would never admit he was wrong.

           

“All anyone wants is to feel good about themselves, and since I wasn’t doing good things good, I thought I would do the bad things good,” he said. “I decided I was going to be the best at doing these bad things as a way of showing myself I was good at something.”

 

            Smith quickly began his crusade towards being good at being bad and in seventh grade he began smoking marijuana.  Just as Smith was easily riled in preschool by his peers, when he reached middle school the same thing applied. “It was always the kids I hung around that defined how bad I acted,” he said.

 

              During his freshman year of high school, Smith met a boy from a neighboring community who was connected to major drug dealers in the area. It was then that Smith first decided he wanted to sell marijuana.  He was 15 years old. Business picked up quickly. Within that year, Smith was selling to his whole high school.

 

            Smith admits he and his friends were not realistic about what could happen to them, but soon, he had to face some harsh realities. When he was 16, police arrested Smith for the first time for possessing drugs and drug paraphernalia. Smith was tried as an adult and put on probation for a year with a 90-day suspended sentence.

 

            Not too long after that, Smith had his worst encounter with the police. “My boy’s house got raided by the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms [ATF] and they had all sorts of information about him and I was with him at the time,” Smith said. “I committed no crime that night, but they arrested me on three charges: interfering with a search warrant, criminal trespassing and attempted criminal commit.”

 

             When Smith’s parents found out about this arrest, they each reacted differently. “My dad said, ‘I don’t give a shit if the kid goes to jail,’ but my mom refused to accept that,” Smith said. “She told me flat out, ‘If you don’t do exactly what I say, then we’re not supporting you in court. You’re going to go stand in front of that judge by yourself or I am going to get a lawyer and get you sent away to [rehabilitation] programs.’” Smith agreed to listen to his mother and was sent away to his first rehabilitation program in the Midwest.

 

             “Robert probably wouldn’t have ended up in jail,” his mother Barbara said. “But that’s what we used to get him to go to the programs. He was sufficiently fearful so that it worked; we played hardball.”

 

            Although Smith originally believed he had to go away for three months, he ended up staying for eight and a half. “They didn’t think I would be able to be rehabilitated,” he said. “I was so deep that I was almost classified as Operational Behavior Conduct Disorder, which is basically what people in prison are classified as.”

 

            But Smith believes the programs helped him break down life and get in touch with the truth behind why he was acting so badly. After the program ended in August 2001, Smith returned home where he swore off dealing or using drugs.

 

            “I didn’t want anything to do with trouble. I never thought in a million years I would go back to selling drugs,” Smith said. “I didn’t want to see the cops or disappoint my parents.  I just wanted to live a good life.”

 

             Smith even tried to counsel his friends and suggested they commit to being honest people. This did not last, however, and as soon as his money became sparse and his friends did not accept the “new Rob,” Smith got back into the swing of things.

 

            “Drug dealing is just about money,” said Smith. “I am so fearful of not having that security. That is my utter weakness. I don’t have the strength to sit at Taco Bell slaving away to make $110 a week, being someone’s bitch. I make $3,000 a week.”

 

            Smith used his money to throw parties in penthouse suites, supplying kegs of beer to his friends every weekend. But before coming to Hofstra, Smith—who was selling to three or four towns—was robbed of all his money during a drug deal. Smith took the robberies as a sign to swear off drug dealing and start fresh at college. But it was not long before Smith, wanting to feel accepted by his peers, reverted back to his drug dealing ways. For now, Smith enjoys sending his parents—who know he still sells drugs—his earnings to pay for college.

 

            However, with thousands of dollars available daily, Smith has a reputation among local drug dealers that led up to the events of violence and robbery in his Hempstead apartment. Some may say he got out clean, giving the men only $2,000 of the $13,000 in cash he had hidden in his desk. After whipping Smith with a pistol, the men left him trembling on his bed.

 

            And still, Smith does not see an end to his drug dealing. He projects a sad, depressing future—one where he ends up dead because of conflicts with other drug dealers.

 

After all he’s been through, a need for attention may be all that is behind Smith’s choices. “Addiction is sociopathic. He, like everybody else, craved attention, but thought negative attention is better than none at all, and this is completely narcissistic,” Lansky said. “That he’s letting you write this story is narcissistic and demonstrates his addiction because if he is the kingpin on campus, people will know who he is and he will be infamous.”

 

            But his mother is more hopeful. “Other than trying our best to get him to stop, there isn’t anything else that we can do,” Barbara said. “How I think it will end is that he’ll have a realization that enough is enough and stop.  That is my prayer and my hope.”

 

             Lansky thinks it will end more dramatically. “My prediction based upon what I know and my experience is that maybe this kid will wake up sometime in his mid-30s after he’s been in jail and a few rehabs— maybe he’ll get it together then if he’s still alive,” he said.

           

 

*names have been changed to protect the security of the individuals.