Randol Contreras

Growing up in the Bronx, Contreras watched a number of people in his neighborhood make fortunes in the drug trade. He tried, failed, and took a different path, to a Ph.D. and this sociological book, which chronicles the trajectory of several other people from the same area. When the drug trade stopped being lucrative, they didn’t have skills that would pay in the legit economy, so they switched to robbing drug dealers. “[T]hey knew how to manage drug spots, negotiate drug deals, and act around drug dealers— everything that had little use in a service economy demanding more subservience, less masculinity, more education, less resistance, and more middleclass etiquette.” (A fascinating aspect is Contreras’ claim that poor New Yorkers who grew up in the mid-1990s had seen the horrors of crack and stayed away from it in favor of pot and alcohol, contributing to the decline of the cocaine market.)

Contreras argues that the robbers were ultimately motivated by the same ideologies that motivated Wall Street bankers (greed is good!) and that were celebrated by conservatives (you are responsible for yourself and only yourself). He also argues that toxic masculinity—reinforced by stays in jail—played an important role in the choices that they saw available to them. Also, the men he dealt with looked down on women, for much the same reasons, considering them all fundamentally degraded and buyable—whereas Contreras considers the fact that women were attracted to his money-dropping friends a way of trying to make the best of very limited options.

It’s a gripping and saddening read, and includes graphic accounts of the torture his subjects inflicted on their victims. Ostensibly dealers couldn’t give in without torture because, if they did, their suppliers would assume they’d participated in a fake robbery to cheat the suppliers. Often, the robbers were clued in by an associate of the dealer, but they had to pretend not to know where the drugs and money were in order to prevent implicating the associate, again meaning that torture was required. To justify themselves, the robbers blamed the victims, said that they were no different from corrupt police, and distinguished between the professional torturers who did only what was required and the amateurs who went overboard. Both among dealers and robbers, “[d]ouble-crossing was the norm”—Contreras reports incidents that sound like TV show storylines, where the men debate whether it’s simpler to murder a robbery partner or pay him his share, and then greet the partner with hugs and good wishes.

The male robbers worked with an attractive, underpaid “girl” in order to get an entrée into a dealer’s place or to get the dealer to brag about important details; though dealers were suspicious of men, especially when she approached them in front of other men, “[t]he girl meant potential sex in a bedroom, an alley, or rooftop. The sex meant demonstrating manliness to peers.… [T]hese drug robbers set what I call a masculinity trap, a play on a male’s manhood to victimize him…. A lone woman buying marijuana from a street peddler is perceived to be open to sex: she is bold (no male accompanies her).”… (meer)