Fixing Capital: Drug Capitalism and Real Estate in Late Twentieth-Century Gotham

The Drug Enforcement Administration (Dea) agents who executed search warrants at 2400 Webb Avenue in the Bronx from December 1986 through mid-1987 foiled not just any crack cocaine operation. They disrupted what law enforcement officials believed was the largest single crack distribution enterprise in New York City. A seven-story residential building, 2400 Webb Avenue contained seventy-five apartment units, with several “used and maintained” for an organization headed by the twenty-six-year-old Dominican immigrant Santiago Luis “Yayo” Polanco Rodriguez and his partners. In apartment 1-D, the organization received profits and processed and packaged cocaine powder into crack, a crystallized form of cocaine. Two floors above, in apartment 3-J, agents found weapons, cocaine residue, and empty crack vials. And in apartment 6-E, they discovered thousands of empty vials and receipts proving, they argued, that Polanco Rodriguez and his partners had funneled their proceeds to business ventures in the Dominican Republic. By the time of the discovery, the organization had garnered a purported $36 million per year (more than $100 million today). But 2400 Webb Avenue was only one of approximately twelve apartment buildings that U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York Rudolph Giuliani alleged the group had used. And in the broad context of the rise of crack in New York City, they were among the hundreds of residential structures, containing tens of thousands of apartment units, that helped fuel drug capitalism's dramatic expansion.1