The People Left Behind

Shortly before Thanksgiving of 1983, a modest drug deal went down in a beauty shop in Harlem. Elaine Bartlett, a 26-year-old mother of four, agreed to carry four ounces of cocaine by train from New York City to Albany.

Bartlett was not a drug courier by trade. She worked off the books as an unlicensed hairdresser and lived in one of Harlem's big public housing projects. A man named Charlie stepped into the back room of the beauty shop one morning and offered her $2,500 for one day's work. When she said yes, she had in mind a huge Thanksgiving feast for her extended family and some new furniture for her tidy little apartment. She never got to have her Thanksgiving dinner that year. By the time she sat down to dinner with her family again, 16 years later, it was in a household ruined by years of frustration and neglect, and her children were no longer really hers.

"Charlie," whose real name was George Deets, was a police informant, retained by the state police in Albany to lure New York City dealers upstate. It didn't matter to the cops that Bartlett was not actually in the business, or that she had no convictions of any kind on her record. In fact, everything about the deal was cynically contrived. Deets and a partner named Rich Zagurski had worked on and off for the cops for years, mostly to get themselves out of trouble following minor drug busts. It was never hard to find somebody like Elaine in Harlem, and the authorities in Albany didn't ask too many questions about how they did it. (Bartlett, for example, had never even been to Albany before.)

In this case, the pair had no charges of their own to work off; they set up the deal to get a friend and colleague out of hot water, a service for which they charged a fee. While running this peculiar sort of brokerage, Deets and Zagurski were also importing a kilo of cocaine directly from Colombia into Albany every two weeks, and earning up to $1 million per year. In his dealings with the police, Deets made no secret of his underworld connections; indeed it gave him the cachet he needed to set up his neck-saving deals with prosecutors.

At trial, Zagurski was asked why he had cooperated with the police. "I just feel that, you know, cocaine is at a bad level and I think that, you know, it should be taken off the street," he testified. Appearances had to be kept up, especially in Albany.

When Bartlett discovered the nature of the setup, she could not bring herself to accept a plea bargain. That was a horrible mistake. New York State, that great bastion of liberalism, had some of the toughest drug laws in the nation. The sale of four ounces of cocaine, even for a first offender, was punishable by a sentence of 15 years to life. Tried in front of one of the state's most notorious hanging judges, Bartlett was sentenced to 20 years to life.

Bartlett was sentenced under the so-called Rockefeller drug laws, which introduced the concept of mandatory minimum sentences to American jurisprudence. Brainchild of former governor Nelson A. Rockefeller, the laws were passed in 1973, at the height of the heroin scourge in New York City. Under the new laws, judges no longer had the discretion to consider mitigating factors when sentencing defendants; they had to abide by the minimums established in the code. Early parole was also eliminated.

The harsh new sentencing laws were designed to win the support of rural New Yorkers fearful of the spread of the blight afflicting Harlem, the Bronx, and the Lower East Side. But more than that, the initiative was an effort to shore up the governor's conservative credentials in anticipation of his fourth run at the Republican presidential nomination. As it happened, a short, ill-advised stint as Gerald Ford's vice president was the closest Rockefeller ever got to the Oval Office. His drug laws remain, however. Widely copied in state legislatures across the country, they have formed an enduring legacy.