MANCHESTER, New Hampshire — The arrest of 84 alleged gang members in New York City on Thursday highlights a trend in the flow of drugs into New Hampshire that law enforcement agencies have been monitoring for the past two years: New York City, and the Bronx in particular, are fast replacing Lawrence, Massachusetts, as the key source of heroin and other hard drugs sold in New Hampshire.
Not only that, but guns are becoming a popular form of currency in a deadly trade that sees cheap drugs from the Bronx sold at huge profits in New Hampshire, while comparatively cheap guns from New Hampshire are sold at huge profits on the streets of New York.
Law enforcement agencies are calling it “a gang alliance that ravaged West Bronx with gunfire and New England towns with drugs.”
That was the headline the District Attorney for Bronx County put on his news release Thursday in announcing what he called “the largest gang takedown in Bronx history.”
Manchester was referred to frequently as investigators announced the successful undercover operation that decimated four of New York’s most notorious street gangs.
“One defendant alone is being charged in connection with 11 attempted murders,” Bronx District Attorney Darcel D. Clark said. “These gangs trafficked in narcotics to Manchester and Massachusetts and brought firearms back here. Their greed was matched only by their ferocity.”
The investigation that led to Thursday’s arrests began in February 2015, when an interagency gang investigation task force in New York learned that Bronx gang members were making frequent trips to Bourne and Wareham, Massachusetts.
They later determined that the same gangs had discovered a lucrative market in the Queen City.
“The investigation found crack cocaine was being transported from the Bronx to Manchester by crew members, and firearms were being brought to the Bronx from Manchester,” Clark said. “The defendants were selling $10,000 worth of crack cocaine a week, for quadruple the street price in the Bronx.”
Bronx connection
Manchester police experienced the Bronx connection in a series of arrests they made last year, starting in June, when they broke up what they described as a drugs-for-guns operation at 137 Orange St., seizing $12,772 in cash and drugs, along with four handguns.
Three men — all from the Bronx — were arrested, and police at the time said the ring involved the exchange of stolen firearms for crack cocaine.
Manchester investigators believe the men arrested last year were part of the New York crime syndicate targeted in Thursday’s arrest, according to Manchester police spokesman Lt. Brian O’Keefe.
On Sept. 3, police executed a search warrant at 452 Pine St., and arrested Khamin Todd. Although Todd gave a Manchester address, he was charged as a fugitive from justice out of the Bronx. Police confiscated 76 grams of crack cocaine, with an estimated street value of $11,500, and 17.8 grams of heroin, with an estimated street value of $1,400.
The Orange Street arrests led police to file charges later in the year against more drug dealers linked to street gangs in the New York City borough. On Sept. 28, police arrested two men near the Manchester Wal-Mart, with 40 grams of crack cocaine between them. Police at the time confirmed that the two men were part of the same Bronx-based gang.
“Inundated with gun-toting drug crews, the west Bronx was the starting point of a drug pipeline to cities as far north as Manchester,” said DEA agent James Hunt, who headed the investigation.
He said gangs with names like Eden Boys, Miami Ave and UGA “fed addiction throughout the Northeast via sales of crack cocaine and heroin.”
Growing trend
Christopher Arone, a special agent with the Boston office of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, says agents are seeing more drug transactions that involve the exchange of firearms.
“We are seeing that quite frequently,” he said. “This field office covers all six New England states, so what we are seeing from the northern states, Maine, Vermont and New Hampshire, is that the gun laws are pretty lax up there, compared to Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island.”
Drug traffickers come to northern New England to sell drugs, not buy guns, he said, but while they’re here, they take advantage of the marketplace.
“They know that firearms are readily accessible and they’re easy to buy up there,” Arone said. “So they will buy them or trade them for drugs and bring them back to where they originated from.”
Indifference to life
New York City police Commissioner William Bratton, who served as Boston police commissioner in the early 1990s, said the 84 arrested on Thursday showed a disturbing indifference to human life.
“Beyond their heinous indifference for the residents of the Bronx, they also went to great lengths to push their narcotic poison outside of New York,” he said, “preying on countless addicted users in my home state of Massachusetts and [into] New Hampshire.”
While making the arrests in New York City on Thursday, police seized nine kilograms of cocaine, four kilograms of heroin, two kilograms of fentanyl, heroin enhanced with fentanyl, cutting agents and drug manufacturing equipment.
About $260,000 in cash, seven vehicles and 889 grams of crack cocaine also were seized, along with 15 guns, large-capacity loading devices and hundreds of rounds of ammunition.
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